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The following material has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Welcome to Alternative Health Tools. This is Kim Shea, your host on this side of the pond. I have a treat for you. We have Dr. Kylie Burton back to speak with us again.
Dr. Kylie Burton is a doctor of chiropractic medicine and is certified in functional medicine. Her focus is on healing beyond the diagnosis. She helps to provide hope, answers, and healing through the functional medicine spin on what “your normal labs” are. Today, Dr. Burton is going to talk with us about the interconnectedness of thyroid, gut health, and depression.
We’re going to look at why your thyroid labs are normal, but you still have symptoms. We’ll discuss four factors that are destroying your thyroid, and you’ll discover what you need to know that your doctor might not be telling you.
We will also discuss gut health. We're going to talk about diarrhea and constipation, as well as how to eat food again and not regret that you ate it for days later.
Finally, we'll look at depression, anxiety, and infection. Dr. Kylie will share the vitamin D protocol that she employs to help curb those symptoms.
First Things First…
Kim (host): It's great to have you back again. I really appreciated having you talk last time with us. In case people haven’t heard the previous episode, can you tell us again how you got into doing what you do?
Kylie (guest): So I grew up with Western medicine. There’s nothing wrong with it. It just has a limited toolkit. I wanted to expand my toolkit.
I got introduced to functional medicine when I was working as an assistant to a chiropractor. The funny thing is, when he hired me, I had no idea what chiropractic even was. I'd never experienced an adjustment before. I never walked into the chiropractor's office before. I was 22 years old and I just graduated with my bachelor's degree in nutrition, thinking that, you know, I like this concept of food being able to help people feel better. Only, everything I learned with my bachelor's degree has now been thrown out the window with functional medicine. It takes it to a whole new level.
I really decided that I want to be able to help people who have been tossed from doctor to doctor to doctor, who have had zero answers, who keep getting told that their labs are normal yet they still aren't feeling like themselves. Their hair's falling out. They've got brain fog. They have no energy.
Their symptoms are real and yet they keep getting told that their labs are normal. I had to promise myself if I wanted to find different results, I had to look at people differently. I'm going to teach you guys how to do that right here.
Kim (host): You use the term “functional medicine.” Can you define that?
Kylie (guest): When it's done right, functional medicine can be very powerful, but functional medicine is a term tossed around by individuals who might have just attended a weekend seminar and now call themselves functional medicine doctors. Most of the people that I help and see have already tried someone who's called themselves a functional medicine doctor.
Really, functional medicine is personalized medicine, and it's getting down to the “why.” It’s the why behind how you feel. Once you find the why, we resolve it. But just be careful, because not all functional medicine is created equal.
Your Thyroid, Your Blood Panel, & Your Labs
Kim (host): Why don't you lead the way and talk about normal labs? I mean, that's kind of a standard blood test when you go in. If you complain of anything, they check your thyroid, especially if you're a woman. What can you tell us about that?
Kylie (guest): We want our thyroid and our labs to be normal. That's a good thing. When they're not normal, then it's like we have a disease and now doctors can plaster a diagnosis next to our name and give us a pill to manage things for the rest of our lives. We want normal labs. But even though they're “normal,” they might not be ideal.
To get our ideal lab range, we take that normal lab range and we make the range smaller. Let's use the thyroid lab as a great example.
The thyroid lab marker that everybody takes is TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone). Now, TSH can be very tricky, because you can have a great TSH number and have all the thyroid symptoms.
A normal TSH lab range depends on the lab, but generally, it's 0.5 to 5.5. That's a pretty big range. If we want to find our ideal TSH within that lab range, then that's like trying to find our favorite restaurant somewhere between California and New York… But, if we could take that and make it much smaller, we’re going to get better results and we're going to figure out why you have “normal” thyroid labs, but they might not be ideal.
An ideal average for TSH is taking a normal lab range--that's 0.5 to 5.5--and condensing it into 1.8 to 3. That's an ideal TSH range. I don’t come up with any of my functional medicine lab ranges. There's a doctor by the name of Dr. Kharrazian. He did all the research and created these functional medicine ranges for us all.
