Your Body Makes Its Own Master Antioxidant — Here's Why It Stops.

0:00Push your limits, train with precision, see the results. At Equinox, that's high-performance loving. Everything you need to lock in and unlock your potential at Equinox. Start today at equinox.com.

0:15Ultra running shoes are all about space. The space to go further, to feel better, to do something you never thought possible. And this space starts with Ultra Fit. Unlike traditional running shoes, UltraFit gives toes more room to move naturally, so every step is strong, balanced, and comfortable. Whatever you're lacing up for, stay out there with Ultra. Shop now at ultrarunning.com. That's A-L-T-R-A running dot com. Your vehicle doesn't just get you from here to there. It's a bridge to the people and places that matter most. It's how you show up for your family, your community, and everyone else that depends on you.

0:59That's why for 125 years, Firestone has been building tires with one thing in mind, to deliver products that are as reliable as you are. Firestone, always dependable since 1900. Most people are trying to raise glutathione backwards. They're buying expensive IVs. They're taking anacetylcysteine. they're swallowing glutathione capsules. But the real question isn't how much glutathione you can put into your body. It's whether your cells can make it and recycle it. And in one small trial at Baylor University, older adults had dramatically less glutathione than younger adults and several times more oxidative damage.

1:42Then researchers gave them two inexpensive amino acids for 16 weeks. The glutathione came back completely. So did their mitochondrial function, so did their walking speed, their insulin sensitivity, and all of the participants felt younger and looked younger. So today, I'm going to walk you through five things. What glutathione actually does, the five places you're going to feel it the most, how to know if yours is actually low or in optimal ranges, and which supplements and foods actually rebuild it. along with my four-step plan for raising it without wasting money. And stay with me because one of the most useful markers is probably already sitting in your latest blood test, and most people never look at it.

2:31Welcome to The Dr. Axe Show.

2:45I am super excited to announce that Heal Yourselves is now officially live. This isn't a trendy health book. It's a resource you'll come back to for years. And I truly believe the future of healthcare is cellular health. And this book is where you learn how to build and maintain that foundation. If you've watched this show for a while and my content has helped you in any way, I'd really appreciate your support on this book launch. You can grab your copy today at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you get your books. You'll also get hundreds of dollars in free bonus material when you enter your email at healyourselves.com.

3:22Again, that's healyourselves.com. Thank you so much for your support. I'm so grateful for you. If you're dealing with toxin overload, autoimmune disease, fatigue, hormone imbalance, or aging more quickly than you want to, then you might be missing the number one supplement that can actually improve your health. It's a lesser known compound that has incredible benefits for your body. That compound is a tripeptide called glutathione. Now, here's why glutathione is so important. It helps reverse your cellular age. It literally makes you younger. Here's how it works. Think about this. If you take the bite out of an apple and set it onto the counter, what happens within minutes?

4:08The flesh starts turning brown. That's oxidation, the same chemistry that rust metal. And that exact same process is running inside your cells right now. It's called oxidative stress. and it's one of the number one hallmarks of aging. And it's one of the primary reasons why your body ages and why you start to feel joint pain, your metabolic health slows down, and you start to age more quickly. And your number one protection against that is the antioxidant called glutathione. Glutathione is your master antioxidant, and you want to think of it as the skin of an apple, right? The skin of an apple protects the apple flesh because it is so rich in antioxidants.

4:55And it is like a living antioxidant coat covering the apple. Well, think about glutathione the same way. It is an antioxidant coating and protective mechanism that protects every cell in your body from browning and aging. You know, I want to share with you a patient I had a few years ago and how they experienced an incredible breakthrough. through because we started using a product called Glynac or a form of glutathione. This is a patient that was struggling with really extreme rosacea to where, you know, almost cysts all over her face. And really it was to the point where she didn't want to go out in public because the rosacea was so bad all the time.

