iThei mdcdaelcinfd o c elllllrllll o tclhdfliThei mdcdaeThe best practice is to follow an elimination diet to identify triggering
foods instead of blindly embarking on one of these diets.
For most, these diets may just be a remission and not a cure, unless they
are combined with nourishing foods and probiotics that fix the intestinal
permeability.
What to Put In
When we think about diets, we generally think about what we need to
remove. The other key of a healing diet, however, is what we add. It’s
easy to get caught up in removing suspected foods while still having defi-
ciencies in beneficial bacteria and nutrients that prevent the thyroid and
intestines (which house the immune system) from healing.
Dietary programs focused only on what to avoid are not as successful as
those that consider what to add to restore optimal function.
A diet for healing Hashimoto’s needs to include bone and meat broths,
gelatin, protein, saturated fats, and fermented foods to help rebuild the
intestinal lining. Meat, liver, and vegetable juices are used to help replen-
ish depletions.
Fermented foods such as lacto-fermented cabbage, coconut kefir (ferment-
ed coconut water), and vegetables should be at the center of this diet.
The diet should be balanced with enough vegetables to provide a healing
alkaline environment.
If you were to pick just one intervention to try from this entire book,
I would recommend starting to incorporate traditionally prepared fer-
mented vegetables into your diet. Fermented vegetables are the best way
to get to the root cause of unbalanced intestinal flora.
Before we had refrigerators, people relied on traditional food prepara-
tions such as fermenting vegetables to keep them edible. Most traditional
cultures ate fermented vegetables for the majority of the year. These veg-
etables were full of beneficial lactobacilli bacteria, which have coevolved
in a symbiotic fashion to keep us healthy. Dr. Mercola suggests that fer-
mented cabbage may contain as much as 1 trillion colony forming units
(CFUs) of beneficial microbes per serving, compared with the 10 billion
CFUs per usual capsule of expensive high-dose expensive probiotics.
Fermented vegetables are prepared by chopping the vegetables, sprinkling
them with sea salt, and sometimes adding water or culture starters. The