If you haven’t heard of glutathione you aren’t alone. But do not let this make you think that it’s not important. Glutathione is a protein that your cells produce that’s profoundly important to your health and survival. Raising glutathione inside your body can mean the difference between living a life of chronic illness, fatigue and depression versus living a healthy, optimistic and energetic lifestyle.
Glutathione levels
Elevating your glutathione levels is an fantastic way to enable your body to cure itself. Glutathione is a small protein generated in our bodies by every cell and is crucial for our health and wellbeing. It’s made up of three amino acids: glutamate, cysteine and glycine. Glutathione has three primary functions that may be remembered by the term AIDE.
- Antioxidant – Glutathione neutralizes harmful oxygen radicals brought on by infection, exercise and metabolism. Glutathione also recharges other antioxidants such as vitamin C and A. It should come as no surprise that glutathione is referred to as the Master Antioxidant!
- Immune system – Glutathione is crucial for optimal immune system functioning. Glutathione empowers the immune cells (white blood cells or lymphocytes) to multiply, move to sites of disease better, and deal with fleas efficiently. So, if you boost your glutathione levels, you’re boosting your immune system.
- Detoxification – Glutathione cleans up the toxins we encounter daily from materials, carpet, paint, exhaust, pesticides, food, heavy metals – you name it. Glutathione conjugates or attaches to those toxins making them easily available for excretion.
- Energy – Glutathione provides the body with energy by carrying out the activities of the above mentioned AID functions. With the body rid of damaging oxygen radicals and chemical toxins, and provided with plenty of immune cells, you have the ability to reap the benefits of health in new energy!
Take note
Who will benefit from boosted glutathione levels? Everyone can benefit from elevated glutathione levels. Young or old, healthy or sick.
- Improved immune function. You’ll get fewer colds. Should you get sick you’ll recovery more quickly. If you’re sick today or have a long standing ailment, glutathione can help your situation. Studies with cancer and AIDs patients show significant health improvement when therapy designed to boost glutathione levels was implemented versus those who remained untreated.
- Improved energy. Your energy levels will increase due to the higher capacity of your’cleansing’ system. Consequently, this will improve athletic endurance by shortening recovery time and enhance mental clarity and believing.
- Improved attitude. When we are well we’re less cranky and irritable. Glutathione can help you recover from the aches and pains of life providing you with a positive outlook on life. How can we get glutathione? We do not’get’ glutathione.
We produce it!
Glutathione is synthesized in all our cells. Simply ingesting glutathione won’t help as our bodies will break it down before it gets into our cells. To encourage your body to produce more glutathione you will need to give it the correct building blocks. The building blocks of protein are amino acids. Three amino acids come together to make glutathione: glutamate-cysteine-glycine. Of the 3 amino acids, cysteine is the toughest to get and is the limiting factor in generating glutathione.
Cysteine is hard to obtain because:
- as a free amino acid it’s highly reactive and potentially toxic.
- many foods have low levels of usable cysteine rich molecules (such as cystine — two linked cysteine amino acids; cystine is more readily absorbed than cysteine)
- cystine containing foods are heat sensitive and upon ingestion are ruined.
There’s a way to supplement cysteine in our daily diet. The drug N-acetyl cysteine (commonly referred to as NAC) can be used in the emergency area and supplies the body with high levels of cysteine, which elevates the production of glutathione. In actuality, whenever someone enters the emergency room suffering from an overdose, physicians prescribe NAC to encourage the body to produce considerable amounts of glutathione. It’s your body which detoxifies the overdose! Although this works effectively, it’s damaging and toxic to the human body and for that reason NAC isn’t a viable daily solution.
What is the solution?
What can I do to boost glutathione levels? Our bodies are sort of like plants: Give them what they need and they’ll prosper. You get the idea. 1. Avoid or limit stress as far as possible. And by stress I mean stress in addition to chemical preservatives and toxins that strain our bodies. Learn to be still, relaxed and calm as far as possible to decrease stress. Make changes in your everyday life to make it less stressful. Also, remove the toxins and chemicals that our bodies cope with by purchasing organic unprocessed foods and things for the home (paints, carpets).
- Wash fruits and vegetables with warm soapy water. Wash your hands — frequently.
- Eat more vegetables. By eating plants and reducing animal products, we can trick our body pH into a healthy and natural alkaline state. We weren’t designed to consume so many animal products. Just examine the rise in ‘Western’ diseases: cancer, obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes. Our diet has a profound impact on the health. The above two approaches work by decreasing the load on your wellbeing. A definite plus. The below methods actually boost glutahione levels!
- Exercise. By maintaining a regular exercise regime (20-30 min.
- Undenatured whey powder. Whey is milk protein isolate–the solids left over from milk production. The benefit of whey is that it comprises plenty of cystine (recall two cysteine molecules bound together?) containing proteins. Most milk products are pasteurized, so they’re warmed up to kill off harmful bacteria. Unfortunately, heating proteins also ‘kills’ them. We call this procedure denaturing a protein, as it eliminates useful bonds such as the cystine disulfide bond. If whey is pasteurized it’s no longer helpful in aiding glutathione production. A patented method was made to isolate those cystine rich proteins from whey. The technique is unique as it doesn’t disrupt the fragile bonds that allow our bodies to absorb the cysteine molecules. Nor does it use the harmful pasteurization procedure.