5:33And after years of flare up, she literally tried everything topical. She tried antibiotics, elimination diets, and nothing helped. Here's what we started doing though. I started saying, you know what? I think there's a bigger issue going on in your environment. We did blood work and I found this marker. GGT was in normal range according to one of her doctors, but it wasn't optimal. And so we started supplementing with glutathione. And here's what's amazing. Is it cleared up by about 98 % in eight weeks? And I knew in order for it to heal, we would have to focus on the root cause. So we stopped chasing the skin, started supporting glutathione in the precursors, and also changed up her diet.

6:15Had her start doing some more glutathione-boosting foods, along with taking a Glynax supplement, and the rosacea reversed almost completely. She said about 98 % improvement. And here's the way you want to think about it. Her skin was like a smoke alarm. And listen to this study. This is pretty impressive. This was taking a supplement called N-acetylcysteine known as NAC. This is the precursor to glutathione, which we'll get into. But this was a human study done on 12 individuals, and they used a N-acetylcysteine-based compound, and 90 % of rosacea patients improved, 70 % had less redness, and inflammatory lesions fell by about 43 % in just four weeks.

6:58This is four weeks only. 90 % of them saw results. And that's because oftentimes glutathione with certain conditions can reduce inflammation because it's the number one thing that reduces oxidative stress. And one of the biggest things that causes inflammation is this oxidative stress on the body. So when you can protect your cells with glutathione, like that apple peel, imagine that protecting all of your cells and body that can put out the inflammation or quench the fire. And here's what glutathione is and surprises a lot of people. It is a peptide, right? Peptides are all the rage today. People are talking about peptides.

7:35There's a lot of peptides out there that we've been using for years that are incredibly effective. Of course, you're familiar with collagen peptides. Or what about insulin? Or what about creatine? These are all forms of peptides. Well, glutathione is known as a tripeptide. It's made up of three amino acids, glutamate, cysteine, and glycine. And the latter two, your body typically needs in larger amounts in order to create glutathione. So cysteine is typically the most important one, followed by glycine. Now, again, most of us have plenty of glutamate. You don't need to worry about that. But cysteine basically is what allows your body to get through that bottleneck, and it carries the sulfur that does the actual work of putting glutathione together.

8:19And then glycine, which almost nobody talks about, turns out to matter way more than we thought the more we're digging into the clinical science and understanding glutathione. And what makes glutathione so unique and powerful is that most antioxidants you get in your body are single use, right? So there's some sort of oxidative stress. Your body eats up that antioxidant and it's gone. Or it oxidizes and then it passes out of the body. Glutathione, what's so unique about it is it can be used multiple times. It basically gets used up and then recycled over and over again. And it neutralizes the damage, and then it gets converted to a spent form.

8:56And then there's an enzyme in the body that can just flip it back on, and it can be used again, which is why you can't supplement your way past a factory problem. The healthiest cell isn't the one with the most glutathione. It's the one making and recycling the most glutathione. And you can see here with me, again, basically there's GSH, right, glutathione, which then turns into GSSG, which is the spent glutathione. And then in order to recycle it, by the way, there are certain things your body needs. And this is why when I work with patients, I don't typically ever just say, take this single supplement.

9:34In fact, I've never done that in my entire career. What I do is I put together a full protocol for fixing the machinery. So for instance, When I had the patient come in and she was experiencing chronic rosacea and she was able to completely turn that around after seeing doctors for 10 years and really almost ruining her life. It was so severe for her. She shared this with me. I said, okay, I'm seeing from your blood work you need more glutathione. But I'm not just going to give you – it's sort of this old – you remember Maimonides? He has this lesson, give a man a fish, feed him for a day, teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.

10:10that same thing, right? I want to teach your body and help your body create glutathione on its own and put together a full glutathione boosting protocol so you can fully and completely heal. Now, part of that was taking a type of N-acetylcysteine plus glycine, a supplement. But in addition, I had her take other types of food. I also looked at blood work and there were other nutrients she was deficient in like vitamin B2 and selenium and magnesium, which are all required for glutathione recycling. And so it's not just about glutathione by itself. It's about making sure your body has all the things it needs for running its glutathione factory.