So, the ideal TSH range is between 1.8 and 3.
When it comes to your thyroid and your TSH marker specifically, and you're saying, “Oh, I'm at 1.2. I’m normal, but I'm not good. No wonder why I'm tired and my hair's falling out and I have brain fog and might even feel a little constipated.” All of those symptoms follow along with the thyroid, even though you're “still normal.” So, if your TSH is 1.2, it's on the low end of the ideal.
Well, what produces my TSH? What's responsible for producing it?
You're probably all thinking, well, it’s the thyroid, because the thyroid is a thyroid hormone panel marker. The truth is, it doesn't, which is why a lot of people get the thyroid wrong.
TSH—the number one most common lab marker taken for thyroid—is not a thyroid marker. It is produced by the pituitary gland. The pituitary gland is this little teeny gland that if you were to draw a line down the center of your head from both sides, where it would cross is where the gland sits.
This teeny-tiny gland produces TSH, which then talks to your thyroid.
If my TSH is low and if my pituitary—if “P”—is responsible for producing it, why is P having a hard time producing it? What's making P feel sluggish?
There are four factors that affect your thyroid function.
The first factor is this lovely word called “stress.” Stress literally impacts your thyroid by lowering your TSH. Now, along with stress, is this gland that produces cortisol in response to our stress levels, called the adrenals. The adrenals and the thyroid go hand-in-hand.
Now, Kim, if you're like me, you have a busy life. There are lots of outside stressors in the government and in the world that we can't control. Figuring out some ways to lower stress levels in our lives is not going to be very easy.
What I like to find is the internal stressor—something that's causing us stress on the inside of our body—and remove it. Then, we can handle the external stressors more easily. We'll get into what those internal stressors are later.
The second factor is inflammation. Now, people toss this word around, like it's the end all be all for everything. That’s why my knees hurt. That's why my head hurts. Inflammation is this word that gets used a lot and is actually commonly misunderstood.
But if stress and inflammation make my pituitary—P—have a hard time producing TSH, then what if we were to find that internal cause of stress? It's most likely going to be the same cause of our inflammation. You get rid of two birds with one stone, and your thyroid automatically feels better.
So those are the first two factors that are causing damage to the thyroid, which your doctor doesn't know.
For factors three and four, we've got to go down the food chain a little bit. We've talked about how the pituitary produces TSH, which then talks to the thyroid. You're going to understand your thyroid labs better right now than you ever will, even than most doctors will.
Now, T4 is a hormone that is produced by the thyroid. That hormone, T4, has to get converted into a hormone called T3.
Kim (host): The thyroid does that?
Kylie (guest): There are two places where that conversion takes place.
The thyroid produces T4, and then T4 goes into our gut and our liver. Those two places are where it gets converted into T3.
The reason why we care about that T3 so much is because T3 goes out and talks to every single cell in our body. It tells our cells to speed up our metabolism, so we can lose weight. It tells our cells to improve our brain function, so we don't have brain fog. It tells our cells to build healthy and strong hair, vibrant skin and nails, and all that fun stuff. The T3 literally goes out to tell every single cell in the body to properly communicate with our body.
And if we don't have enough T3, the communication chain is broken.
We can't lose weight. We have brain fog. Our energy levels are depleted. All of these things we associate with the thyroid are thyroid problems, but the thyroid is just one piece of a system.
What we just discussed was the stress, the inflammation, the gut, and the liver. If you clean all those up, your thyroid feels great, whether you’re on thyroid medication or not. So many people get the thyroid wrong.
Kim (host): But thyroid medications would help with this whole chain?
Kylie (guest): Yeah, they can help. The thyroid medication itself is going to be producing T4 and T3.
As far as I'm aware, there's no thyroid medication for TSH. That being said, the number one marker for thyroid is TSH. Prescriptions are given based off of that marker. They should be based off of the T4 and the T3, because that’s what the medications actually are—T4, T3, or a combination of the two.
