Thyroid Takes the Biggest Hit
Environmental Illness/EPM is really the end result of many years of environmental onslaught to the systems of the body. Environment is every single thing that comes in contact with the body such as food, air and water. Toxicity and nutritional imbalance can cause envirnmental illness, hamper thyroid function and thus make a horse more suseptable to EPM.
There are many predisposing environmental factors which affect all living systems, including humans and horses. The most affected part of the body is the Thyroid - master regulator of all cellular metabolism in the body and producer of Thyroxine (T4). This is the top domino that controls all the others, indeed, the speed of every action in the body.
Halogen Overload
Typically from chlorinated, fluorinated and brominated hydrocarbons - pesticides, herbicides, and/or fungicides. Common disinfectants, common bleach, preservatives, chlorinated water and even drugs, etc - play "bumper pool" with iodine in the thyroid gland, substituting themselves in thyroxine. This forms incorrect thyroxine molecules that don't work right in cellular receptor sites. These substituted halogenated products test falsely as real thyroxine in blood tests, due to the inability of these tests to distinguish between different halogen electron clouds the outer part of the molecules.Thus, "normal" levels for the biologically active form of thyroid, Triiodothyronine (T3), and storage form, T4. However, sub normal basal metabolism is indicated by sub normal temp, which accurately represents the size of the "fire burning in the body". The bigger the fire, the more heat given off, by anyone's standard.
Breakdown products of these halogenated hydrocarbon organic compounds (containing Fluorine, Chlorine or Bromine) from pesticide residue in feeds are sometimes more toxic than the original products. We learned that one when we found out that DDT broke down to DDD and DDE - both more deadly and even longer lasting than DDT.
Common Herbicides
Can also taint feeds from residues, prevent and interfere with production of tyrosine, an essential backbone amino acid for thyroxine . Fat soluble herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, and preservatives build up in the system since our bodies can't adequately break them down and detoxify them. The newer ones are not so initially toxic, but are insidious in their actions over time. A low protein or incomplete protein diet like straight oats or oat/corn mix is low in tyrosine. You see, it's not just lysine that is so important to immune and metabolic function.
Alfalfa
Has five identified compound groups known to interfere with binding of iodine to tyrosine, to produce the thyroxine. Years ago-before the levels of all these halogenated hydrocarbons and their metabolites had built up to high levels in feeds and waters, alfalfa wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back, like it is now, in these already compromised individuals. Alfalfa was used freely and with great benefit for its higher protein and energy over grass hays. Not anymore you can now see why the feeding part of our protocol is so very important for a successful outcome. Alfalfa and cabbage family members were named "Goitrogens" many years ago, for a reason, and avoidance of these is important in helping control environmental illness in people too.
Many Common Commercial Fat Supplements
Utilize commercial slaughterhouse waste and further hydrogenated those already saturated animal fats into a prilled wax. Horses are vegetarians and have even a lesser digestive and enzymatic ability to digest these ultra saturated fats than we do as omnivores - and you know what that does to us! These fat trimmings also are the repositories of all the steroids, Synthetic estrogens fed to those feed animals as growth stimulants. These synthetic estrogens (also called xenoestrogens, are likely to be solvents and sometimes hydrocarbons, since they can also plug into estrogen receptor sites in the body) are immune suppressors. There are lots of them, too.
Heat treating fats and even oils, like they do in prilling, pelleting and - extruding produces trans fatty acids which are inflammatory to cell membranes. Heat also kills or deactivates all enzymes and B vitamins, which puts more digestive stress on the body, having to provide more of these digestive elements themselves. A horse fed these "dead" feeds without additional non-heat treated vitamin supplements, and having no access to fresh pasture (most race and performance horses don't) bear an additional stress of digestion as if the stress of performance isn't enough already. These things can contribute to cell permeability and fragility of cell membranes. Also, these things compromise calcium and magnesium metabolism with a low basal metabolism and low thyroid function and metabolism in the body, you also have low "cation" compound absorption and retention in the body. The essential cations most compromised are calcium and magnesium, the body's main acid neutralizers, both at the gut and at the cell level. Acidity raises to critical levels everywhere, with all kinds of acids - lactic and gastric and many others. Symptoms include chronic sore muscles, muscle spasms, arthritic inflammations, ulcers, blockages of circulation of both blood and lymph and further malabsorption of essential trace minerals along with incomplete digestion of nutrients, and low energy production, as lactic acid is turned over more slowly.
Cell walls (the cellular membrane) are only two molecules thick, composed of protein and fatty acids, become fragile and deformed like milk proteins when they are exposed to even the mild acid of orange juice which clump and form curds. The fatty acid fraction of a cell wall is targeted by free radicals from trans fatty acids generated heat treated oils. The protein part is targeted by acidity, no matter how slight . It's no wonder with all this activity going on at the cell level that animals and people don't have enough cation buffer left over to properly neutralize their food after digestion in the stomach.