10:52And by one of the reasons why this is important, and you might notice as you age, certain conditions you just can't seem to beat, right? It could be the joint pain. It could be histamine reactions, autoimmune disease, some other health problem where you just feel like you're aging, like your skin, you're noticing it changing more quickly. The problem is there are certain things your body becomes less adequate at producing as you age, right? And I remember I used to talk about this a lot and I still talk about it sometimes with collagen, right? It's a peptide as well. Over time, your body creates less peptides on its own.

11:21Collagen breaks down more every single year. The very same thing happens with this peptide glutathione. It drops every single year. Now, there was a study done at Baylor College of Medicine and it ran a direct comparison, adults in their 70s against adults in their 20s and 30s. And here's what they found. Not just less glutathione, but far more damage was happening to the body because they had less glutathione. So it wasn't about, oh, you just have less glutathione now, because on average, they had about 70 % less glutathione in their blood, these people that were 70 years old. They also saw some of the most important blood markers.

12:01By the way, one of my favorites is called F2 isoprostanes. And this is looking at oxidative stress done to your fat cells. So think about all your cells have a lipid bilayer as well. So this is fat and cellular membrane oxidative stress. Well, in these people, there was over 300 % more oxidative stress in 70-year-olds, which showing that their glutathione needs to be so much higher as you age. And I see a lot of women today online talking about wearing certain types of skincare and doing certain things as you age. And by the way, I think you should be doing that. I think that's wonderful. We should all be trying to slow down the aging process and honor God with our body, right?

12:43It's a temple of the Holy Spirit. We're called to do everything we can in order to age more slowly. And I do think having the right skincare ingredients is helpful. However, one thing I don't see a lot of people talking about in the anti-aging community is glutathione. And it honestly might be the single most impactful antioxidant or supplement you could take at slowing down the aging process, especially for any of you that are dealing with autoimmune disease or toxicity damage. because glutathione, again, it's known as your body's master antioxidant, and it's used by the liver for detoxification.

13:26So if you're deficient in glutathione, your body is typically aging more quickly. Again, think about the skin of the apple. If you remove the skin of the apple, that apple immediately starts aging. Likely 10 times to even 100 times faster than without the apple skin. Well, think about your body in the same way. If you were depleted in glutathione, you are aging more quickly. If you ever noticed, you know what? I feel like the past two years, I started looking older, I started feeling older. It could be a glutathione issue. Now, I want to bring you some clinical evidence in a study that proves these benefits.

14:00There is a 16-week study where patients supplemented with the main two amino acids that help create glutathione. And when they use these two amino acids, total glutathione increased in the body by 225%. and active glutathione by 259%. And in the placebo group, it didn't change. Here are the benefits people saw in the study. They saw better mitochondrial function in lab work. They had lower levels of inflammation, improved insulin resistance, and they were even faster at walking. They actually saw improved athletic performance. And that's because glutathione is also critical for recovery. So a few benefits let's dive deeper into.

14:42Okay, number one, it keeps your mitochondria from cooking themselves. Your mitochondria burn fuel with oxygen. However, when your mitochondria are burning up this oxygen, it creates something called reactive oxygen species or reactive oxygen. It kind of sprays out of your cells like an exhaust. Now, what takes care of that exhaust? It's glutathione. If your cells are running low and glutathione, the exhaust from making cellular energy never gets cleaned up and it's going to damage every organ and tissue in your body and it's going to cause you to age prematurely. Because glutathione, again, is your body's master antioxidant, oxidative stress.

15:28That's what it does. Benefit number two, it helps your liver finish the job. Detox isn't a juice cleanse, okay? It's a two-stage chemical process in your liver. Stage one takes a toxin and makes it reactive, often more dangerous than it started. Stage two sticks that toxin to glutathione, making it water-soluble so your body can get rid of it. If stage one is running hot, we call this phase one of liver detoxification, where your body is eliminating or transforming some of these toxins that are in your body. But if your body is not prepared in stage two, you end up with a backlog. And that's the real mechanism behind chemical sensitivity and even things like rough hangovers in the body.

