Upgrade Spotlight: Glutathione for Ageless Skin | 1135 | Dave Asprey

What is the best way that you have found for people to get their levels in, in a way that works systemically?

So after my research today, we do know that topical absorption of glutathione is there. It is proven. We have done human trials on that to back it up. And it is by far the best technology that we have today to deliver glutathione completely intact without getting denatured. Topical absorption, skin absorption is probably the best we have today.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is a special, I call them Upgrade Spotlight Editions. And this is where I bring someone interesting who's done cool work in the world. They're making something, so a creator, something that saves you time, something that gives you more energy, improves how you show up in the world one way or another. So it's a very carefully curated list. So today we've got a renowned pharmacist, an author who specializes in glutathione, a core antioxidant in your body. It has all kinds of functions, including in your skin. So this is a guy who holds the only patent on delivering glutathione through your skin called transdermal glutathione, and the author of a book called the Glutathione Revolution. His name is Dr. Nayan Patel. Nayan, welcome to the show.

Oh, glad to be here, David. Thank you for inviting me.

I wanted to educate listeners about glutathione. It's something where if you go way back in time, when I had heavy duty mold toxicity, I got some IV glutathione, some early really bad tasting, liposomal, and it really helped me get my brain back. And when I travel, I'm all over the stuff. So what is important about glutathione? What do we know today? We didn't know 20 years ago, so.

We knew 20 years ago that glutathione was important to us. But what we did not know is how can we deliver to our body effectively. We were injecting IVs, we were taking the liposomal form of glutathione and it was actually improving levels, but not the reason we think the way it was. We thought it was absorbing correctly because we had infusing into the blood. If you're taking by mouth, it was absorbing slowly and we're seeing the results. But in actuality, it was not absorbing at all. It was breaking down the glutathione and the amino acids that were Created were reabsorbing, and they were recreating those glutathione back into a system using those amino acids. So was working, no doubt about it, but not the reason we thought it was for. Or by merely absorbing slowly. Now we know that part that it was not absorbing at all. It was actually breaking down and reconstructing again. But now we have a technology. We have a technology that can change that whole process and don't have to depend on body to absorb it. Keep in mind, the last 15 years ago, we were not doing gene testing. Now we're doing so much gene testing, we are finding out people have all these mutations that their body is not able to reconstruct or deconstruct glutathione. Then what happens?

Wow. Okay, so how many people in the population have a hard time either making a recycling glutathione?

Well, we have a very small database right now, right. For the last 15 years. What we have found out that people have those gene mutations. They're roughly about 20, 25%, which is, it's actually a big number. But at the same time, on the flip side, 70, 75% of the people have no issues. They can take glutathione, whatever forms they want to take it and still get benefit out of it.

I. I find that I have problems with sulfur metabolism because of my comt genes. So even though I probably shouldn't have too much sulfur, I also could sometimes not have enough. And I've taken things like msm, which is a thing that can help because it has extra sulfur in it. Even collagen is a high sulfur protein, and glutathione is high in sulfur. Can you talk to me about sulfur versus glutathione? And how would you know that you need glutathione?

Oh boy, you're right. If somebody has a gene defect, what you'd expect was comt those patient populations will definitely benefit from some sort of glutathione formulations. But, but the simple test today is you can do a blood test and literally check your RBC levels of glutathione. If you measure whole blood, what we do know is the whole blood level of glutathione is actually not good for us because what we are measuring is the both plasma and the red blood cells. The plasma levels of glutathione has a very short life in your body. So it's about 14, 15 minutes. So it's not a true test of your true glutathione levels. If you measure The RBC levels. I think you'll get true levels of glutathione in the RBCs and we can do those testings. In fact, we are working on test kits right now where we'll be able to do at home test kits for glutathione. It's not ready yet, but we are working on that right now because as you might know, with the lab testing, it just takes a long time to get FD approvals. But once we have that, you'll be able to measure blood spot tests at home and check your levels of glutathione. Wow.

So no one has that yet?

No.

Interesting. I've seen some glutathione. I've seen it measured in labs. So far it's not red blood cell, though. What are they measuring? Plasma?

Whole blood. They're measuring whole blood.

What's the difference between red blood cell versus whole blood glutathione.

So the whole blood is plasma and the red blood cells, the plasma half life is very short. So when we want to measure glutathione, we spin the blood, take the plasma out and just measure the red blood cells. If we just measure. That part has a little bit longer life in your body, so it gives you a little bit better marker as to what your body levels are.

Okay, what are the times of day that someone would want to use glutathione?

So the glutathione is actually used, I mean, from external sources. The life is very short. The best product that we have in our market that we have right now, it stays in your body for anywhere from four to six hours, eight hours. If you've repeated use, make it to 12 hours. So if you're using it twice a day would be ideal. So morning and evening is. Most of the people will use it twice a day. Morning and evening.