Which leads to cellular membrane dysfunction with the cell wall integrity compromised...
Energy is lost and cell function also compromised as magnesium and potassium inside the cell mix together with calcium and sodium in fluid around the cell. A cell wall is supposed to function like a dividing plate in a battery, with opposing cations generating electrical energy across it. If the plate is destroyed, so is the energy potential of the battery. If the cell wall is deformed or compromised, it too causes the cell to suffer and thus the whole body and all of it's tissues.
Heavy metals - another matter to make matters worse.
Heavy metals everywhere substitute themselves and interfere with nutritional mineral metals and further pollute enzyme systems that are activated by these nutritional mineral metals. More energy and biological functions are lost. More biochemistry is compromised.
Superphosphate Fertilizers
With their very high phosphate activity, designed to help us out of foreign oil dependence from the seventy's oil embargo. At just 2 lb. per acre, superphosphate fertilizers now commonly used fertilizers can do the biochemical job of 30 lb.- 40 lb. per acre of the old fashioned phosphates. Just imagine the biochemical havoc they play in our body against Calcium and Magnesium - making these problems even worse. That are already bad to start with. Feed companies and nutritionists generally don't take this into consideration. They're still adding up element molecules the old fashioned way and don't consider biochemical or biological availability or environmental activity, yet. They also seem to think all phosphates are created equal, and they are definitely not! So, with these residues in grains, we certainly don't need additional phosphates from dicalcium phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, or any other phosphate added to our grain mixes like common commercial ones do.
Adding insult to injury now comes acid rain, and literally tons of sulfates which not only bind trace minerals in the soil, making plants deficient, but acidify soil and plants and tie up ever-overworked (and declining) calcium, and worse yet, magnesium. Magnesium has taken the biggest hit in soil deficiencies over the last 50 years and nobody pays attention. It is necessary in 99% + of all biochemical reactions in the body and we get only 40% of what our grandparents got in food (provided we eat the same food groups that they ate) which isn't the case anyway, and further yet differentiates our diet today.
Chemical forms of minerals like copper sulfate (a powerful acidifying compound and drain cleaner you can buy at the local hardware store), zinc sulfate, cobalt sulfate and manganese sulfate are the commonly used sources of trace minerals in inexpensive supplements and even animal feeds. Some feed companies use magnesium sulfate( Epsom salt) as a magnesium source. A wonderful purgative since the body hates it so much, but hardly adequate for a supplement in our severely magnesium deficient world! We can't use those old chemical forms any more for obvious reasons. We could get away with using small amounts to supplement the small soil deficiencies we had many years ago, but not to satisfy the huge ones we have now. More expensive, safer and higher biochemical activity trace minerals must be used now, and in higher doses to do the job. And yes - it costs more money. It costs more now to keep healthy than it did before, and it will cost even more and more in the future, if we don't all get smart and fix the planet that is poisoning us. Unfortunately, cheap supplementation with these more toxic, and less compatible, forms of minerals is no longer an option, if you really want to do the job properly.
The doors to the body have opened wide. You can see, EPDS bugs - the whole lot of them - and there will only be more and more, enter the picture as opportunistic organisms who simply move in to a body that has been multiply compromised on many levels. All the sick systems of the body have to be helped and supported daily against the daily onslaught of environmental factors that we can't control. This is what our approach to the problem does, on many levels, in many systems of the body. As the years go by, we will have to use more nutrients daily to balance and fight ever rising levels of environmental pollution coming into the body, and ever growing nutritional deficiencies in our foods.
And not a drop to drink... local and endemic factors also compound the overall problem. Water from coal deposit areas of the country like the Appalachians; PA, VA, WV, KY, TN, etc. contain resorcinol, a natural toxin of the thyroid. Nitrates, from fertilizer run off in ground water, causes shrinkage of the thymus gland, premature aging and depressed immune function. Areas of arsenic contamination like S.E. Michigan (where I live), areas of TX and NJ and possibly other locales of the U.S., cause immune and liver problems too, with additional copper and zinc deficiencies. Health for all will only get more and more expensive as we can take less and less for granted any more.
The bottom line is, supporting just some of the body's sick systems will not do in most cases. These environmental problems caused the opportunity for bugs to enter the body in the first place. Toxins will cause the body to become sick, allowing the opportunity for any "bugs" to really set up shop. Restoring healthy body chemistry is the only sensible approach to any opportunistic disease, since these things don't affect a healthy body! Even the slyest thief doesn't consider a raid on Ft. Knox because of its security. People need to restore normal body chemistry daily, because the toxins are also a daily threat, restores our body's security system as well. In reality, it's the body itself doing the work when all the building blocks are provided.
