I believe one reason iodine supplements and tinctures are formulated with both iodine (I2) and potassium iodide (KI) is because iodine is normally only slightly soluble in water, but the addition of KI to the water allows much more iodine to dissolve.
The iodine reacts with iodide to form the triiodide ion. So almost all of the iodine in Lugols is in the form of iodide or triiodide. There is very little elemental iodine.
Hip said that most of Lugol's hits the bloodstream as iodIDE, because most of the iodine is converted in the stomach to iodide.
My own experience doesn't necessarily bear this out, because my skin responded a lot more dramatically when I deliberately added asc acid to half of my day's dose, intentionally creating iodIDE, which means it got a greater amount of iodide from, well, giving it 100% iodide as half my daily dose, instead of the iodine/iodide mix in Lugol's.
Iodine forms in food/supplements are indeed converted into iodide and taken up in that form into cells - ie the known transporters carry iodide, not other forms.
It is possible there might be some other transport mechanisms and a couple of in vitro studies do suggest this, but at this stage, if they do exist, we don't know what they are.
An alternative explanation for your experience is that by converting all of your Lugols dose into iodide you were simply ingesting a higher dose, which your skin noticed. In other words, your gut is not converting the non-iodide part of Lugols into iodide efficiently and so you are getting a lower dose than you think.
The breasts need iodine. There are other tissues that also prefer iodine.
As I said in this post, the evidence for this is extremely thin.
I'm still researching which tissues prefer which form, but will be posting it in my iodine thread, not here.
I would be very interested to read some serious studies to support this notion, not just the numerous internet sites which dogmatically repeat the same information over and over again with no shred of supporting evidence. I'll look forward to your post.
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