If we're looking at that, then we are feeding the bottom of the food chain. It’s a bottom-up process, instead of top-down. Someone might have a low, free T4 and a low free T3. Then they're given Levothyroxine or Nature-Throid or ArmourThyroid or Cytomel or Synthroid. Those are the big common ones.
They're giving you one of those medications to boost the T4 and T3—the bottom of the food chain. But if your TSH is low, everything downstream is going to be low too.
Those are the four factors affecting your thyroid: stress, inflammation, your gut, and your liver.
How To Read Your Blood Panel
Kylie (guest): Now, when we talk about the stressor that’s the internal stressor, it’s this additional component called a low-grade hidden infection. I see this a lot with thyroid—Hashimoto's, hyperthyroidism, and hypothyroidism.
Probably 95% of the time, this infection is a cause of the internal stressor that we're dealing with. In fact, the most common trigger for Hashimoto's is the Epstein-Barr virus—a viral infection.
We can identify if we have this viral infection, or any infection, with our regular blood work. We're going to be told that that blood work is normal, but we want it to be normal. It's just not ideal.
The blood work or blood panel that is the number one blood panel that we receive as a precursor to anything is called a CBC (complete blood count).
Ideally, you want a CBC with differential. Now, if you were to go and tell your doctor, “I'm going to go in for my physical next week. What labs should I get?” Make sure that even if you're just worried about your thyroid, you get a regular blood panel too. Tell them to order a CBC with a differential.
Kim (host): And what does differential mean? So, there's a CBC without differential and there's one with?
Kylie (guest): Yes. The CBC without differential is missing pieces of the puzzle, whereas the differential has more markers, or more pieces of an individual's puzzle.
I request thousands of medical records and most of the time they had a CBC with differential. That just means, I've got more pieces of the puzzle for somebody's health story. When it doesn't have that differential portion, there are five markers that are missing. It’s just one check box that they didn’t check and it misses huge pieces to people's health puzzles.
The very top marker inside the CBC blood work is called a white blood cell count—a WBC. Your WBC is responsible for fighting infections. That’s what white blood cells do. They help keep us healthy.
You're going to get told that your WBC lab range is normal. Go pull up your lab results, go see what it is in your patient portal, or if you have the hard copy of it, and look at the numbers.
If your white blood cell count is less than 5 or greater than 8, you’re fighting an infection. This is not the “normal” range, but this is the ideal range.
Viral Infections & Your Thyroid
Kylie (guest): An infection can be viral. It can be bacterial. It can be fungal, like candida… it can be parasitic. Those are the big four types of infections.
The most common infection, especially with thyroid issues, is a low-grade virus.
I was just literally on the phone with a guy right before this. I was looking through his labs for him because he got put on testosterone. He was on crazy, crazy high doses of it, and injecting himself every single week with testosterone. It wasn't doing anything for him. He didn't feel any different. And I'm like, “You should have crazy energy and crazy libido. This should be making a big difference if testosterone is the culprit.”
It wasn't.
I literally just diagnosed him with Hashimoto's, which is a thyroid issue. It’s an auto-immune component. I was able to do that based off of some patterns that I found inside his thyroid panel, but then also getting down into this infection component.
I asked him, “Have you ever had a history of Epstein-Barr virus?”
And he said, “Oh yeah. I got diagnosed with it at 17 in high school. I remember someone diagnosed me with it. But I don't remember if we did anything about it.” He's in his fifties now, so it was a while ago.
When we have that history of Epstein-Barr virus that virus is there all the time. We're fighting viruses in us all the time anyway. But this one has a name.
So Epstein-Barr virus—also known as mono—can be active at a low level, but it can still be active enough to put our body under stress. It can be enough for you to say, “You know, something's not right with me. I don't have the energy I used to have. My hair's falling out, but my thyroid labs keep coming back as normal.”
This is a low-grade viral infection. If you were to get an actual positive infection test, especially with the Epstein-Barr virus, you would be so exhausted that you couldn’t even walk up five stairs.
I had a teenager just get diagnosed with it and he literally will wake up and two hours later, he falls asleep on the couch. He could just sleep anywhere. That's the level it has to be for the test to come back positive, but it can still have this lower grade activity level. You’re not as bad as you could be, but you’re not feeling 100%.
