How much iodine do we really get from foods? How did are ice-age ancestors get their iodine?

[Guest guest]

Hi all,

How did our ancestors, subsisting on almost nothing but meat and

fat and probably a some vegetables, get their iodine? Or did all of

them in iodine-poor areas have goiters? My mom says that goiters

were rather common when she was growing up, before iodization of salt

in the middle of the country where people didn't eat seafood (and she

tell ME to take what I read on the internet with a grain of.. salt..

These days I figure the same about her..) If this was true in modern

times in the middle of the coutry, I'd think it would have been true

thousands of years ago for inland Indian tribes, to say nothing of

further back in geologic time - the Paleolithic diet. I haven't

studied the Paleo diet in detail, and I'm not sure the " Paleolithic

Diets " of today are anything like what are ancestors actually ate.

This is talking about non-thyroid-disorder people of course.

hypoT people if correctly treated most likely get enough (actually,

MUST get enough) from their thyroid medications. I don't have a clue

what happens to the iodine in thyroid hormone AFTER it enters the

cells and does whatever it does in the mitochondira ad nucleus, and

whether iodine can be recycled by the body. But the US RDA does have

a value for iodine, implying that even if it can be recycled, it

can't be recycled forever - at least not in modern-time humans.

Perhaps if " iodine starved " the body recycles more of the iodine,

although that would imply that the same process would occurr today in

iodine-poor areas, unless we used to have some enzyme which 'reset'

the iodine in terms of energy level and eletron configuration, and/or

unbind it from a protein that " takes it away " for excretion (these

are the only ways I can think that iodine could be " used up " )

Although, a goiter might have been/be the gland's natural response

to a iodine " famine/feast " situation - the gland overloads and stores

excess iodine when it gets it, and then uses it up when it isn't.

Why is seafood so high in iodine? If it comes from the water,

would this mean that real sea salt (which few people use anymore)

would contain all the iodine a person really needs, if used

" moderately " (whatever that was).

Jim