Dr. Eric Balcavage leads us in a powerful conversation on Cellular Stress in Hypothyroidism. Dr. Balcavage is the owner and founder of Rejuvagen. He is widely recognized around the world as a leader in Functional Medicine and Thyroid Physiology.

“Cell stress is not a new term at all. We talk about cell stress in lots of different aspects, but you know, cells are kind of like people, they cannot operate in two different operating modes. They operate in a mode where they’re in a low stress state and essentially they have all the energy, they need to do all the things they need to do for normal cell metabolism. But when a cell has an excessive amount of stress on it, whether that be from physical stress, chemical stress, emotional stress, organism stress, whether it’s low oxygen disrupted sleep patterns, the cell can start to sense danger.

When a cell is under stress, it wants to slow down those normal aspects of metabolism, slow down energy production, bring less glucose and oxygen in the cell, and increase the cell defense and inflammatory mechanisms. And the dimmer switch to do that is T3. So if I have more T3 inside a cell and T3 is binding to the nuclear receptors in the mitochondrial receptors, that’s going to turn on cell metabolism and it’s those.

So when T3 binds to some receptors, it turns on mechanisms when T3 binds to other receptors. It turns off mechanisms. So when we have a low-stress state and we have lots of T3 in the cell, I can turn on metabolism by binding T3, to receptors and by binding T3 to the two other receptors, I’m turning off that cell defense and cell inflammatory mechanisms. But as soon as I’m in danger, I say, Hey, I want to turn off those normal metabolic processes, shift energy to cell defense and inflammatory mechanisms. And the way to do that is to deactivate the amount of T3 inside the cell and reduce the amount of T3 and T4 coming into the cell.”

Listen closely – he provides A LOT of valuable information.

Visit rejuvagencenter.com to learn more about his specialty practice on the Thyroid!

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