EAT THESE FOODS To Live Longer, Prevent CHRONIC DISEASE & Boost Glutathione | Dr. Mark Hyman

If you learn about glutathione and you learn how to upregulate your body's own glutathione, it's going to be a huge contributor to your overall health. So what, what actually supports glutathione production? Well, it's first food, so eat a lot of foods that contain sulfur molecules. And there's, there's basically, I would say, three main categories of food. The allium family, that allium means like onions, garlic, leeks, that kind of stuff. Those are full of sulfur molecules, so you want to include a lot of that in your diet. And garlic is a powerful booster of detoxification as well as an antimicrobial and has many, many other benefits. So make sure you eat plenty of sulfur containing garlic, onions, and leeks. Second is the broccoli family. This is called the cruciferous vegetables or the brassicas. Broccoli, collards, kale, cabbage, Brussels sprouts. There's a few other superheroes like arugula, watercress, crescylantro. These are all very good detoxifying molecules and they help to boost glutathione in the body. And they have sulforaphane and glutathionylates and all these phytochemicals that upregulate glutathione, which is super important. In fact, some of them are really great against cancer. There was one study I saw from China years ago where they looked at the urine in, like, on a bazillion Chinese people, and they've, well, not quite a bazillion, but you know what I mean. And then they found that they had high levels of broccoli compounds in the urine of some people, and those people did not get cancer, whereas the people who didn't have high levels got cancer. So it's played such a role in all these things. So it's really important to eat also those vegetables. The next one, and this is one I've started to use more, and I'm not a huge fan of dairy, but whey protein is pretty unique. Now my preference is pasture raised grass fed goat whey. It doesn't taste weird or anything, it's just whey protein. It's way better tolerated than regular grass-fed or even, you know, regular cow whey, although grass-fed cow can be fine for some people. And whey protein helps you boost glutathione significantly because it has a lot of these sulfur containing amino acids like cysteine. And it, so it should be made from bioactive non-denatured proteins, which is some of the highly processed ones aren't. But, but I love, grass-fed goat whey, and I use that on a regular basis. And I've noticed my body change. I've noticed my energy increase. I've noticed my muscle mass increase. So I, I think that's a really great way, especially as you cause it gives you so many benefits. One, it helps with glutathione, which is important in the aging process. And two, it really helps build muscle, which is important. Glutathione is probably the most important molecule in your body, and I'm going to tell you why. So stay tuned. It is so important because it helps address everything from heart disease to cancer, to diabetes, to kidney disease, to Alzheimer's, to autism, I mean, you name it. So I'm going to explain why glutathione is important. what it is and special tips to help you boost your own glutathione levels and boost your detox system and help protect yourself from chronic illness. So, what the heck is glutathione? Now glutathione is an amazing molecule. I'm just going to give you a little biochemistry first. It's made up of three peptides, three little, sorry, it's a little tripeptide. It's made up of three amino acids, glycine, glutamine and cysteine. Now, cysteine is an amino acid that has sulfur in it. Now, if you ever like kind of crushed garlic and you know how it's like sticky, that's the sulfur. And garlic is one of the most powerful detoxifying compounds too because it has a sulfur compound. Now, why is this sticky sulfur thing so important? Well, think of it like fly paper. That's that all the toxins stick to in your body. so we unfortunately have been exposed to so many toxins that we need to have a lot of detox capacity. There's 80,000 new chemicals on the market since the turn of the last century. 1% has been tested for safety. Heavy metals, pesticides, plastics, all kinds of stuff. Flame retardants. I mean, the average newborn baby has 287 known toxins in their umbilical cord blood. That means even before they took their first breath, they're already pre-tox pre-toxified. I don't know what the word is, but they're, they're already poisoned before they come out of the womb because of the level of toxins in our environment. Now, what, what glutathione does is it basically sticks to all these toxins with the sulfur sticky molecule. So that's really important. It's like fly paper. It has a lot of other functions, too. We're gonna get into them in a minute. Now, it's kind of recycled in the body, and, and, but sometimes when we're overloaded with toxins, our body can't keep up, so we just kind of overload our body's capacity for detoxification. Now, I, I also we also do a lot of diagnostic testing around glutathione. We can