Goiter? Do you eat millet?Goiter aberrant goiter goiter of a supernumerary thyroid gland. adenomatous goiter that caused by adenoma or multiple colloid nodules of the thyroid gland. Basedow's goiter a colloid goiter which has become hyperfunctioning after administration of iodine. ? Do you eat millet millet, common name for several species of grasses cultivated mainly for cereals in the Eastern Hemisphere and for forage and hay in North America. The principal varieties are the foxtail, pearl, and barnyard millets and the proso millet, called also broomcorn millet and hog millet. Much millet is grown in China, India, Manchuria, the USSR, and Africa. Foxtail millet (Setaria italica) comprises 90% of the millets grown in the United States.? Over the past five years or so, another natural source of goiter has been identified: flavonoids flavonoid /fla·vo·noid/ (fla´vah-noid) any of a group of compounds containing a characteristic aromatic nucleus and widely distributed in higher plants, often as a pigment; a subgroup with biological activity in mammals is the bioflavonoids. fla·vo·noid --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 res·or·cin (-s  n)n. ; a functionally similar variant known as "substituted' resorcinol; dihydroxy dihydroxy /di·hy·droxy/ (di?hi-drok´se) a molecule containing two molecules of the hydroxy (OH) radical; used also as a prefix (hydroxy-) to denote such a compound. benzoic acids benzoic acid /ben·zo·ic ac·id/ (ben-zo´ik) a fungistatic compound used as a pharmaceutical and food preservative and, with salicylic acid, as a topical antifungal agent. A white crystalline compound used primarily as an antiseptic in skin diseases such as psoriasis or eczema, but also used in the treatment of nausea, asthma, whooping cough, and diarrhea. ben·zo·ic acid (b; 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 antithyroid /an·ti·thy·roid/ (-thi´roid) counteracting thyroid functioning, especially in its synthesis of thyroid hormones. compound in millet, thiocyanate thiocyanate /thio·cy·a·nate/ (-si´ah-nat) a salt analogous in composition to a cyanate, but containing sulfur instead of oxygen., 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. |
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