[Excerpt]
Iodine has always been an important part of our diet. However, in North America we only began to appreciate its importance in the early 1900s. Landlocked areas in the US and southern Canada, from the Rockies to New York, experienced an epidemic of goiter. Goiter is the swelling of the thyroid which allows it to absorb as much iodine from the blood as possible. Areas close to the sea has iodine rich water, air, soil and food. The Goiter Belt, most of which is well inland, has very little iodine in the environment.
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