Brazil nuts. One of my favourite nuts by far, perhaps even my most favourite, and here are my reasons why. Brazil nuts are packed with a mineral which we call selenium, and it's one of those minerals that perhaps doesn't get spoken about enough. Selenium should be packed in our soil so that when plants grow, they drag the selenium up into the plant and then we eat them and we get the mineral selenium in abundance. However, unfortunately, our soils are becoming depleted in selenium. If you look online at images of countries looking at the selenium content of soil, you'll see that it's gradually dropping more and more and more because think of what's going into our soils, the pesticides, the herbicides, etc, which is sadly depleting our soil of these amazing nutrients. Now, selenium is crucial for so many different reasons, but I'm going to give you some of the really crucial reasons today. One of the main functions of selenium is to support the health of the thyroid gland. That's the gland that sits just here at the front of the neck. This gland is a sort of butterfly-shaped gland like this, and it has a really important role to fulfil in the body because what it has to do is it has to regulate the metabolism of every single cell in the body. What I mean by metabolism is the chemical reactions occurring in those cells. If the thyroid gland is sluggish and not working very well, every single cell will also be sluggish and so that person can feel tired and lethargic and maybe low in mood, everything just sort of slows down in that person. And selenium is crucial when it comes to the creation of these thyroid hormones. In fact, there is one thyroid hormone in particular that it's really, really related to and that's a hormone called T3. Now, there are two main thyroid hormones, T4 and T3. T3 is the more active one. That's the one that we're really interested in because if we don't have enough T3, we're not going to be feeling overly well. So selenium is needed to make T3 and if it's absent, that conversion into T3 doesn't happen very well and the person can have quite an underactive thyroid picture. So selenium, given that our soils are so depleted in it and our plant foods are generally now less abundant in it, we've got to make sure that we're getting enough through our diet overall and that's where brazil nuts come in because brazil nuts are packed with selenium. In fact, one brazil nut has more than the daily recommended nutrient intake of selenium. So if we have one brazil nut a day, we're having more than we're recommended to have overall. So think about that, very easy to introduce into your diet. You can simply add that into your morning porridge, maybe crush some of that up or chop that up or even just have brazil nuts on their own. They taste lovely, they're packed with nutrients, especially selenium and therefore it's something that we should all be trying to eat if we can. Selenium has some other really important benefits, one of which is your immune system. Selenium helps to really up-regulate and boost the immune system so that we're better equipped to fighting infections. So if we really need a bit of a boost in our immune system, if we keep getting unwell and we're struggling to overcome an illness, then brazil nuts might be a really good way of trying to bring that extra boost of selenium in there. Selenium is also very important for the liver. There is a really important antioxidant in the liver that relies on selenium and if we don't have enough of it, then the liver's not going to be quite as capable at breaking down those toxins for us. So think about it, very easy to introduce one or two brazil nuts a day and that should be your selenium intake pretty much sorted, but remember, we want to be encouraging a range of fruits and vegetables, lots of plant foods because then we can get lots of different sources of selenium into our diets. Thanks for watching this video. I'd like to offer you a free online class. To access this, please click the link below in the description section.