16:12If you've ever experienced that, is that phase one of your body might've been working fine and then it gets backed up typically because you don't have enough glutathione. Benefit number three, glutathione, your immune cells. Here's the thing, they can't live without it. When a threat appears, your T cells and natural killer cells must divide fast. That replication generates huge oxidative stress. Cells that can't handle that stress don't divide well. Glutathione is what lets them do it. It's why one person catches everything and their spouse, same house, same food, doesn't. So if you're wondering, why am I getting sick all the time?

16:53Sometimes it's not vitamin C. Sometimes it's not zinc. Sometimes it's not vitamin D. Sometimes you're deficient in the single most important antioxidant in your body. Again, we talk about vitamin C. Listen, that's critically important. Glutathione, just as important or more important in certain cases when it comes to supporting your immune cells. There is a study done on patients who took a liposomal glutathione supplement for two weeks. Here's what they found. Natural killer cell activity increased by 400%, lymphocyte proliferation by 60%, and oxidative stress damage went down by 35%. Now, the number four benefit of glutathione has to do with your brain and neurological health.

17:38Your brain is about 2 % of your body's weight, and it burns about 20 % of your oxygen. It's packed with fats that oxidize easily and it has limited capacity to repair. It is structurally the worst designed organ for oxidative stress in your entire body and it needs the most protection. So brain glutathione isn't a nice to have. It's essential and potentially important for even preventing things like Alzheimer's long-term. There's a study done on those who supplemented with sulforaphane, which is found in broccoli sprouts and certain types of cruciferous vegetables, that when people consume more of those types of vegetables, their brain glutathione raised by roughly 30 % on an MRI.

18:20The number five benefit of glutathione is anti-aging. Two of the best predictors of how long somebody will live has to do with their grip strength and their walking speed. In a Baylor study, people that used a supplement, this is for supporting glutathione, it's called Glynac, it's glycine placenta cytocysteine, they actually improved their walking speed and their grip strength with no dietary change, simply by only taking Glynec. And so the top five benefits of using glutathione are, number one, mitochondrial energy, okay? More power, less damage happening from that. Number two, liver detoxification.

19:00It is essential for you to detox and heal from everything from infections, like parasites, to overcome long COVID. And of course, getting rid of things like glyphosate in your body. Number three, immune function, whether it be autoimmune disease or just strengthening your own immune system to fight the common cold and flu. Number four, brain protection. And number five, anti-aging. Here are the four words people say to us most often. This finally makes sense. Years of scattered symptoms, random supplements, diets that have worked for a little while but ultimately fell to the wayside. For many, it's the first time somebody has actually shown them the cellular pattern behind their symptoms.

19:45And that's what a cellular blood work analysis is for. It's an at-home kit followed by a full hour with one of our senior health advisors who will explain exactly what's going on in your cells and if one of our cellular healing protocols is right for you. And we have hundreds of five stars on Trustpilot that say the same. If you're ready for it to finally make sense, Go to mybloodwork.com and order your kit today. That's mybloodwork.com. So you might wonder, well, how do I know where my glutathione levels are at? Well, one thing you can look at is your symptoms, right? If you're dealing with fatigue and especially poor recovery, you just feel like your body doesn't recover very quickly.

20:24That's a big warning sign. Number two, brain fog, okay? If you are dealing with just feeling like your head is cloudy, sometimes losing words or just short-term memory, that's an indicator. Number three, chemical sensitivity to perfume, to fuel, to alcohol, just sensitivities to things. But typically, if glutathione were there to protect your body in the first place, that wouldn't be happening. Number four, again, frequent illness, catching everything going around. Number five, high oxidative stress on your labs. If you're seeing those in lab markers, that's a big indicator that your glutathione is low.

