Steven:

If you're listening to Dr. Oz for diet advice, you're going to be sold a lot of useless supplements and straight-up quackery.  Consider: if he could actually cure obesity, his audience wouldn't need him anymore!  It's much more profitable to lead them in circles, always chasing the next "miracle food" or diet plan.  There's a reason Oprah is still fat.

However, in this case there may be a grain of truth.  DT linked Paul Jaminet's excellent post on the issue (thanks, DT).  However, it is the case that quite a few people have perfectly reasonable thyroid function on VLC diets, so it stands to reason that capabilities differ in that area.  And though I don't want to open the door to a discussion of the people involved, it is absolutely true that cold exposure dramatically increases T3 levels.  So does exercise up to the anaerobic threshold.  There's more than one way to skin that particular cat besides "eat more sugar or you're going to die".

JS

Steven:

If your energy levels are good and you have no obvious symptoms of hypothyroidism, I wouldn't worry about it.  When you want to start thinking about potential thyroid issues is if you're feeling listless and low on energy despite a reasonable caloric intake, good sleep, good nutrition, etc.  

Remember, no one in the nutrition business, whether Dr. Oz or paleo, makes a profit off of anyone who is healthy and doesn't need anything but food.  First you have to convince people there's something wrong with them...then you can sell them a solution, even if the problem doesn't exist.

JS

scott:

While I believe Dr. Davis overstates certain parts of the anti-wheat case, I agree that it's not a food anyone should eat.  There are no upsides to wheat consumption, and a raft of downsides -- the severity of which will depend on your genetic background.  I'm glad you're seeing success!

I have no special sets of letters after my name, if that's what you mean by "qualifications".  However, I've spoken at the last two Ancestral Health Symposia (here's a video of my talk at Harvard), so the academic community apparently finds my work credible and valuable.  Note that, unlike many online gurus (including many academics), I both link and quote my references, so that you can verify for yourself that I'm properly representing the science. 

Meanwhile, it might surprise you that having an MD doesn't mean you've received any nutritional training at all!  In fact, the average MD receives just 23 hours of nutrition training before receiving their degree (Adams 2005), with most receiving less -- and what they get is of extremely low quality.  (Example, from an actual MD.)  I guarantee Dr. Davis didn't write Wheat Belly based on classes he took in school!

It's also instructive to remember that the paleo movement hasn't been around long enough to have a formal academic or training path.  (There's no degree in "paleo".)  Everyone writing about Paleo and Primal, from Eaton and Cordain to Wolf, Sisson, Jaminet, Kresser, and the Hartwigs, to myself, has had to do their own research, on their own time.  In my case, this involved years of reading very dry academic papers and attempting to put them together into some sort of logical and rational framework.  I have over a dozen browser tabs open to Pubmed and academic journals at this very moment, with titles like "Subjects with early-onset type 2 diabetes show defective activation of the skeletal muscle PGC-1{alpha}/Mitofusin-2 regulatory pathway in response to physical activity."

In short, my qualifications are that I've spent the years of time and research required to understand the subject and communicate it to others.  The quality of my work speaks for itself.

JS