Okay, morning, evening. What is the best way to use it? And this is something that if people saw the last podcast, that they might have picked up on. But this is like groundbreaking stuff. So I'm give a little bit of history before you answer that. We talked earlier about like stinky, you know, bad breath, rotten eggs, liposomal. We've talked about iv and there's precursors and taking vitamin C. There's all kinds of different ways that I've tried like that. And almost any of them I noticed, like if I'm flying, I have less jet lag, or if I have a toxic thing, I have less dark circles and things like that, or less, less acne or something because of the toxin. Effect, but I don't know how to stack rank, which ones work better, which ones get glutathione into my cells or my brain or my liver. So what is the best way that you have found for people to get their levels in, in a way that works systemically?

So, Dave, I'm biased because I have a product now, so it is the best. But again, I've made Liposome technology products in the past. I used to make the IV Glutathione for 20 years plus, and I stopped making all those products when I discovered the topical version of the Glutathione 15 years ago. And it took me 12 years before I launched the product to the open public because I had to make sure that it was not just better than the other products out there. It is far more superior than anything that's out in the market today. So after my research today, we do know that topical absorption of glutathione is there. It is proven. We have done human trials on that to back it up. And it is by far the best technology that we have today to deliver glutathione completely intact without getting denatured. And your body has to reconstruct them again. So it is, yeah, topical absorption, skin absorption is probably the best we have today.

Got it. In the autism community where I've given talks and a lot of people maybe miss that part of my story, but I had Asperger's syndrome when I was younger, until I was about, actually I was about 30. I really started getting in and I, I got rid of the toxins and, and all that. So I, I understand some of the, the felt sense of it as well as the biological pathways, how to fix my own brain. And in the autism community, people have been talking about transdermal glutathione for a long time with the, the problem being it was like really greasy. They need a lot of it and, and you know, the last thing you want is a four year old kid, not whether they're on the spectrum or not covered in greasy stuff, you know, rubbing against your couch. Right. So it was, it was like a pretty extreme use case when they would do it. And what you've done now is very different. And explain what Oro does that doesn't exist in the glutathione world. And then I want to zoom in on specifically skin and the longevity benefits there.

Gotcha. So what we have done, first of all, the technology is where we have taken the glutathione molecule, we put a chemical cap on the cysteine which is the sulfur producing sulfur. The odor of the sulfur comes in from cysteine molecule. We put a chemical cap on it where you can still smell the sulfur. You can see the sulfur, but it's not available to the air to get it oxidized. So it's like we, we put the first chemical cap and then we basically use polysaccharide molecules to actually stabilize the glutathione in such a way that it can deliver through your skin. And so it is very, it's very fast acting. You literally spray it on your body. You just put it on your body and rub it in for about a minute or two minutes and it completely dries up. It gets sticky a little bit initially, but it completely dries up. So there's no messy residue. There's nothing, there's no odor left. There's nothing left. Your skin becomes bone dry again one more time in about two minutes or so. And so that's the technology. So you don't have to worry about a four year old kid. You're trying to use this product and have to worry about is it going to be messy and smelly and is it going to linger for the rest of the day.

So there's no sulfur smell at all.

Once it absorbs, once it absorbs, there should not be any sulfur smell. So that's, that's the best part. So that you know that it's already inside your system, it's already inside your.

Skin because it goes away.

Goes away.

So I've used oral glutathione for a while now because it actually does work. You can, you can feel a difference. And I also use a variety of high end stuff on my skin because I'm working on, you know, living to at least 180. Having a functioning barrier to the environment is a good idea. And collagen loss, if you, if you look at the percentage of collagen loss over time every decade, you lose actually every year you use 1% after age 40, if memory serves. So I'm like, if I'm gonna live to 180, I'll have 17% of my collagen in my skin left. So I would be like one of those African frogs where you can see their organs. I don't wanna be like that when I age. So I put a bunch of stuff on and I'll say when I use oro, I get the detox benefits. But there can be some sulfur leftover, I think, cause my skin is saturated. So what I started doing is I'll Just use a little bit of rubbing alcohol. And on my thigh, I'll just rub my thigh with rubbing alcohol. Then I put the oral glutathione on. Then it absorbs really easily because the skin's prepared for it. Is there a better way to prepare the skin to absorb glutathione even more?

So again, for me, I just apply different parts of the body.

Okay, but you don't put lotion on your whole body.

