Glutathione

Gluta-what? If you haven’t heard of glutathione you are not alone. But don’t let that make you think it’s not important. Glutathione is a protein your cells produce that is profoundly important to your health and survival. Raising glutathione in your body can mean the difference between living a life of chronic sickness, fatigue and depression versus living a healthy, positive and energetic life.

Elevating your glutathione levels is an excellent way to enable your body to heal itself.

What is glutathione?

Glutathione is a small protein created in our bodies by each cell and is essential for our health and well being.

It is composed of three amino acids: glutamate, cysteine and glycine. Glutathione has three main functions which can be remembered by the word AIDE.

Antioxidant – Glutathione neutralizes harmful oxygen radicals caused by infection, metabolism and exercise. Glutathione also recharges other antioxidants like vitamin A and C. It should come as no surprise that glutathione is known as the Master Antioxidant!

Immune system – Glutathione is key for optimal immune system functioning. Glutathione enables the immune cells (white blood cells or lymphocytes) to multiply, move to sites of infection more efficiently, and deal with intruders effectively. So, if you boost your glutathione levels, you are boosting your immune system.

Detoxification – Glutathione cleans up the toxins we encounter daily from detergents, carpet, paint, exhaust, pesticides, food, heavy metals – you name it. Glutathione conjugates or attaches to these toxins making them readily available for excretion.

Energy – Glutathione provides the body with energy by carrying out the activities of the above AID functions. With the body cleared of harmful oxygen radicals and chemical toxins, and supplied with an abundance of immune cells, you are able to reap the benefits of health in new found energy!

Who can benefit from boosted glutathione levels?

Everyone can benefit from elevated glutathione levels. Young or old, sick or healthy. If your glutathione levels are raised you can expect to experience:

• Improved immune function. This means you will get fewer colds! And If you do get sick, you will recovery more quickly. If you are sick now or have a long standing ailment, glutathione could help your situation. Studies with cancer and AIDS patients have shown significant health improvement when treatment designed to boost glutathione levels was implemented versus those who remained untreated.
• Improved energy. Your energy levels will increase because of the increased capacity of your ‘cleaning’ system. In turn, this will improve athletic endurance by shortening recovery time and improve mental clarity and thinking.
• Improved attitude. When we are well we are less cranky and irritable. Glutathione can help you recover from the aches and pains of life giving you a positive outlook on life.

How do we get glutathione?

We don’t ‘get’ glutathione. We produce it! Glutathione is synthesized in each of our cells. Simply ingesting glutathione will not help as our bodies will break it down before it gets into our cells.

To encourage your body to produce more glutathione you need to give it the proper building blocks.

The building blocks of protein are amino acids.

Three amino acids come together to create glutathione: glutamate-cysteine-glycine. Of the three amino acids, cysteine is the most difficult to get and is the limiting factor in creating glutathione. Cysteine is difficult to obtain because: (1) as a free amino acid it is highly reactive and potentially toxic, (2) most foods have low levels of useable cysteine rich molecules, and (3) cysteine containing foods are heat sensitive and upon cooking are destroyed.

There is a way to supplement cysteine in our diet. The medication N-acetyl cysteine (commonly called NAC) is used in the emergency room and provides the body with high levels of cysteine, which elevates the production of glutathione. In fact, when someone enters the emergency room suffering from an overdose, doctors prescribe NAC to encourage the body to produce large amounts of glutathione. It is your body that detoxifies the overdose! (I love it when the medical world figures out how to enable the body to fight for itself).

Although NAC works effectively, it is harmful and toxic to the body and therefore not a viable every day solution for raising glutathione levels.

So what’s the solution? What can I do to boost glutathione levels?

Our bodies are kind of like house plants: Give them what they want and they will prosper.

So the usual suspects fit here: eat well, exercise, get a good night’s sleep, reduce stress, laugh—you get the idea. But there are a few things you can do to specifically boost your glutathione levels:

1. Avoid or limit stress as much as possible. And by stress I mean anxiety as well as chemical preservatives and toxins that strain our bodies. Learn to be still, calm and relaxed as much as possible to reduce stress. Make changes in your every day life to make it less stressful.

Also, remove the chemicals and toxins our bodies deal with by buying organic unprocessed foods and items for the house (paints, carpets). Wash fruits and vegetables with warm soapy water. Wash your hands — often.

2. Eat more vegetables. By eating more plants and reducing animal products, we can tip our body pH to a healthy and natural alkaline state. We were not designed to eat so many animal products. Just look at the increase in ‘Western’ diseases: obesity, cancer, heart disease, diabetes. Our diet has a profound effect on our health.

The above two methods work by reducing the load on your health. The following methods actually boost glutahione levels!

3. Exercise. By maintaining a regular exercise regime (20-30 min. of cardio 3 days per week) you get a dual benefit: (1) the exercise promotes glutathione production, and (2) the workout improves the removal of toxins from your body (perspiration, fat metabolism, respiration).

4. Undenatured whey powder. Whey is milk protein isolate—the solids left over from milk production.

The benefit of whey is that it contains an abundance of cystine (two cysteine molecules bound together). Most milk products are pasteurized, which means they are heated up to kill off harmful bacteria. Unfortunately, heating up proteins also ‘kills’ them.

We call this process denaturing a protein, as it removes useful bonds and changes its active structure. If whey is pasteurized it is no longer useful in aiding glutathione production.

A patented method has been created to isolate these cystine rich proteins from whey. The method is unique as it does not disrupt the fragile bonds that allow our bodies to absorb the cysteine molecules. Nor does it employ the destructive pasteurization process.

Glutathione is clearly an essential player in health! Enable your health by ensuring that your glutathione is at an optimal level.