Is iodine deficiency rearing its ugly head again?

Fatigue? Muscle weakness? Weight gain? Dry skin? Kosher salt for cooking and no added table salt? That might be related--and the implications for kids are more worrisome.

Dry skin, weight gain, muscle weakness and fatigue can be related to dozens of issues, but one we don’t usually think a lot about is iodine deficiency. Those relatively innocuous symptoms in adults are one thing, but kids brains are far more fragile—the original reason iodine was added to table salt. Autism and other childhood diseases not seen in the recent past have researchers worrying that, like polio, we’ve forgotten big lessons of the past.

Read the article here. Researchers are increasingly reporting low levels of iodine in pregnant women, raising concerns about the impact on newborns, including delayed development and possible impaired cognitive function. There are also a small, but growing, number of reports of iodine deficiency in kids.

We’ve changed our food habits substantially since iodine it was first added to salt a hundred years ago to prevent severe iodine deficiencies, particularly in pregnancy and infancy.

Since then, we’ve greatly increased our intake of processed food, which has lots of salt, but it’s not iodized. On the other side of the equation, doctors have urged limiting additional table salt for good health reasons. Additives in food continues to be a problem covered frequently in the media, and many of us depend on kosher salt for cooking, and Himalayan rock salt or other non-iodized products are being used more, replacing everyday iodized salt in cooking and table use.

While most salt brands added iodine to table salt by the 1950s. But some leading brands have stopped adding iodine since then. Just between the 1970s and 1990s, the result was a reported 50% drop in U.S. iodine levels in surveyed Americans.