Kim (host): So, what you're saying is the average person who has the low-grade impact from this low-grade infection isn't going to be having these extremely severe symptoms, and therefore it's not going to be picked up by their doctor or their labs?
Kylie (guest): Yeah.
Kim (host): Okay. That's good to know because I'm sure there's a lot of people who have been exposed to it and just really don't know it because they're not having these horrific side effects from it.
Kylie (guest): The viral infection is big, especially with the thyroid.
That infection could be a big-time internal stressor that's making your pituitary struggle to produce TSH, which is making your thyroid slow, which is making your hair fall out and draining your energy. And weight loss? Just forget it. It's not happening.
Now, remember these are low-grade, hidden infections, so don't go running to your doctor and telling them that you have an infection and that's why your thyroid is having issues. They're not going to understand that, but you do and so you know what you need to do.
Does that make sense, Kim?
Kim (host): Oh, yeah, it makes sense. It's like this whole-brain system here. The brain does all these things, but the thyroid does all these things too. Then all the things associated with it, do all these things. It's fascinating.
Kylie (guest): I always say that the body is one incredible machine with multiple systems and each system impacts another.
We've got all these endocrinologist specialists and GI specialists and cardiologists and all these specialists that focus on the key system. Well, if we’re only focusing on one system and not paying attention to how everything else is affecting it, we're going to have some issues.
Kim (host): It’s fascinating. You're a great teacher. Thank you.
Kylie (guest): I never thought I would be teaching in my entire career. But, people need to know this, so I'm going to teach it. I actually teach doctors this too. I teach them every Tuesday how to read labs.
The Impact of Infections on Your Gut Health
Kylie (guest): Most of these infections are found in our gut. Our gut is the small and the large intestine, so that's what I'm talking about specifically when I say “gut.”
The next most common infection that I see, no matter how chaotic the health history is, is a bacterial infection.
Now this bacterial infection, again, is something that if you were to go get tested for H Pylori or C Diff or Campylobacter or E-Coli… whatever bacterial infection we want to call it… it won't come back positive. Thank heavens! To get a positive test with one of those bacterial strains, you literally can't control your bathroom problems. The diarrhea is so bad that you probably cannot be away from a bathroom because it's that urgent. That will be a positive test.
Thank heavens it's not positive in most cases. But it can be a point of bacterial infection where someone has constant chronic constipation or where someone can't have a bowel movement without taking magnesium, or MiraLax, or some type of stool softener. We're looking at people who have dealt with constipation. I'll have people say, “Oh, I remember being constipated as a teenager. In fact, I had to go get my stomach pumped one time because I didn't have a bowel movement for like two weeks.” Maybe someone who’s like, “Hey, I don't have a bowel movement for maybe three or four days.”
Now, you can also have a bacterial infection that causes the opposite effect, which is diarrhea. I was on a phone call with a lady today who was going through her labs and she was saying how her bowel movements are at least two times a day. Two, three, four times a day. And she says, “The problem is that sometimes they’ll be urgent and I have to find a bathroom immediately, or else I'm in big trouble.”
These are the types of bacterial infections and the issues they can cause. It's not a lack of magnesium. It's not a lack of MiraLax. It's not something that we should take lightly and sugarcoat, because a lot of times, these issues will result in IBS or Crohn's or IBD or ulcerative colitis. If you have a GI issue like that, then this is what's causing it and now you’ll know how to remove it.
This type of bacterial infection I often like to call SIBO: Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth.
Now there are different types of bacteria in our gut and there's never a one-size-fits-all protocol for your gut. So don't buy the magic pill. Don't buy the magic test kit. There's no magic anything out there. These things might help in the short term, but your gut is as unique as your fingerprint. We have so many strains and so many varieties at different quantities that it is like your fingerprint.
But this bacterial infection is caused by one of two main types of bacteria that produce two different types of gases. Depending on what type of gas is being produced inside your gut depends if you’re experiencing things that are more on the constipation side, or on the diarrhea side.
