Goiter? Do you eat millet?

Goiter? Do you eat millet?

Over the past five years or so, another natural source of goiter has been identified: flavonoids--plant pigments providing most of the red, yellow and blue coloring in flowers and fruits. New data from Robert Cooksey and his colleagues at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson, Miss., the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the National Research Council of Canada in Saskatoon, show that flavonoids in the hulls of millet, when broken down by bacteria in the gut, can be transformed into resorcinol; a functionally similar variant known as "substituted' resorcinol; dihydroxy benzoic acids; and yet another potent thyroid-function inhibitor, ferulic acid. This may explain, at least in part, the previously puzzling correlation between millet consumption and goiter incidence in many developing countries, Cooksey notes.

But flavonoids may not be the whole story. The researchers have found another antithyroid compound in millet, thiocyanate, which when consumed with the flavonoid has an additional inhibitory effect on thyroid function. Most perplexing, they found that when millet is cooked and then stored for a week--a practice common in many cultures--its antithyroid activity increases six-fold.