I don't put a lotion on the whole body, but I do put different parts of the body. But if you're looking for the skin benefits we have for the facial benefits, we have a protocol that we use which is the glutathione and a moisturizer in the evening and a vitamin C serum and a moisturizer in the morning. And it's a four product system that we've developed for your whole skin benefits. If you're looking for collagen, because the thing about it, the number of products sold for serums for your face is vitamin C. And yeah, vitamin C is, they claim as an antioxidant, but in reality vitamin C is a pro oxidant. How is it possible that at low dose vitamin C is an antioxidant at a high dose, which we use in IV treatments all the time, and at high dose becomes a pro oxidant. It doesn't have a dual chemical properties. Not that smart of a molecule. They have dual chemical properties. And the reason is because at low doses it activates oxidized glutathione in your skin and regenerates the glutathione. So the antioxidant benefits are actually coming from the glutathione, even though we are using vitamin C as a product on your face. So we have developed a whole different product for vitamin C at a higher concentration, at 25% vitamin C. Because I want to get away from the antioxidant benefits of vitamin C into stimulating the collagen production under your skin. That can only happen if the concentration is much, much higher.

So you have to get a very high concentration in.

Yes.

What would happen if I washed my face? So I'm a guy and what guys typically do is we just take the same bar of soap that we washed our butt with. We assume that the soap forgot where it was so we won't be embarrassed. And then we just wash our face with it. And then we look young and beautiful. And then our, our women companions have like 17,000 bottles of various things that they do. And all this stuff and it's like, they don't. Don't they know the soap forgets? But regardless, I have learned from lots of friends in the industry that maybe soap is a bad idea for your face. So I use a cleanser because it's probably better. After the cleanser, can I take the oral glutathione and just spritz my face with it and then put whatever moisturizer I have on? Or is there a synergy between the stuff that you guys are making? Because I'm facing this problem that no guy usually has where I have 10 bottles of stuff that people sent me to try, and I'm like, how many things can I put on my face before I have, like, a layer of moisturizer I could peel off my face and it would be weird. So help me out here. Can I spray Oro on if I'm lazy?

So you just said right now, first is a cleansing part, right? You got to remove all the leftover oils and the dust particles, whatever. You cleanse your face up first. It depends if it's day or night. If you're using at nighttime, we always recommend using the glutathione product, which. I'll show you a picture of the bottle. It's the glutathione, the G serum. And this serum is actually. It's just glutathione by itself. And all it does it during the daytime. Your body has been exposed to a lot of oxidative stress. So all we want to do is to nullify all the RS pieces in your skin. And once it's done that, we use that. Use the glutathione to do that part. And after that, we have this. We have this moisturizer made up, which is called Oral Skin Care Rest and Repair. And what this has is the two main ingredients that we have inside. This one is resveratrol and cycloestrogenol. And as we know, cycloestrogenol is a DNA repair to help telomeres and all those things.

So let's talk about that for a minute. All right, so, guys, you know that I've been a longevity guy for 25 years, wrote a big book about it. It called Superhuman. If you're new to the show, you should read Superhuman, because it's got a lot of stuff in there about living a very long time. And it's actually the structure of how most longevity books are written now is based on this. There's four things that'll kill you, and then seven or eight things that'll make you old. So let's address them in that order. And I write about cycle as estrogenol, can never say it right, which is an extract of astragalus. But it takes about 45 pounds of Astragalus to make this precious compound. You might know it as TA65, where it used to cost $7,000 a month to take the amount that will lengthen telomere. So if you're an aggressive longevity guy, 15 years ago and you had seven grand a month, you would take the stuff and maybe some people still do. They probably get results. I did take a very high dose of that for about two years. It was not TA65, it was A, A, an from a generic manufacturer. I took very high doses. But it's about how do you get it into the body. And it turns out getting stuff in through the skin is oftentimes more effective than getting things in orally. So if you want to save money, smear your vitamins on your face. It's, you know, maybe not the turmeric because you'll look funny. So there's an argument, I would say, for putting that very high end ingredient in. What results do you see when they're using resveratrol plus cyclo? I can never say it right.

Cycloestrogenol.

Yeah, cycloestrogenol and your glutathione molecule where you've modified the saccharides, that combination. What does it do? Do you have clinical studies?

Yes, we do. So if, let me just go back one step behind to the Nobel prize winner on telomeres activation and, or telomeres lengthening and things like that. And now we have a compound that we have shown in studies that it can actually increase telomeres lengthening. But if you look at all the clinical trials, everyone shows one thing in common, that in order for the cycloestrogen to work, it has to combine with an antioxidant. And so we have the, the most powerful antioxidant that our body produces, glutathione. When you combine them with a cycloestrogenol together, this is basically becomes cycloestrogen on steroids. Or the benefits are exponential. I mean, the results are literally. You can see, you don't need a fancy camera. You can see with the naked eye the results in less than one week. Wow. Some of the patients are seeing results in two weeks to four weeks. But I kid you not, we had patients that they had some spots on the face because of sun damage and you know, that's oxidation of under your skin. Those spots are literally gone in seven days. And so, so that's a very, very powerful way to do it. And the reason, the why it works, because the key is, yes, we have, we can make all the products we want. Why and how does it work? Because if your skin is this thick of a layer, right, you have a seven, seven, eight layers of a skin. We can put this, we can put on the top of the skin the product, but if it goes all the way down to the bottom, and now it works on the bottom and the top. So literally squeezing the response out double time. It's like burning the candle at both ends. The results are that much faster. And so we have done that with this combination. At the nighttime routine, of course, we have a separate daytime routine, but the nighttime, all you need is two products. We have the technology to combine a lot of those chemicals, ingredients, not chemical ingredients at a full concentration into one product. That way you don't have to put on five different products on your face to get the same benefits.

