Those provisos are in general false. We have cut our total iodine intake by close to 50% from a barely adequate level 30 years ago. Net outcome is that most of us are taking in far too little iodine to take care of thyroid, breast, prostate, and several other glands.

Well, just to limit discussion to obesity, our thyroid output is too low to sustain good health, but in particular this limits our ability to use up the calories we take in. We exascerbate the problem when obesity leads to heart health problems and we cut out almost all of the salt we used to use that was iodized.

Our brains suffer from that hypothyroid condition too, rather severely if one is schitzophrenic or suffers depression. But the list of problems involved is long, very long.

Hyperthyroid condition is a significant cause of obesity, but far more important it is a major cause of ill health, independent of obesity.

Well, there are iodine supplements that are mostly potassium iodide, with a bit of selenium and a B vitamin needed to store the iodine in the glands.

IODINE 2 is a brand name that works well, not so much to eliminate obesity, which it does, but mostly to give us back the energy our cells need to be healthy.

The classic test for hypothyroid is that the waking temperature of the body is below 37C or 98.6F

I think the real myth is that being obese instantly means you’re sick. I know obese people without any prevailing body conditions, as well as thinner people with a lot more problems than me. However, I do agree that having a balanced body and healthy lifestyle is certainly better, hands down.

There may be an element of correlation without causation in the obesity thing. Our culture of high sugar/fat processed foods makes it easy to put on lots of weight and easy to avoid exercise simultaneously. We can all think of examples of very robust and healthy overweight people, but it might be that being overweight coupled with being sedentary is sort of a dangerous mix.

I would like to see people eat more wholesome food and go outside. Whether they lost weight or not, they’d probably be healthier.

And as a doctor nearly a third of whose patients are clinically obese, I’ve felt that people tend to respond more to a suggestion to ‘Lose weight(or gain weight or quit smoking), it’ll make you look more attractive’ than to ‘exercise more and eat healthier, it’ll cut down on your risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes etc’.
The reason may be that while most people have suffered from the social consequences of being over/underweight or of smoking, relatively few of them have experienced heart disease or other lifestyle related ailments.

People are more apt to follow the same advice(eat healthier, exercise more, don’t smoke, don’t drink too much, don’t work too hard, get enough sleep) if they think that it’ll help them be more popular or get laid a month or two down the line than if you tell them that it’ll stop them having a heart attack twenty years from now.