About Temperature and the Thyroid
A horse's normal temperature should between 100°F and 100.8°F to adequately function properly. Actually, anything lower than 100°F should be considered clinical and monitored. In people, we have two temps to look at - oral and axial. In the 15 years I have been studying autoimmune diseases, especially involving the thyroid, as I have had it all of my life, I have found the oral temp to more closely reflect true basal metabolism and axial to reflect autoimmune responses, and cellular inflammation at the peripheral tissues which did correlate with the blood auto antibody. The axial should be a degree or so lower than the oral and if it is closer or even equal or surpasses, it is a good indication of inflammation at the cell level in peripheral tissues.
In horses, we don't have auto antibody tests developed, and have not figured a way to take an axial temp reliably with a regular thermometer. This axial are is significant in that it is directly over a major set of lymph nodes, but horses don't have armpits, per se. Digital thermometers often are unreliable and read high, giving false norms. So we only have a rectal temp to work with. High oral temps of low grade fever, are sometimes seen in autoimmune cases, mostly of the most severe kind, but that temp is a "faker" and is only a reflection of the larger amounts of inflammation, and not a true representative of basal metabolism that we want. See?
So a low is real, but a high or high normal may not be an accurate measure of health/disease. This seems to hold true for horses too. Many of these have goiters, or abnormal growth in the thyroid gland. Most autoimmune cases run low temperatures, but the most difficult to control and the worst cases run higher temperatures. Often when starting our Hi-Pro Feed™ nutritional program and protocol derived from consultation, inflammation will go down along with the temp and you will begin to see the "real'' body temperature.
In the very worst autoimmune cases, the temp will stay high throughout, or fluctuate daily and symptoms will not go away until you add thyroid. After a very long course, the temp may come down to normal or even fall despite increasing the thyroid as the inflammatory processes subside. Since we do not know the true targets of autoimmune response without an antibody test like we have for people, we have to be very careful not to trip a potential autoimmune response.
Desiccated thyroid components can themselves be the targets, and trip autoimmune response, by giving it the old way of doing it in a "normal" physiological dose, which is six times higher than where I like to begin. This is why medical and veterinary practitioners are so gun shy of using thyroid, as they did so extensively in the past. They usually didn't understand the "backfire" in those patients and couldn't control it. I have found that using it like a progressive allergy shot, starting with incredibly small doses and slowly increasing only every two to three weeks in spring and summer when endocrine activity is naturally higher and every ten days to two weeks in fall and winter when endocrine activity is naturally lower (and basal metabolism and immune response too) can actually work like a vaccination and a tolerance is built up.
Also, we are normalizing "correct" immune response with our supplements and food support, to effectively monitor and control autoimmune response. Immune response is indirectly proportional to autoimmune response. This is very helpful to remember. So this is why I have owners throw away the blue tablespoon scoop that comes with the complete desiccated thyroid and start at 1/2 tsp , which is 1/6th of the "normal" physiologic dose of conventional medicine. Synthetic thyroid is only T4 - the storage form, and there have been manufacturing and standardizing problems galore with it. I have not had success with these synthetics in any E.I. case be they horses or humans. Patients have experienced anger, anxiety and depression without resolving the biochemistry of thyroid pathways. I have also seen synthetics trip autoimmune responses or cause them to worsen. Managing an autoimmune horse (or person for that matter) is very difficult. It's confusing for everyone. I wish it weren't this way. These are the Prozac® cases; the patients from Hell that nobody wants.
There are ever increasing percentages of these cases from Hell that make practitioners look bad - and I believe their numbers will continue to increase in all species. Awareness, education and understanding is the only solution. There is no easy way. There is no fast way. There is no shortcut. As a result, I encourage every person with a body like that, and every horse owner with one, to continually monitor the body, and learn controls for this situation. Each will be a bit different, but with many similarities. This is not an "easy fix". It will take four to six months, and maybe several years to stabilize a severe autoimmune body. Be patient. With these cases especially, detox is essential - and avoidance, elimination of all environmental factors that precipitated the problem in the first place.
Recommended Reading:
FAQ's on the Thyroid
Environmental Health Conditions Involving the Thyroid as they relate to tripod stance / environmental cow hocks, autoimmune diseases, and difficult to train horses.
Understanding Your Thyroid & How It's Affected by Environmental Illness Syndrome To simplify a very complicated endocrine pathway for your understanding, we can say that the thyroid, with help from the adrenal glands, regulates the speed of biochemical reactions at the cell level, in every cell of the body.
More on Thyroid Testing: Understanding TSH -The Latest "Gold Standard" and it's Failures.
