Saturday, March 19, 2011

Potassium Iodide Not Necessary for People Who Eat Japanese Diet

Some people have expressed concerns over the lack of Potassium Iodide available at stores in Japan. Potassium Iodide is used to protect the thyroid gland from the effects of radiation exposure.


First off, in Japan, most druggist do not carry Potassium Iodide as one needs a prescription to buy it. Secondly, the average Japanese gets more than sufficient amounts of iodine in their regular foods that it is not necessary at all to supplement it.


Dr. Donald Miller reports about Potassium Iodide and the Japanese diet on Lew Rockwell:


Taken in a sufficient amount, natural iodine can block uptake of radioactive I-131 in fallout and prevent thyroid cancer. The U.S. government’s Department of Health and Human Services has approved potassium iodide (KI), in a dose of 130 milligrams (mg), as a thyroid blocking agent in radiation emergencies.
Consuming an average of 240 micrograms (mcg) of iodine a day, most Americans have an insufficient amount of iodine stored in their bodies. The conventional view is that the body contains 25–50 mg of iodine, and 70–80 percent of that amount resides in the thyroid gland. But as doctors in "The Iodine Project" have shown (see HERE), whole body sufficiency of iodine is 30 times greater than that – 1,500 mg – with only 3 percent of that amount residing in the thyroid gland. A person needs to take 50 mg of iodine a day for 3 months, or 12.5 mg a day for 1 year, and continue that dose, in order to achieve whole body sufficiency of iodine. Once achieved, people who take 12.5 mg or more of iodine a day are already well protected against radioactive iodine in fallout. The thyroid glands in such people will retain less than 2 percent of absorbed I-131, similar to that after consuming a 130 mg KI tablet (in the appropriate time window).


Fortunately, this is the case with the Japanese. People in Japan eat a lot of seaweed, which protects them against the deleterious effects of I-131 in radioactive fallout from the meltdown of their Fukushima Dalichi nuclear plants. Compared to terrestrial plants, which contain only trace amounts of iodine (0.001 mg/gm), the seaweed that the Japanese consume – brown algai (kelp), red algae (nori sheets, with sushi), and green algae (chlorella) – have a high concentration of this nutrient (0.5–8.0 mg/gm). According to public health officials there, people in Japan consume 14.5 gm of seaweed a day. They don’t need to take potassium iodide tablets for fallout. They consume enough iodine in the seaweed they eat.

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