That supplement is very good for any people and also very common for athletes and bodybuilders specially for liver protect. Glutathione is the strongest anti-oxidant and it is packaged as 600mg of glutathione powder and an ampoule of 4ml sterile water Glutathione (GSH) is a small protein substance inside every cell in your body and it is vital to life. Without GSH your cells would disintegrate from uncontrolled oxidation regardless of how much or what type of anti-oxidants you were consuming. Without glutathione, your body would have little resistance to disease. Viruses, bacteria and cancer would rule the day.
GSH prevents your liver from choking with toxic overload. Yes, glutathione does all this…it is the body’s “master anti-oxidant”, it feeds your white blood cells, including lymphocytes, T-cells and leucocytes and it is your cell’s transport mechanism for ridding the body of toxic material, oxidation breakdown products and damage from pollution. Without glutathione, all the anti-oxidants that you take are unable to work.
When vitamin C or E or lycopene or other anti-oxidants reduce a free radical, that free radical gets handed off to glutathione for transport out of the cell. The same occurs when ultra-violet light, car exhaust, radiation, or lawn chemicals damage a cell; the damage is removed by GSH. A patient, admitted to an ER with an overdose of certain drugs, such as acetaminophen, is given an injection of n-acetyl-cysteine, which serves to rapidly but temporarily boost the glutathione level of the ill patient and remove the offending drug toxins from his system. Your body’s ability to recognize and deal with foreign invaders, such as bacteria and viruses as well as cancer cells, depends to a very large degree on the level of glutathione available to your immune system. The greater the supply of GSH, the higher the immune response and the healthier a person can stay.
Many clinical studies have shown that GSH may address some of the major health issues of today: diabetes, heart disease, strokes, asthma, hepatitis, AIDS, and the diseases of aging such as Alzheimer’s and arthritis. The Lancet in 1994 (344: 796-798) showed that low glutathione levels were associated with neuro-degenerative diseases such as MS (multiple sclerosis), ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and others. People who are physically active require increased GSH.
A study of the Canadian cycling team showed that the average athlete had a blood GSH level depressed by as much as 40%. Interestingly, by elevating their GSH levels, these athletes reported improved performance by 1-3%. A 1% performance enhancement does not seem like much; however, at the Olympic level, it is the difference between finishing first and placing sixth. High performance athletes also discover that optimal GSH levels gives them greater strength, and endurance, decreased recovery time from injuries, less muscle pain, less fatigue and a ‘fitter’ feeling. (Journal of Applied Physiology 87: 1381-1385, 1999) The Journal of Clinical Epidemiology (47: 1021-26, 1994) stated that glutathione levels diminish with aging and many diseases associated with aging may, in fact, be merely glutathione deficiency diseases.
Laboratory tests with mice showed that those with enhanced GSH blood levels lived 30% longer than other so-called ‘normal mice’. That is the human equivalent of living 100-120 years; an age that many of us in the natural health field have been saying for decades that human life expectancy should be.
Elevating your GSH levels seems to be the key to keeping your youth. It seems like a panacea. The list of diseases proven to be helped by elevating your glutathione levels is legion. No wonder so much research has been done on this one intracellular protein. Panaceas are the ‘bete-noir’ of medicine, but here we seem to have one. Although, not really. It is just that GSH it so critical to cells that with low levels they cannot function properly in any of the 3 life-sustaining areas: detoxification, anti-oxidation, and foreign substance invasion. The list of diseases resulting when one or all of these functions misfires can number into the 100’s.
In the first part of this article on the subject of glutathione (GSH), we looked at the importance of this compound in maintaining a healthy and strong immune system. This is especially so as one ages because the GSH levels of youth wane after mid-life. Many of the diseases of aging have been attributed to a lowering of cellular glutathione. Factors that cause diminishment of one’s GSH are the usual gang of suspects plus some interesting ones that may surprise you: alcohol, smoke, radiation from all sources including sunlight, chemical exposure such as lawn chemicals, automotive fuels and oils, infections, emotional and physical stress, and mostly all drugs but especially acetaminophen (Tylenol).
The question then becomes: how can I raise my glutathione level or at least ensure that it stays high enough to remain healthy? The first thing I’d like to clear up is that supplementing with oral glutathione won’t work. The glutathione in your cells needs to be made by your cells. Taking GSH orally, like a vitamin, is a waste of money. Your digestive system will break it down and little good will come of that effort. GSH precursors, such as cysteine, methionine and glutamine will raise the GSH levels to a minor degree; however, all have side effects and are not well tolerated by most people. Milk thistle, melatonin and lipoic acid can be helpful as well but the bio-response and degrees of bioavailability can vary widely and investigations are on-going. Whey proteins seem to be the best method of obtaining the building blocks of glutathione. You see, breast-fed infants have high GSH levels and for the most part enjoy better health until about the age of 15 until their GSH level off to that of non-breast-fed infants. The whey content of raw milk contains several albuminous proteins that supply potent GSH precursors. However the heat of Pasteurization and the extreme agitation of homogenization easily denature these proteins. This denaturing process renders their GSH enhancing abilities next to useless. You need to be very careful of the source of your whey protein if GSH is what you are concerned with. These glutathione-building protein factors are extremely sensitive to denaturing by heat and agitation. To maintain bioactivity of glutathione precursors, whey proteins must be extracted from milk under exacting, almost laboratory conditions, and then concentrated. Most whey products vary from 20-90% in their protein content. Much of the research into whey proteins and their stellar glutathione enhancing ability came from McGill University in Canada resulting from an accidental discovery while studying protein supplementation in the 1980’s.
Over the last 20 years, much research has been done to prove its value to human glutathione enhancement. An interesting product has resulted from all this research and is known commercially as Immunocal or in Canada as HMS90. This product has unquestionably proven to be highly bioavailable and effective in raising GSH levels both in the blood and intracellular. The combined research has resulted in a total of 9 right-of-use patents being granted in Canada, the USA and Australia. A right-of-use patent is a difficult and valuable piece of paper. It is evidence that a product has scientifically proven to government regulatory bodies to perform exactly and safely what it claims to do. It proves that the product has specific clinical applications for the treatment of specific disease processes. The diseases covered by these patents are primarily its bioactivity, its bioavailablity, and its application in the treatment and prevention of some cancers and of AIDS. I was surprised when I took the time to read one of these right-of-use patents and found that it actually addressed the preventive applications of cancer using Immunocal. This may be a first for a nutritional supplement. A group of these scientists went on to find many momento
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