tell if your body's making enough glutathione, we can tell if your body's overloaded with toxins and I use various kinds of tests like organic acids and glutathione tests and we can look at reduced and oxidized glutathione, all this kind of fancy stuff you don't have to worry about. But, the point is that a lot of us don't really have a good ability to detoxify with glutathione and why is that? Well, think about it. 500 years ago, 10,000 years ago, all the toxins were underground, right? Heavy metals come from coal, which we've dug up and we created energy from it and it's created the Industrial Revolution, but it's poison dust. And all that stuff goes in the atmosphere and we get heavy metal rain. So we have all these toxins that we have to deal with. And so we genetically, a lot of us don't have a good array of these detox genes. They're called various kinds of glutathione producing genes. So there's enzymes in your body that turn one chemical to another and they make the glutathione and recycle it. Glutathione M1 transferase, glutathione S-transferase, which is P1 transferase, all these different genes for glutathione, glutathione peroxidase, they're basically coding for enzymes to make more glutathione. But, I mean, if you didn't eat a lot of gluten found, you know, 500 years ago, so some of us don't have that. But half of us don't have the right genes. In fact, I read one study years ago where half the people who were in most hospitals have this problem. So it's a big contributor to chronic illness in a lot of ways. And, and we don't have really good genes to help us do this. Most of us, I certainly don't. And I, in fact, I know this very well personally. I, I mean, honestly, I learned most of the stuff I learned on myself because I I don't know why God gave this gift to me of getting sick and then having to figure it out, but that's what he's done or she's done, whoever's done it. And essentially I got mercury poisoning from living in China. I ate a lot of tuna fish sandwiches growing up. I had a lot of dental fillings and my body just couldn't handle it. And I ended up learning I had impaired glutathione genes, which makes it hard for me to produce glutathione. So I'm always eating all the things, and I'll tell you what those are coming up, so don't go away. All the things that help me boost my own glutathione. and I got chronic fatigue syndrome. It was really, really bad and my body broke down. I got super ill because I couldn't get rid of all the heavy metals and toxins. So that's why glutathione is such an important molecule and why you should pay attention to all the things I'm going to say about how to boost your glutathione. So the question is, how does glutathione protect against illness? It does so in three main ways. One, it's your body's main detoxifier, your body's main antioxidant and your body body's key regulator of immune function. Let's just talk about each one of those. The first is the detoxifier. And we talked about that, how it's like fly paper and it's sticky and it gets rid of things. The second one is it's an antioxidant. And how does that work? Well, most antioxidants in your body work by donating one of their electrons to some damaged molecule. We call those free radicals. And this is oxidative stress, free radicals. You might have heard these terms antioxidants. basically what it means is that your car rusts, your apple turns brown, fat and a nut goes rancid, your skin wrinkles from the sun damage and ultraviolet radiation. This is all free radical damage. So, your body has its own system of antioxidants. You don't have to always get them from food, but you have a system and you need to get them from food like vitamin C and vitamin E and so forth. Now, glutathione is basically the last stop on this hot potato chain. So, what happens is let's say the vitamin C finds a free radical and gives one its electrons. Then the vitamin C is damaged and the vitamin E has to come on and protect that. And then it goes down this kind of hot potato handing off these hot potato free radicals until it gets to glutathione. And that's the final stop and then your body gets rid of it. The problem if you're depleting glutathione, you're gonna have trouble with your antioxidant system and your detox system. It's also really important in immune function. A lot of our immune system is regulated through glutathione and its effect on many, many different functions in our body. It also helps with muscle function and it helps to reach peak mental physical function. So we know, for example, that glutathione levels, if they're high, actually lower muscle damage, reduce recovery time, increase strength and endurance, and make you shift from fat to production to muscle development, which is all good. And I'm very interested in that as I age. So these are really important to think about. How do we upregulate and increase our glutathione levels? Okay, what else boosts glutathione? Well, exercise also is effective in boosting glutathione. and it helps to boost your immune system, it helps boost detoxification, your