20:59The number one lab marker, by the way, you've probably been tested for. I mean, it is a standard lab test looking at what we call GGT. That's gamma glutamyl transferase. And here's the problem though. Listen to this. This is a big deal. It's on nearly every liver panel out there today. When you get your blood work done, again, look for GGT. However, here's the big problem. Your doctor is looking at it in the range for severe liver disease, right? So they're looking to see, oh, are the numbers so bad you're about to die? They're not looking at that marker for optimal health or longevity. So if you're dealing with autoimmune disease or rosacea or you're aging more quickly, they're not going to tell you that because they're not reading your blood work in that way.

21:46And so most labs consider GGT, this again glutathione marker, they consider it to be normal around 60. But for longevity and lower oxidative stress, the optimal range is closer to 10 to 20, ideally under 20 for men and under 15 for women. And GGT doesn't directly measure glutathione, but rising levels that signal greater oxidative stress, knowing that you have greater glutathione demand. And in a study done on nearly 300 ,000 participants, a GGT around 14.5 represented the lowest risk reference point for people. And they discovered in this study, when men got up closer to that 60 marker, they had a 31 % higher risk of dying, a 43 % higher risk of dying of cardiovascular disease.

22:36Now, why cardiovascular disease? Well, your cells in your heart, there's a lot of mitochondria there, right? And the other one is, listen to this, a 225 % higher liver-related mortality rate if somebody had high GGT markers. So the reality is, listen, your doctor, you might be at 50, okay? And your doctor says, listen, your blood work's good. You're good to go. But you should be at 14.5 for optimal function. This is why there is such a chasm today between conventional blood work and the way that I read blood work and the panels and markers I do and what most conventional doctors do. They're not looking to get you healthy.

23:13They're just trying to keep you barely alive. And so knowing your glutathione is really important. Now, let me go through a few glutathione markers. The biggest is this GGT, right? You're going to find it on any lever panel. It's a really, really important marker, and it's an inexpensive marker. It's not expensive to get this done. Another one that I really like is called F2 isoprostanes. This is the gold standard test for fat oxidation. So think about all your cells are made of fat. Your brain is fat. It's important for certain organs. So all that being said, if your fat is oxidizing, your risk of heart disease and just generally aging more quickly goes up dramatically.

23:50So this F2 isoprostates is a really, really great marker to look at for, again, it's known as the gold standard test for oxidative stress. And those are two of the biggest. A few others though that can be helpful, GSH to GSSG ratio. It's looking at a ratio that's showing how well your body is recycling glutathione. Another marker, selenium and magnesium, knowing what your selenium is, because selenium actually helps create glutathione. Magnesium does as well. And there's another, this is a urine test. It's called 8-OHDG. And this is actually looking to the damage to the DNA itself, but this is something that glutathione helps protect against.

24:32And those are the five markers that are probably the most helpful in discovering what your glutathione levels actually are. Hey, and by the way, if you want an entire guide, by the way, on exactly how to detoxify and support your glutathione levels, I actually have an entire guide for you in my show notes. I also have another guide you can check out. It is my top 25 blood markers guide. You can download there as well if you want to know. Well, I've had blood test done before. I want to see if I'm in the functional medicine range. These are guides I put together. It's over$100 in value, and you can get it for free.

25:06If you just go to the show notes, you can download these PDFs for no charge at all. Just my gift to you because I want to help you reach your ultimate level of health. Because I want to bring the truth because, you know, these are things that I think about my mom growing up. Like my mom, I know from looking at her labs over the years, she was deficient in glutathione. And no doctor ever told her that. I think about could we have prevented her getting cancer or helped her heal more readily if we were actually looking at the right markers. So the reality is getting the right markers and also just knowing how to raise your glutathione levels is critically important.

25:38So I would encourage you to go to the show notes and get the free guide I put together for you right there. Now, I want to talk about glutathione supplements because there's a lot of different types out there. And I want to talk about which ones are most effective and what I most recommend. Okay, so the first thing here is looking at standard glutathione versus liposomal, right? I saw a post once saying supplementing with glutathione was pointless because your gut breaks it apart. Then there was a six-month placebo trial that actually proved that it actually worked modestly and measurably, though taking a liposomal form is going to be more effective.