Thought this article likely to be of some interest to members. It does NOT mention thyroid (hardly surprising!) but nonetheless has much relevant discussion.
Does the microbiome hold the key to chronic fatigue?
In 2019, years after developing the myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS) that had kept her bedridden in a state of chronic pain and exhaustion, Tamara Romanuk experienced something “miraculous”. After taking antibiotics prescribed to treat a separate infection, she experienced a short-term remission in symptoms. “I went from being bedbound to twirling outside,” Romanuk says. “I had no idea that life could be so different from what I’d become adjusted to.”
Sharing her experience online, Romanuk, a former biology professor, discovered that she wasn’t the only person who had had this experience. Both she and Tess Falor, an engineer with a PhD, had developed ME/CFS years before and had picked up a bacterial infection that required antibiotic treatment. Doctors had advised them to take probiotic supplements to help the microbiome recover. Afterwards, both experienced a dramatic remission in ME/CFS symptoms. They called it a “remission event”. Romanuk and Falor have named their project to investigate the experience the RemissionBiome.
Thanks for posting that helvella. I saw that in the Guardian earlier on and thought about all of us thyroid sufferers. There are one or two very pertinent comments
“We become experts not because we necessarily want to but because we have to in order to have a chance at recovery - Lisa McCorkell “
And
“Romanuk says. “It’s not just ME/CFS; I believe that patient-led research will ultimately make the difference for other neglected diseases and rare diseases.”
I think you could probably put thyroid disease in among the ‘other neglected diseases’.
This is LITERALLY what I thought too when I read the website earlier too!
In 2018 I had a fecal microbiome transplant, having been diagnosed with CFS and believing the doctors who told me that my thyroid was “fine.” (My T3 was JUST inside the range). Interestingly, microbiome transplant (10 vials over 10 weeks) improved absolutely no metrics in my health whatsoever.
Thank you for posting this , there seems to be a lot of research being undertaken in this field it's only a matter of time before the link between gut bacteria and thyroid is evidenced in this way. The human body is a complex symbiotic organism and sadly the medical model of health care in the west has compartmentalised the human body in to departments and or categories separating each body system , so when we present at the GP they look only at thyroid in terms of levels and targets..rather than the impact it had on the body as a whole . Personally when I was diagnosed with hashimotos it was the first place I went to ..my gut bacteria and had tests which I feel are as important as the thyroid tests in treatment planning. From these gut results I am able to modify my diet and nutrition and work towards improving all over health and wellness which in my little universe must impact on thyroid health..
I am sub-clinical Hashi and had awful brain fog. Learning from this and other online sites I upped my vitamins & minerals and now keep an eye on them via Medichecks. I worked out by elimination that I wasn't pulling enough nutrients from my food so started to research why, and up came the gut microbiome.
In March I started making sauerkraut, but who wants to eat that three times a day? While I was waiting for it to mature I looked at kefir, which has a 24 hour turnaround, and I have never looked back.
Within two weeks I could tell the difference in my digestive system. Any excess I make into creamy cheese. The grains I bought from Ebay for less than £5 delivered. All that's needed is milk (any type) and a large jar. Interestingly, it is supposed to cut the lactose in cow's milk (I use full cream for the vitamins).
PS: I don't actually "drink" it; it goes on my oats & fruit & seed mix breakfast, so I am having way less than half a pint a day - hence being able to make cheese.
Kefir is often said to be the most beneficial fermented food to eat for health, and I know many forum users make it and take it. The starter culture for kefir is called 'grains'. They are little chewy chunks yh, that you need to get hold of from somewhere before you can make it. I have made a lot of fermented food, but found kefir a bit hard to make while I've been ill, because it means handling milk and you need to tend to it every single day. While many ferments are a big task once a week, or even every few months.
Saurkraut is made using only cabbage and salt, so is one of the easiest fermented foods to make first, because you don't need to buy any special ingredients. It will ferment using just the bacteria that naturally occurs on the skin of cabbage and other vegetables. More generally this form of fermenting is called lacto fermenting and can be done with many vegetables by covering them in salt water.