antioxidant system, all that stuff. So exercise boosts all of those things. That's why exercise is so critical. I mean, I just wrote my book on longevity, and in the book I talk about the power of exercise to work on almost every single one of the longevity pathways. And, and glutathione levels is one of the key pathways. So glutathione is so important. So I encourage you to do something. if you're doing nothing, doing something is a huge benefit. So from doing nothing to doing something that you get a huge benefit, even if it's just walking 20 minutes a day. And then you can keep increasing benefit by longer periods of exercise, by interval training, by strength training. Just do what's fun, right? I like to ride my bike, I like to play tennis, I like to swim. Strength training is super important also for muscle building. And with the goat way, you'll get a double whammy of boosting glutathione and building muscle. Now, what else can you do to boost glutathione? And I have to do this every day because I have those crappy genes and I don't want to get full of toxins. So I reduce my toxic exposures. I use the Environmental Working Group, EWG's website to reduce my toxins and skincare, household products and food and sunblock, all that stuff. So you kind of want to reduce your exposures, but there's a lot of things you can do to boost your glutathione levels. The first is a really important product, which I honestly thought was a drug. Because in medical school, and residency. And when I was an ER doctor, I learned about it and I used it all the time. It's called N-acetylcysteine. We call it mucormist. And we would use it inhaled for an inhalation, for example, with asthma, but we'd also use it for if I had Tylenol overdose. So Tylenol, why Tylenol damages your liver and why if you take Tylenol, you can, you know, it's a big cause of liver damage for many people is because it depletes glutathione. and when you deplete glutathione, your liver can't do its job and it gets overloaded with toxins and that causes your liver to fail. So what do we do to save the liver? If someone comes in, let's say it does an overdose of Tylenol, what do we do? We give them N-acetyl cysteine. Now, this is actually a supplement you can buy in the health food store. It's really cheap and it's something I take every single day because it's the building block of glutathione, N-acetylcysteine, that cysteine molecule, the sulfur we talked about, super important. It also has been shown in peer-reviewed journals like JAMA that if you give it before, for example, an injection with dye, which we use for different kinds of x-ray procedures, that it will protect the kidneys from damage. A lot of dye can cause kidney damage, but it'll actually protect the kidneys from kidney failure, which is kind of cool. The next one I use is called alpha-lipoic acid, another really important thing that your body makes to some degree you get from some food, but it's really important. N-Acetyl Cysteine also boosts glutathione, energy productions, helps in blood sugar control, helps your brain function better, and it's really awesome. I take that every day as well. And then the next is there's this important cycle in your body called methylation. I've written a lot of articles about it. We'll talk about it on the Health Bites soon, but it's a chemical process that's at the center of your biology. And if it's not working, so many things go wrong, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, autism, I mean, you name it, it's a problem. And it's run by these vitamins, B6, B12, and folate. And, a lot of us have genetic variations that are problematic. And, you want the right forms of these nutrients. And, methylation and sulfation are like two cogwheels that go together. So, sulfur, the glutathione production, the methylation, all of this one kind of system. And, it's the center hub of your biochemistry. so I always make sure I take N-Acetyl Cysteine, I take the right B vitamins. Selenium is another important one. Selenium is a cofactor for an enzyme called glutathione peroxidase. That enzyme, again, one of your main antioxidant systems, because you have, you know, antioxidants from food, but you also have your own antioxidant systems, which are way more powerful. So taking the selenium helps boost that. And then there's also, obviously, various other antioxidants that you can use to support it, like C and E. But milk thistle is another herb. Milk thistle. is an incredible herb that also helps with liver disease and boosting glutathione. So that's really what you can do, like N-Acetyl Cysteine, Lipoic Acid, the B vitamins, B6, B12, folate, selenium, and milk thistle. Those are really my go-to's for boosting glutathione. If you loved that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. The idea of food as medicine is one of the most powerful ideas in tools that you have available to create optimal health. And using food as medicine is the first step that I take to treat my patients. And it's one of my favorite topics. I have a whole list of.