Egg Whites, TPO Antibodies, and Raynaud's
In 2017, before I started the Autoimmune Protocol (AIP), my TPO antibodies were 450, I had horrible decades-long Hashimoto’s symptoms, and I was developing arthritis in my hands. I made a difficult but necessary decision to start AIP. Within months, my symptoms disappeared. My antibodies dropped to an all-time low of 27 last June.
It’s amazing how dumbfounded practitioners are when they see these changes. They just don’t want to believe that diet can have such a profound effect. Just like the elimination of foods has a dramatic effect of symptoms and lab markers, so too can the addition or re-introduction of foods.
With AIP, you are supposed to slowly add foods back in and “test” your reactivity. I have been VERY slow to add foods over the past five years. I successfully reintroduced green beans, snap peas, egg yolks, cacao and white rice without any reaction (i.e. no symptoms and no worsening of labs including TSH and TPO antibodies). I have had a few unsuccessful attempts (e.g yogurt) and there are some foods that are permanent deletions - never to be added back in (e.g. gluten).
Then, in December of 2022, I decided to try egg whites (oh, how I longed for a real omelet!). I was thrilled when I had no reaction whatsoever. For an entire month, I made a daily omelet for myself and felt so liberated!
In addition to Hashimoto's, I have Raynaud's which is a vascular phenomenon that causes numbness and then pain in the toes and fingers along with change in color- sometimes purple and sometimes white (see picture of my hand during an attack). In college, I had these attacks frequently, and they seemed to worsen with age. But, for years after starting AIP, Raynaud’s seemed a thing of the past. I could even go into my deep freezer without any issues! We recently moved from FL into the mountains of NC and I began having more Raynaud's attacks with the colder climate. At first, I thought that it was just the colder climate, but I started to worry that the colder weather, the reintroduction of egg whites and the increase in my Raynaud’s attacks all coincided and wondered if the eggs could be making the Raynaud's worse. So, I asked my doc to check my numbers since it had been 4 months since my labs. I wanted to make sure I was not triggering any autoimmune symptoms at the cellular level even though I felt great. Sure enough, I just got my results and my TPO went from the all-time low of 27 in August to 230 this month. The only food I added back in since August was egg whites. It is just so frustrating because I had no reactions at all. I have had plenty of reactions to other foods over the years and could tell I was reacting and stopped. And, the proof is in the symptoms— or more accurately, the disappearance of symptoms. Just one week after getting my labs and immediately ceasing to eat egg whites, I reached into the deep freezer and had no Ray’s attack. I went outside in the snow and 25 degree weather — no Ray’s attack. Just a week prior, I was having attacks daily. I am very in tune with my body, but even I would have been tricked into thinking egg whites were not harming me had I not insisted on drawing labs. My advice if you have any autoimmune disease or other chronic condition is to get labs drawn frequently like I do (at least quarterly) because sometimes we are doing damage and cannot tell unless we check blood markers.
I will miss my yummy omelets, but as I have learned over the past five years, we need to eat to live- not the other way around.