There are many other fermentations that can easily be done at home, such as kombucha made from tea, or water kefir that uses similar grains to (milk) kefir but is made from water with with a little dried fruit, yoghurt made from milk where you can use ordinary supermarket yoghurt as a starter, or send off for wilder varieties.
You would have to go into this more deeply than I have to really evaluate the differences in terms of bacteria and which might be the most beneficial. All of them contain beneficial bacteria that is introduced to your gut. And they also serve to make food more easily digestible and gentle on the gut. If you are just starting out I would recommend trying whichever appeals to you, or would be the easiest to fit into your lifestyle.
Thanks for this that's very helpful. As I'm struggling with health issues at the moment, I'm planning to ask my husband to buy some kefir in a pot from the supermarket to get my gut some support asap.
I'm assuming that would be OK, or is it best to to make your own as it's more effective?
I would say it is enormously better to make your own. A lot of fermented food you can buy is a lot less rich in bacteria, and some have even been pasteurised to kill the bacteria.
But making it yourself takes time, to make your own kefir you'd probably have to order grains online and wait for them to arrive, and to make saurkraut takes some time to ferment, so even if you eat it very young you'll be waiting several weeks.
So if you want to start eating them straight away buying may be the only option. If you have access to a good health food shop, or more expensive supermarkets you would be able to find much better quality fermented food than in an ordinary supermarket. For example the expensive veg box delivery service Abel and Cole does pretty good fresh sauerkrauts, and their Brown Cow yoghurt range tastes like home made. A friend of mine concluded ordering saurkraut from there was the cheapest way to buy good sauerkraut
If you're going to an ordinary supermarket it is hard to advise what would be the best fermented food to try. You may be best off with the yakult-style probiotic yoghurt bottles, as at least they claim to contain good bacteria. Although I think the best thing to do overall would be to eat a range of things, as then you will be getting the widest range of bacteria on offer at the supermarket. I also think yoghurt can be good as a supermarket food, because it is relatively cheap and you can eat a lot of it. Make sure you get plain and not flavoured yoghurt. Often sold as Greek yoghurt. Stay away from anything low fat or that has been highly processed. You may be able to find other varieties of yoghurt such as Skyr, an Icelandic style. These are made with slightly different bacterial cultures, so will add more variety. Check to make sure they haven't been pasteurised. I would get a variety of yoghurts, kefir, and any other fermented dairy you can find in the fridge section, and eat all of them daily.
I think you may be able to find kombucha in the supermarket, too. Best practice fermented food will always be in the fridge, but in my supermarket there is one in little cans sold as a soft drink that isn't too bad.
I have never seen fresh saurkraut in a supermarket, only pasteurised, but if you see any in the fridge that is good, too. Kimchi is another very similar ferment that is getting more popular so may be in the fridge, too.
Thinking about it another form of unpasteurized ferment you can find in the supermarket is Apple Cider Vinegar. Aspel's (I think that's the brand name, but I may have it a bit wrong) do one that is unpasteurised and often in the supermarket. In the vinegar section you may see expensive brands that claim to contain the mother ( such as Bragg's or Raw Health), and those are probably even better than Aspel's. Of course don't eat those neat, but use a lot in food and cooking. You can dilute a tablespoon or so of vinegar in a glass of water and drink it hot or cold. Add some honey if you like, and it makes quite a nice drink close to the traditional shrub.
Another thing you can try if you need to repopulate your gut right now is probiotic capsules. You probably need a health food shop for that or to order online. These are one of those things that may be great or may be nothing, but I think is worth a try. Usually a bottle will contain a several week course. The great thing about wild fermentation in food form as opposed to tablets, is you know for sure they are full of beneficial bacteria, and that they are alive and thriving when you eat them, so home made fermentations are probably better than capsules.
