How To Heal Your Thyroid Naturally | Dr. Neal Barnard
The Exam Room by the Physicians Committee
Physicians Committee
4.9 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 October 2025
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Your thyroid could be the hidden key to your energy, mood, and metabolism. What you eat may be making or breaking it.
In this episode of The Exam Room Podcast, Chuck Carroll sits down with Dr. Neal Barnard to uncover the powerful connection between thyroid health and diet.
Discover how eating certain foods and reducing stress can help restore hormone balance, boost metabolism, and reduce inflammation. Dr. Barnard also reveals how dairy, iodine, selenium, and soy all play surprising roles in thyroid function — and what you can do starting today to protect and restore this vital gland.
🍎 In This Episode You’ll Learn:
- How dairy proteins can trigger autoimmune thyroid disorders
- Why people eating a plant-based diet have the lowest rates of hypothyroidism and hyperthyroidism
- The best foods for your thyroid — including seaweed, Brazil nuts, and antioxidant-rich fruits and vegetables
- The truth about soy and cruciferous vegetables like kale and broccoli
- How stress, sleep, and crash diets affect thyroid hormones
- The role of environmental toxins and processed foods in hormone disruption
🌱 Start your journey to better thyroid health today!
Work with the expert doctors and dietitians at the Barnard Medical Center: https://www.BarnardMedical.org
📕Order your copy of Dr. Barnard’s book Your Body In Balance which covers thyroid dysfunction: https://amzn.to/3JcPrcI
This episode is sponsored by The Gregory J. Reiter Memorial Fund, which supports organizations like the Physicians Committee that carry on Greg’s passion and love for animals through rescue efforts, veganism, and wildlife conservation. Visit their website: https://gregoryreiterfund.org
If you feel like you’ve raised your health IQ, please leave a 5-star rating and nice review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Today on the exam room. |
| 0:04.0 | I don't think a lot of people, Dr. Barnard, know how impacted the thyroid is by what it is that a person is eating. |
| 0:12.0 | The thyroid is exquisitely sensitive to the diet, to stress, to environmental factors. |
| 0:17.0 | The other thing that should be said, though, is that we're playing for keeps. |
| 0:26.3 | Welcome to the exam room podcast, brought to you by the Physicians Committee. |
| 0:31.3 | Hi, I'm Chuck Carroll, raising health IQs coast to coast and around the world. |
| 0:32.6 | Hi to the exam room. |
| 0:39.5 | He's in Charlotte, North Carolina, Eugene, Oregon, and Auckland, New Zealand. Wherever you are, we appreciate you helping to make the world a healthier place. This is episode 84 of season 8, number 683 overall. |
| 0:48.3 | And if you have ever struggled with fatigue or gaining weight or had mood swings, your thyroid might be the key. |
| 0:56.8 | So today, on the heels of the incredible episode featuring Dr. Ruby Lathen and her triumph |
| 1:02.3 | over thyroid issues, we're going to be doing a deep dive into how the diet and lifestyle |
| 1:08.0 | that you lead can either heal or harm your thyroid. And we're going to be |
| 1:13.2 | having a conversation with one of the world's leading nutrition experts, our good friend, Dr. Neil Barnard. |
| 1:19.9 | So from iodine-rich seaweed to selenium-packed Brazil nuts, we're going to tell you the best |
| 1:25.4 | foods to support your thyroid. And Dr. Barnard is |
| 1:28.9 | also going to share why dairy proteins may be triggering an autoimmune reaction that can |
| 1:34.3 | disrupt your hormone balance. Plus, we're going to be getting into why vegans have the lowest risk |
| 1:40.0 | of thyroid disease. Plus, we're going to be covering stress and sleep and crash diets. Those |
| 1:45.3 | three things, why they can throw your thyroid into a tizzy. And why even your salt choice, |
| 1:52.0 | if you eat salt, could make a big, big difference. So whether you are managing hypothyroidism |
| 1:59.1 | or hyperthyroidism, or maybe you're just looking to get |
| 2:02.0 | a quick metabolism boost naturally, we will be talking about everything you need to know |
... |
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