Hello and welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition's Ask a Nutritionist podcast brought to you by

nutritional weight and wellness. My name is Leah Kleintraud. I'm a registered and licensed

dietitian, and we're thrilled to be celebrating 20 years of on-air

discussing the connection between what you eat and how you feel while sharing practical real-life

solutions for healthier living through balanced nutrition. We thank all of you for your support

and listenership over the years, And if you're enjoying this show,

please let us know by leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Providing

feedback also helps others find these important real food messages. Now let's get started.

So on today's show, I will be answering one question that we

received from our Dishing Up Nutrition listeners. Now, this listener says, I'm interested in

learning more about selenium. What are the benefits? And is it possible to be deficient? So this is a

great question. Selenium doesn't get much airtime

compared to a lot of our other vitamins and minerals like vitamin D or calcium or magnesium.

But that certainly doesn't mean that it's not a critical nutrient for the body. So we're going to

dig a little deeper into selenium. So selenium is a mineral.

There's actually several different forms of selenium in the body and that exist in nature,

but just for the sake of this podcast, we'll just be referring to the umbrella term of selenium.

And selenium plays several different critical roles in the body. Primarily, the first one that comes to my mind is it is important

for making our thyroid hormones. So it catalyzes some of the enzymes that are needed to make

our thyroid hormones. Now, our thyroid gland is the organ in the body with the highest concentration

of selenium, which really

tells us something there. And our thyroid is responsible for many, many different things,

...