A lot of these people who have these gut issues that are unresolved and chronic and nobody can figure out why, eliminate a lot of food culprits. They're not eating dairy or soy or gluten or peanut butter or eggs. A lot of them will even eliminate the most common foods.
I've had a 14-year-old boy who literally was only eating chicken and rice, because that's all he could tolerate. But even then, he was having bowel movements six or seven times a day. I'm all virtual now, but when I had a brick-and-mortar practice, he came in one day and he said, “Dr. Kylie, I feel constipated now.”
I said, “What do you mean you're constipated? How many times are you having a bowel movement?”
“One time a day.”
I just looked at his mom and I smiled. And I said, “Buddy, that's normal.”
For him, it was so bizarre that he was telling me he was constipated. We literally just tackled the SIBO, and you know, he's doing all the normal things that a kid can do now. He wasn't having to be homeschooled and always be by a bathroom and watch his food intake so much.
If you were to look up a SIBO diet, it's called a Low-FODMAP diet. It's intense. It gets pretty, pretty strict. I know, Kim, you're a fan of food. I'm a fan of food. Food is a part of life that should be enjoyed, not just consumed for survival.
If we can get rid of this SIBO and kill the bad guys, replenish the good guys, heal the leaky gut, and do all the necessary work to make the gut right, people can enjoy food. They can go, like this 14-year-old boy, and enjoy Wendy's on Friday night with his friends when he never could beforehand.
Another one of my patients was 23 years old and was always scared to go on dates. She didn't want to be that person who scrutinizes the menu. She couldn't eat anything because she knew she would regret it days later. Now, she just got married.
A lot of these gut issues are also causing the food sensitivities and yes, remove the food sensitivities… for now. That's a great place to start. Then fix the gut and rehab the gut, so you can get the food back in and not have to live on such a strict diet.
Kim (host): And really live.
Kylie (guest): Exactly. Really live.
Food Sensitivity Tests
Kim (host): So, let’s talk a little bit about food sensitivity tests.
Kylie (guest): Yes. A lot of times people will also try food sensitivity testing. In fact, I was scrolling through my Facebook feed just the other day. There is a food test kit that said, “Hey, we’ll test the top 96 foods for you and identify which ones are your culprits.”
It almost shattered my heart when I looked at the image because the image had all sorts of foods and vegetables on it. I won't even tell you the brand name, because it's irrelevant. There are a million and a half food sensitivity test kits out there that are like, “Hey, for $99, you can go do this.”
Even if you're getting an IGG test from your doctor or some food test kit that you're ordering from Facebook, there's a big problem with them because they identify the food culprit in only one form. That one form is usually the raw form.
I had a patient in her fifties. She kept getting these food sensitivity tests done. She swore by them and she had this immaculate garden. She wouldn't eat anything out of her garden because her food sensitivity test told her that she was sensitive to all these normal, great fruits and vegetables. We're taking it to such extremes now.
People don't understand these food sensitivity kits. They're only testing for food in the raw form. So raw broccoli, raw cauliflower, raw carrots. But when you cook them, the protein structure of that vegetable changes.
Say you cook your broccoli in a casserole. Well, now you've combined it with other foods and you've changed the protein structure, as well. It’s not necessarily the same protein structure that was identified in the food sensitivity kit.
If you're getting these food sensitivity kits—unless you're going through a lab like Vibrant America Labs—they're very short-handed. They're handing you pieces of the puzzle, but not the whole puzzle.
Kim (host): I mean, you'd be eliminating entire categories of food that are really healthy for you but you could probably consume them in a different way.
Kylie (guest): Yeah. Removing the food sensitivities, the food culprits, it's a great place to start. It's not a great place to end.
I know a dad who’s a lawyer and his health has been so bad… he can't even be a lawyer anymore. His schoolteacher's wife is now paying the bills. For over three years, he and his family have cut out sugar, so no sugar, no simple carbs, no fruits. They’re all trying to figure out something to help dad in his health. It hasn’t gotten him very far.