If you're going to the supermarket I would also bring back two or three heads of cabbage, any variety will work, a mixture is even better but get at least one of the tightly rolled dense kind if you can. Organic if possible, and look up a saurkraut recipe online to set going today. It should include only the cabbage, salt, and maybe a top up of water. It is a similar amount of work to making a cake or a casserole. Basically all you will do is slice up the cabbage nice and small, crush it up, mix through with salt, and then pack into jars or a Tupperware.
Then think about whether you'd like to order some kefir grains, or to stick with sauerkraut in the future. With today's quick delivery you may be able to be making kefir by the end of the week!
Another home fermentation available to you right way would be to make yoghurt using the bought yoghurt as a starter.
I didn't know whether to mention it as it probably won't add any additional bacteria strains over just eating the bought yoghurt. But I didn't want to leave it out in case it helps anyone else who is reading hoping to try some home fermentation. Yoghurt is another really nice one to start with I think.
Yoghurt you buy tends to contain only a narrow range of bacteria, and it isn't strong enough to make new yoghurt for more than a few generations. The way I think of it is that the bacteria in shop bought yoghurt is similar to the meat from factory farming, only one variety, bred to be most productive for the supermarket, and not capable of living in the wild. While the bacteria in wild strains of yoghurt is more like a wild animal living in its natural environment in the wild, strong and capable.
Yoghurt is made by heating up milk, then mixing the warm milk with a small quantity of starter yoghurt from a previous batch, then keeping it warm for 8 hours or so. Bought yoghurt makers are just a Thermos flask type setup you can fill with boiling water to keep the yoghurt warm inside. You can do similar with a casserole dish of hot water, or fill the casserole with the milk mixture and keep warm in the oven with just the bulb or a plate warmer setting, etc. Then hold back a tablespoon or so of the newly made yoghurt to make the next batch.
Personally I absolutely love home made yoghurt. It is much nicer than bought yoghurt. Its a lovely feeling to get up in the morning and open up your warm yoghurt. Very hard to avoid eating it all if opened before breakfast 😱
Home made yoghurt will usually be thin, more like a drinking yoghurt. You can thicken it by straining out the whey (useful for other things such as making porridge, rice or fermented soft drinks), or by adding milk powder or cream when you mix the milk at the start.
Many interesting strains of yoghurt starter can be ordered online, many which have been alive for hundreds of years. This is a very traditional food, and many different cultures have had their own particular strains of yoghurt, many of which have survived wars and migrations, perhaps dried on a scrap of cloth in a refugee's pocket. Some are thicker than others, or chewier than others. Some ferment at room temperature and don't need to be heated, etc.
Hehe... Sorry for extreme levels of detail. I guess I love yoghurt more than I realised 😅
Oh yes, that's true. I think slow cookers work well, too.
After I wrote this I wondered about an airing cupboard, but I'm not sure I've ever heard that mentioned as a suggestion. Maybe people aren't keen to get their clean laundry mixed up with fermenting milk
Yoghurt machines are also easy to find second hand. I think it's one of those things people buy and then never use, like women's shoes and any other hobby equipment.
Another little point is that it is common to heat the milk to a higher temperature and then cool it to fermentation temperature before adding the starter yoghurt. Traditionally this was to pasteurise the milk a little first, but it also slightly denatures the yoghurt and gives a thicker final result. Which I guess adds a bit more difficulty to using other kinds of heaters.
Yes - some, possibly all, slow cookers. And - believe it or not - some air fryers.
The old warm airing cupboard has largely disappeared as we have gone to instant heating for water. (Not entirely, of course. There's many still out there.)
Thank you SilverAvocado what an incredible amount of information 👏 ! I'm overwhelmed now😃. We do have a Waitrose and health food shop so I'll start there.
Once my daughter hopefully goes to university on September I'll be looking at it, I love yoghurt.
This is a massive, encyclopedic book, that lists gigantic numbers of home fermented foods eaten throughout the world, so perhaps not as useful for someone who doesn't want to go too deeply into it. He has written some shorter books that are more like simple recipe books, for example a very small one called Wild Fermentation.