I'm pretty interested. And just full disclosure, I think you're a legit scientist. I enjoy chatting with you about nerdy stuff. Uh, and glutathione has been such a. One of the first supplements I introduced in the world of biohacking, it was like charcoal and glutathione are the two that no one talks about, followed by MCT oil and collagen and, and things like that. So, so this is just important stuff. Um, where I'm, where, where I can say I haven't, I haven't tried that specific formula you're talking about. I'm hoping that you guys will send me some. So what I'm. What I'm most interested in for listeners is just understanding transdermal delivery is likely more effective than IVs. And a Glutathione IV these days is 200 to 600 bucks, depending on where you go. And, you know, maybe it's a little bit less as an add on to some other drip, but it's, it's a lot of money. Right. And if you get a bottle of Oro, not, not just the face stuff, but if you get just the, the body spray, you know, you can put anywhere, it's way less expensive and it'll raise your levels as much as many IVs, right?

Yep.

So. So this blows IVs out of the water. And not to mention, you don't need a nurse and blood and all that. After that, we're like, okay, like there's a whole bunch of cool stuff that you can put on your skin. And you've got an interesting combination here that I think is. Is really cool. So I will try the combination on the skin because some people are going to say, well, it's this one ingredient that matters. I believe that most of the world of biology, it's not one ingredient, like, oh, you want to grow corn? Well, give it water. Well, it needs dirt, too. You need mold and sunlight. What did you know? And it needs wind. It turns out if there's no motion of the air, most plants won't grow. So you have all these things, or at least they won't grow effectively. So there's all these things that are important. So I think stacking the right things up to put them on your face or the rest of your body's cool. If I put it on my butt, will it tighten up loose skin? Because I've lost a hundred pounds of fat and I've got rid of a lot of my loose skin and I have great abs and stuff. But kind of wondering, can you tighten things up for me a bit there, doc?

It depends, right? If it's fine.

Depends.

I wish it was true. But yeah, I mean, if fine wrinkles are easier than worse, right? If you've lost 100 pounds, which I can't even imagine you 100 pounds heavier than what you are right now. But yeah, but yeah, if we have 100 pounds, that skin, if it's stretched, elastic is stretched out, that's very hard to bring it back to complete baby skin. But the fine wrinkles, crow's feet, things like that, those are relatively easier compared to something on your back or your rear that is. That is like that. So sorry.

Oh, man. How about cellulite?

So cellulite, Absolutely. So cellulite is a function. I always say cellulite is. If you can somehow detox your liver, the cellulites will start getting lower and lower. It takes. Takes a little bit of time. And so I always say detoxing the liver will help your cellulite more than anything else. And glutathione absolutely is a powerful agent that can help you detoxify the liver. So we have seen cellulite reduction in a lot of our patients by applying state to the thighs, state to the belly area, things like that. So it just takes a little bit longer time than normal. But we have seen great results with that, too.

So potential. We'll call it fix for cellulite.

Yep. The.

The nature of cellulite, too, is that if you lose weight, you'll lose cellulite because there's fat in it. But if you increase collagen thickness under the skin and on the top of the skin, basically the skin is, is more taut so you're not going to see the dimpling, right?

That's right, yep.

And I don't actually have any cellulite anymore. I used to have a little bit on my, my butt, but I have about 7 pounds of fat in my entire body, including my organs right now, which is, which is probably too low. I'm like adding more butter and more carbs, but I'm shockingly lean. Like it's unimaginable to be perfectly honest. And a lot of this is recent shifts in nutrition that I'll chat about someday where I've been testing some beliefs in the longevity community versus others and I'll release all that when I feel confident on it. Um, the other one is I did do gene therapy, guys. Daveaspro.com Gene therapy, if you wanna hear the episode about that. And I think that that probably resulted in 1% of the, of the body fat loss. So I can say I don't have cellulite, but cellulite was a concern before. I never had a lot of it and I had, you know, I have lots of women friends, middle aged who are always worried about it. So if you were to, to get which of the Aura Wellness products is the one that is most likely to.

Reduce cellulite, it's still the glutathione.

Just a straight up glutathione.