People are removing food sensitivities and it's a great place to start, but don't think like you have to live like that forever. Just treat the gut right. You can resolve these food sensitivity kits and then save money. In fact, just save the money and have somebody help you, or have myself help walk you through a detailed gut protocol and make sure it's specific for you.
If you have this bacterial infection, if your bowel movements aren't regular daily, then look at the SIBO component and tackle it. There are a lot of people who will say that they can help tackle SIBO. You can even go to your GI doctor. GI specialists are now becoming aware of this term and they'll give you an antibiotic for it. The problem with that is antibiotics are great at killing things, but they’re not going to rebuild things.
Once we've killed it, we've got to heal the leaky gut and rebuild it with a variety of probiotics and prebiotics and fiber and enzymes and hydrochloric acid. It's not just, “Hey, I'm going to take this probiotic to prevent what the antibiotic did.”
The probiotic is a great source or a great tool, but sometimes people will take probiotics and they have SIBO and it makes things worse. Probiotics are just not the magic pill for gut health, and it's not the magic pill for overcoming SIBO either. It's a multifaceted approach. Just make sure you're doing it right with someone who's trained and who’s very successful in it.
Leaky Gut: What It is and Ways to Treat It
Kim (host): In the previous podcast that we did, you talked about leaky gut and you brought that up a few times today. Can you explain what that is?
Kylie (guest): Yeah, leaky gut is a piece of the puzzle when it comes to the gut stuff, but it's just a piece. A lot of people will say, “Well, I have leaky gut, so I have migraines. I have leaky gut, so I have XYZ.” They're right, but the leaky gut is just a piece of the puzzle.
When I say “leaky gut,” I'm talking about your small and your large intestine. They're crazy cool because one cell protects the inside of your GI tract from your bloodstream. Just one cell. That's it. The lining of your small and your large intestine is one cell thick.
Because we live in a 21st-century environment, there are some factors that harm the inside of our body, which we have no control over. Those cells in your GI tract should be really tight, so nothing gets through. The problem is that damage happens to those cells and then they have gaps in them. Hence, the term “leaky.” When we have these gaps in our cells, what goes inside our GI tract hangs out, maybe gets absorbed, and what should be eliminated now floats into our bloodstream through these gaps. That triggers our immune system because that’s not supposed to be in the bloodstream.
Our immune system is fighting more and more. On top of an infection, that's a lot for the immune system to fight. When it's fought long enough and hard enough, it's just going to go, “I'm tired. I'm exhausted. I’m done. I'm just going to attack whatever I feel like attacking.”
Usually, our genes are going to tell it what to attack, and then we end up with an autoimmune disease.
Leaky gut is a piece of the puzzle that is conquerable.
Depression, Anxiety, and the Importance of Vitamin D
Kylie (guest): Infection is actually surprisingly a big cause of depression. Anxiety and depression also go along with thyroid, so if we figure out the infection component, it'll be huge for whatever the health story is.
You can conquer a lot of things by conquering the infection because if our body is constantly fighting something, it's just going to give up and shut down—depression. On the other hand, if we're constantly fighting something, say it's a viral component and we're always on edge, it won't take much to throw us into an anxiety attack.
Your thyroid, your gut, and depression, and anxiety all go hand-in-hand. My favorite, favorite, favorite, favorite thing for depression, for the thyroid, and just in general is vitamin D. Vitamin D will curb anxiety and depression, like no other thing will, but you have to take it in certain doses.
A lot of people will take 2,000 to 5,000 IUs of vitamin D per day. That’s just standard dosage. But what they'll find, especially with seasonal depression, is that they're just taking those doses from November through February and then calling it good. What I have found with all of these medical records that I've requested, only a handful of vitamin D statuses have been ideal or really good. Most of them fall in the lower part of the normal range.
The normal range for vitamin D is between 30 and 100. Most people's vitamin D statuses are in the 30s. That's normal, but you're not going to feel good when it's in the 30s.
You will feel like a million bucks when your vitamin D gets around 80. The way to do that is to take some pretty good doses of it, not just a simple standard 2,000 to 5,000 dose. That's not going to cut it.