I'm no expert, just did a lot of reading up via Mr Google. It seems that sauerkraut and kefir, both fermented foods, do the same thing in different ways - simplisticly, they increase the amount of "good" gut flora with the intention of out-multiplying the "bad" flora.
My symptoms - readers of a sensitive disposition please avert your eyes - I needed, and I mean *needed*, the toilet as soon as I got out of bed in a morning. It was loose and finger-thick, and I'd go three or four times in the next 2-3 hours. There was no pain, but I often got bloating which would wake me at 5am, especially after eating rice and pasta (even brown rice/wholewheat pasta, but oddly not couscous made of the same durum wheat).
Something had to be done, but it wasn't simply the fermented foods. I had to lay the way to help both my gut cope and the fermented foods have their best chance of working. This is no quick fix. Sugar in all its forms feeds "bad" bacteria. I cut out as much as I could and stayed that way for a week to see how my body reacted (okay, as it happened).
Then I halved my simple carbs and cut back a quarter on complex carbs with the idea I'd do the same again if need be (I didn't need to). I'd read that headaches would result, mine (low-grade) lasted two days, but I've read they can last up to four days. It's a bit of a shock to realise how addicted we are even when we don't think we eat a lot.
Two weeks into the kefir (with occasional spoonful of sauerkraut with dinner) and not only had the bloating gone but my faeces was noticably returning to "normal". I have it instead of full-cream milk on my breakfast cereal, which rotates every three mornings to a gluten-free. And I make my own kefir, which is the consistency of pouring cream/thin yoghurt.
However, I laid the foundations a year before that: my vitamins & minerals under Medichecks' Advanced Thyroid test are now above halfway in their ranges, and I've upped my protein. On that breakfast has been a daily bag of a teaspoon each of crushed linseeds, hemp, pumpkin seeds, plus soaked chai, then one date (fibre), half a walnut and 1 Brazil nut (I now take selenium capsules to aid my T4 to convert to T3 - one of my main thyroid problems).
What works for me might not work for you, or might need tweaking. It's all a big experiment, as other have answered. Good luck. In my case being fobbed off by medics was not an option.
Thank you TorcHouse that's a load of helpful information. And really interesting.I'm going to explore kefir and fermentation when I'm hopefully a bit better on the thyroid front. I'm still at the laying the foundations stage.
For now I'm definitely going to buy some good quality kefir. And over time research my gut!
No, it's just what I make/need to cover my breakfast. It can be a quarter pint, or more. I've read some people have an adverse reaction if you drink "a lot", but I'm not certain how much that is. There are recipes for half pint smoothies with fruit, so it's whatever works for an individual.
This was a really interesting article, and lending itself to the ever more increasing focus on our gut health.
My humble early take on this is that the increasing attention in this area (of course part profit driven) we may risk oversimplifying and overselling the benefits of healthy gut bacteria (especially with probiotic and prebiotic) use at the cost of a more holistic focus. I meet a lot of people into prebiotic and probiotics and seemingly ignore everything else they consume e.g. excessive alcohol consumption. The same can be said of folk that blindly target on other areas of the body with omega etc. without putting in all the other necessary work in their diet and health with a much more holistic approach.
I believe in our health, and for our thyroid the old adage rings true… You are what you eat, and if I can extend that to ‘You are what you do’ as well. I very much think we need to address our health issues via our gut health of course (the evidence for this is too powerful to ignore) but not ignoring everything else that benefits our health m… stress, exercise, environment, love. They all play a part in our wellbeing.
Thank you, hevella, for sharing this article. Maybe this could be additional information to the article and relevant to thyroid, although thyroid is not the particular focus, just hormones in general. foodrevolution.org/blog/fib...
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Thyroid or Chronic Fatigue 
Chronic fatigue syndrome 
Hypo and chronic fatigue
Chronic Fatigue verses Thyroid problems = being taken of Thyroxine and being put on Erfa.
