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Everything You Need To Know About Glutathione: The Body’s Master Antioxidant!
Glutathione is relatively unknown in the mainstream, but with more and more people conscious of their health since Covid hit, it’s finally getting the attention it deserves.
What is glutathione?
When you break it down, glutathione is actually a protein known as a tripeptide. This is an especially small protein made up of three amino acids – cysteine, glycine and glutamate.
Glutathione is commonly known as the body’s master antioxidant. Antioxidants are essentially the antidote to free radicals, the unstable molecules that come about from oxidation and damage your healthy cells.
Bacteria, viruses, radiation, heavy metal toxicity, certain medications, and even ageing can all cause oxidation and subsequently free radical build up in your body.
When you consider that glutathione is present in nearly all 37 trillion of the cells in your body, it makes sense why it’s viewed as our most important antioxidant.
What does glutathione do?
Most of the glutathione in your body is located in your liver, making it essential for your body’s natural detoxification process. This can help with various issues, including skin conditions like acne, heavy metal poisoning, recovering from illnesses and ridding your body of toxins from alcohol, food, pollution, etc.
As a key antioxidant, it not only donates its electrons to free radicals, neutralising them, but also recycles other essential antioxidants like vitamin C, E, alpha lipoic acid and CoQ10 to ensure you’ve got enough of the good stuff. Protecting your cells’ mitochondria from damage also keeps your energy levels up as the mitochondria is where your body produces energy!
Glutathione as the body’s master antioxidant
Glutathione is an essential antioxidant in the body. If you didn’t know, antioxidants are your body’s natural protectors against free radical damage, which is caused by alcohol, pollution, chemicals and heavy metals, as well as normal physiological processes in your body like metabolism.
These unstable molecules seek to steal an electron from other molecules and ‘neutralise’ them while causing damage to other healthy cells. Glutathione works to counteract this damage by donating an electron to the free radical and suffering in place of your healthy cells!
Glutathione and energy
Energy production occurs within all your cells, inside the cells’ mitochondria, otherwise known as the ‘cell powerhouse’. As a key antioxidant, glutathione protects the mitochondria from free radical damage. Since free radicals slow down energy production and cause the cell to become sluggish, this makes glutathione essential for maintaining good energy levels. What happens when your cells become sluggish? So do you!
Glutathione and detoxification
As humans, we have a built-in natural detoxification system that works on a deep cellular level. Detoxification has three phases, mostly occurring in the liver. Here’s a simple breakdown:
Phase 1: During phase 1, toxins from alcohol, caffeine, dioxin, drugs, radiation, heavy metals, pesticides, and other carcinogens are partially processed in your liver’s mitochondria (where your liver produces energy). These partially processed toxins, aka ‘intermediates’, are even more dangerous free radicals than when they were in their original form, so need to be further processed in phases II and III.
Phase 2: In phase 2, glutathione and other enzymes neutralise and inactivate the toxins in a binding process called conjugation, readying them for elimination.
Phase 3: Once the toxins have been conjugated, they are ready to be eliminated from your body, mainly via your kidneys and liver.
What are the best ways to increase glutathione in the body?
In my view, not glutathione supplements! There is some scientific evidence to suggest that taking glutathione supplements, at least in the long term, may prohibit your livers ability to produce it endogenously. So I always recommend eating and supplementing your way towards healthy glutathione levels.
Recently, we produced a new supplement called NAC (N-acetyl cysteine). NAC (N-acetylcysteine) supplements increase glutathione levels by serving as a precursor to cysteine, a key building block of glutathione. When NAC is ingested, it’s absorbed in the digestive tract and converted into cysteine in the liver, which is then used to produce glutathione. This process effectively boosts the body’s glutathione levels, which are crucial for antioxidant defense and detoxification.
Selenium enhances glutathione levels primarily by acting as a cofactor for glutathione peroxidase (GPx), a crucial enzyme in the glutathione system. GPx plays a vital role in scavenging free radicals and reducing oxidative stress, and selenium is essential for its proper function. Additionally, selenium can influence the activity of other related enzymes and may indirectly affect glutathione synthesis.
Vitamin C supports glutathione levels by acting as an antioxidant that protects against free radicals, potentially sparing glutathione from oxidative stress and promoting its regeneration. Additionally, Vitamin C helps recycle glutathione back to its active, reduced form after it has been oxidized.
Milk thistle, through its active compound silymarin, increases glutathione levels by enhancing the availability of cysteine, a key amino acid for glutathione synthesis, and by protecting liver cells from damage, thus maintaining glutathione levels. Silymarin also supports the liver’s antioxidant defenses and inhibits free radical production, further contributing to glutathione’s protective role.
Magnesium contributes to increased glutathione levels primarily through its role in enzyme activation and the gamma-glutamyl cycle, which is crucial for glutathione synthesis. Magnesium is a cofactor for gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase (GGT), an enzyme involved in glutathione synthesis. Additionally, magnesium enhances the activity of glutathione peroxidase (GPx), an enzyme that helps glutathione neutralize free radicals.
What about foods that help increase glutathione?
Grass-fed beef, and organ meats like beef liver, are excellent sources of glutathione and its precursors.
Poultry: Pasture-raised chickens also provide glutathione and essential amino acids for its production.
Fish: Wild fish like salmon and rainbow trout, as well as other fish sources, are rich in selenium and sulfur-containing amino acids.
Eggs: Eggs contain selenium, which is a cofactor for glutathione production.
Cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower, as well as garlic, onions, and eggs all help to increase glutathione.
One last point…
Autistic children often exhibit lower levels of important transsulfuration metabolites, including taurine, sulfate, and cysteine. Enhancing the levels of glutathione and other metabolites in the trans-sulfuration pathway could have potential benefits for children with autism.