A lot of people are worried about vitamin D toxicity. You can get toxicity if you're taking really high levels for a really long time, like four to seven years. But when we're talking three months, toxicity is not really something to worry about. For three months, I'm going to jack this vitamin D up, I'm going to calm the immune system down, and I'm going to also curb the anxiety and depression because vitamin D is that powerful.
My three-month recommendation for vitamin D is 25,000 IUs of vitamin D per day. It's a lot different than just 2,000-5,000. Εven the prescription dosage will be 50,000 IUs of vitamin D per week. 25,000 IUs of Vitamin D per day for one month. Jack it up.
Then, you're going to back off to 20,000 IUs per day during the second month. In month three, you’re going to back it down to 15,000 IUs per day, and then maintain a dose at around 10,000 IUs. A lot of times people will say their labs went from 33 to 43 on so-and-so’s protocol, like the 50,000 IUs per week from their doctor.
I can take someone in three months from a 33 to an 83 where they're like, “Whoa, I didn't even know that make that big of a difference.” I always get responses specifically from anxiety and depression, just off of Vitamin D. With the previous year, I know we all could curb anxiety and depression tremendously right now.
So, if you're dealing with some anxiety or depression or both, start taking vitamin D and just see. Share the program with your friends. It's that powerful. I would rather we prevent the uglier stuff downstream than not teach people how effective vitamin D can be with anxiety and depression.
Kim (host): That's really amazing, Dr. Kylie, because I've been thinking about vitamin D a lot since I spoke with you last time. I was looking at my bottle of vitamin D last night, and the recommended dose is one pill, which is 1,000 IU a day. That's quite a difference in terms of the dosage and how it could be so helpful. That’s amazing.
Kylie (guest): Yeah, whatever bottle you have, go and see how much the serving size is, and then take the necessary dosage to improve your levels. If you want a vitamin D where you’re not taking 25 pills a day, you can get some from my website at DrKylieBurton.com. You’ll only need to take 4 or 5 capsules per day, or you can take liquid. The liquid tastes like orange soda, so it's not terrible.
Especially if you have an auto-immune component, vitamin D is a big factor in calming the immune system down. I'm not a fan of taking vitamins just to take vitamins and I don't take supplements. Vitamin D is the one thing I will always take.
Final Thoughts
Kim (host): Thank you very much. Do you have anything else to share with us? This is just amazing. I’ve been taking so many notes.
Kylie (guest): Thank you so much for having me. Well, I’ll just do a quick recap.
We talked about the four factors destroying your thyroid that your doctor doesn't know, but now you do.
Make sure that the gut and the liver are clear, because that's where your T4 is getting converted into T3, which goes out and communicates with all the cells in your body.
We spoke about the internal stressor and figuring out if it’s an infection, because that might be causing your inflammation, as well.
Make sure your gut is treated right and personalized to you. A food sensitivity test is a great place to start, but not a great place to end.
You can curb depression and anxiety with vitamin D. You take 25,000 IUs per day the first month, then 20,000 IUs the second month, 15,000 IUs the third month, and maintain a 10,000 IU dose.
I go into all of this in further detail on my podcast, Beyond the Diagnosis with Dr. Kylie.
About Us: Co-hosts Lisa Thorp, John Biethan, Lisa Victoria, and Kim Shea discover and share new alternative health tools and resources from alternative healthcare practitioners and experts.
Interview Links
Connect with Dr. Kylie Burton at her website, https://drkylieburton.com/.
Listen to Dr. Kylie Burton’s podcast at http://drkylieburton.podbean.com/.
Send Dr. Kylie Burton a message at dr.kyburton@gmail.com.
Resources
Want to know more about Alternative Health Tools? Visit our website, https://www.alternativehealthtools.com/.
You can find us anywhere you get your audio.
Contact the show’s co-hosts Lisa Victoria, John Biethan, and Kim Shea, or leave us a message on our Contact Page at https://www.alternativehealthtools.com/.
Did you like what you heard? This show is produced by Imagine Podcasting DBA of Heard Not Seen Media, Inc. For more, visit Imagine Podcasting at https://www.imaginepodcasting.com/.
