On Life As A Picky Foodie

So what can be done to help boost an underactive thyroid?

First of all, cut out the processed food.  OK, you say, but Gabriela, you would tell me to do that anyway.

Yes, you’re right.  And your thyroid is one more great reason to do so…

But what else is there?

Last week, I gave a bunch of yoga teachers-in-training a talk about nutrition during pregnancy.  Of course the question of soy came up and I had to admit that although some of my closest friends are soy-lovers, I personally consider it devil’s food.

Simply put: soy messes with your hormones.

Your thyroid is all about the hormones.

I’ll let you connect the dots.

If you have to have it, try and stick to the fermented kind like miso or tempeh.

Other foods that can inhibit a properly functioning thyroid include brassica vegetables like bok choy, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kale, collards, mustard greens, tatsoi and turnips.  And other goitrogens: peanuts, millet, strawberries, pears, peaches, spinach, sweet potatoes.

The good news, however, is that cooking most of the vegetables above will lower their harmful effects. 

There are the PUFAs, of course, which I mentioned in my last thyroid post.

Lastly, fluoride is a nasty little bastard that acts more or less like a poison on the thyroid.  If you drink tap water or use a tabletop filter, chances are you’re ingesting way more fluoride than you think.

And I have to say this: caffeine has been said to act as a thyroid suppressant… So much for that morning java boost!

But what am I going to eat???  And how am I going to brush my teeth?

OK, OK, don’t have a cow!

Do I go through life without broccoli, kale or sweet potatoes?  Not a chance!  Moderation, dear Watson.  Ask yourself: Is that food worth it?  Do I really want it?  Will it make me feel good? These are constructive questions to ask anyway, but keeping your thyroid in mind offers one more incentive.

If you’ve ever woken up the morning after a “good” / “healthy” meal and wondered why you feel like you’ve been hit by a fast-moving bus, maybe it’s time to check the ingredients of your dinner, as well as get a blood test to get your thyroid levels checked.

But rest assured, it’s not all bad news: micronutrients like selenium (found in Brazil nuts), magnesium (chocolate has the highest levels of magnesium of any food, but you can also try nuts, legumes, and cumin) and zinc (good sources are sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds and chocolate; and for the omnivores, try oysters and lamb) are beneficial to the thyroid.  Also, sea vegetables – and especially kelp -- provide iodine, which is necessary for proper thyroid function.  And coconut oil is widely used to boost thyroid levels as well as metabolism.

As for my own thyroid?  Since removing the PUFAs from my diet (you can read more about this in thyroid part 1), I have seen a remarkable boost in my energy levels and what I affectionately called my post pregnancy camel hump has massively decreased.  What never ceases to amaze me is how quickly I feel the effects of every food decision – the good ones as well as the bad. 

P.S. Of course there is one more thing you can do to help an underactive thyroid ... Exercise.  But I'm sure you knew that already.

One question many people ask me is about disasters in the kitchen.  Have I had any?  What were they?  Truth be told, I don’t often remember as that’s not what I tend to dwell on.  However, one meal – if you can call it that -- does stick in my mind and since January is Detox month, I thought I’d come clean and write about it.

I’ve noticed that when it comes to eating healthy food, people really want to be wooed.  If I said I was deep frying my kitchen sink, expectations would probably not be as high, but being known as a “healthy” person, means dinner guests expect to be impressed.

It’s as if healthy automatically means sawdust in most people’s minds.  And if you’re not planning on serving steamed sawdust, then you’d better come up with something spectacular.  Personally, I find that quite strange, but whatever…

On the other side of that is the person doing the cooking – me in this case. I don’t really fret over it anymore: like with most things, the more experience I have with cooking, the easier it feels.  However, it wasn’t always thus.

A few years back, my grandmother came to visit.  I was just beginning my Picky Foodie journey and wasn’t as comfortable in the kitchen as I am now.  My beloved grandmother was let’s say a tad sceptical about this whole “healthy” business.  I, however, was determined to change her mind – almost defensively so. 

All had gone relatively well until then, mostly because I had eased her into my cooking and supplemented liberally with bread, butter, cheese and brownies from The Kitchen Table, a favourite café up the road where everything is made from scratch using fresh and high quality ingredients.  My grandmother had politely declined most of my homemade offerings, or, at the most, tasted a bit or two, and nodded politely. 

I remained nevertheless determined to seduce her palate.  The plan was to make a broccoli soup.  It was going to be vegan and cold though not quite raw as I was planning to steam the broccoli.  Don’t ask me why, I thought it was a good idea to make something I had never made before – it was a recipe I was going to tackle for the first time!

You see, I wanted to woo my grandmother not only with the amazing flavours, but also with my incredible talent in the kitchen. 

Yeah, that didn’t exactly go as planned. 

I made two fatal mistakes:

The first was thinking a vegetable is a vegetable is a vegetable.  Once upon a time in an era when my cooking had consisted of heaping steaming food out of takeaway packages, my friend H had shared a foolproof recipe for vegan cauliflower soup.  No, not broccoli, cauliflower…  That day, I thought, how different can they really be?   

My second mistake was a little subtler.  My friend’s recipe called for a ton of soy milk.  Having recently been diagnosed with a thyroid problem, that wasn’t going to work for me.  Luckily, I had also become more interested in the raw food movement.  No problem in that case: I figured I’d simply use cashews instead of soy milk.  Cashews are used extensively in raw food.  They are used to make cheeses, blended and strained as mylk, and thrown in virtually everything as thickeners.  Cashews are like a magic raw ingredient (though hard-core raw foodists don’t often eat as much fat as that, in addition to the fact that many packaged cashews are heated above what is acceptable… but bla la bla -- I digress) and I thought they would be a perfect replacement for the soya milk.  Wrong Again!

The result was knobbly, lumpy, tasteless and FUGLY.  Fugly, fugly, fugly.  Green polka dot fugly.  My grandmother took one bite and shyly and politely asked may I have another piece of bread please?

Here’s the kicker, though.  My goal was to wow my guests – and one in particular – but I didn’t actually taste what I was going to be serving them beforehand.  Now maybe if I had made the recipe, oh I don’t know, a hundred times already, I might have gotten away with it.  But this was my first shot.  And man did it bomb. 

Luckily, my grandmother has never refused to try anything I have made.  She has an itty bitty bite of everything.  Since the broccoli soup disaster, she has gone on to pronounce my cooking Interesting and even asks for seconds sometimes.  Though she’s made it very clear that she still prefers her toast and jam. 

These Gluten Free Flatbreads, on the other hand, my grandmother has always enjoyed.

Gluten-Free Spring Onion Flatbreads
(makes 6 large flatbreads – great with spreads)

1 C brown rice flour
½ C chickpea flour
½ t arrowroot powder
½ t baking soda
½ t xantham gum
¼ t salt (or to taste)
1 T olive oil
½ t balsamic vinegar
4 spring onions, finely chopped
1 ½ C water

Preheat the oven to 120 degrees Centigrade (248 Fahrenheit).

Combine the dry ingredients.  Add the olive oil and balsamic vinegar, then add the spring onion. 

Mixing as you go, add the water gradually until the batter is almost watery, but still thick. 

Heat a non-stick pan until water spatters on the surface.  Keeping the heat on medium, ladle ½ cup of the batter at a time into the pan.  You know it’s time to flip the flatbread once the edges start getting hard. 

Once each side is starting to brown, put in the oven.  Bake for about ½ hour.