How This Molecule Prevents Aging And Disease

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

If you learn about glutathione and you learn how to upregulate your body's own glutathione and avoid toxins, it's going to be a huge contributor to your overall health.

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Week'S episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and this is a place for conversations that matter. And I'm bringing you a new feature on the Doctor's Pharmacy called Health Bites, Yummy Health Bites, little nuggets of information that'll help you live better, live longer, and feel better, which is what it's all about. So I'm excited about this part because it's like where I get to talk about all the things I really love and excited about and the kind of nerdy geeky stuff that I have been studying for years and I've been using in my medical practice for decades and that it's helped so many of my patients and I want you to have that information. So today we're talking about something you may or may not have heard about. It's kind of a goofy medical word. It's glutathione. Say that three times fast, glutathione, okay? And glutathione is probably the most important molecule in your body. And I'm gonna 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 gonna 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 the first thing I want to tell you is 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 of detox capacity. There's 80,000 new chemicals on the market since the turn of the last century. One percent 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 going to 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 do a lot of diagnostic testing around glutathione. We can tell if your body's making enough glutathione. We can tell if your body is 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. It's 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, 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 poisoned us. 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 into another and they make the glutathione and recycle it. Glutathione M1 transferase, glutathione S-transferase, which is a P1 transferase, all these different genes for glutathione, glutathione peroxidase, they're basically coding for enzymes to make more glutathione. I mean, if you didn't need a lot of glucose found, you know, 500 years ago, so some of us don't have that, but half of us don't have the right genes. And 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 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. 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 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 of its electrons. And then, 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 going to 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 and 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. In fact, one of the most important strategies for healthy aging is using this antioxidant system of glutathione and boosting it with something I'm going to tell you about soon, which is a certain kind of whey protein. I'm going to talk about that in a minute. So these are really important to think about how do we upregulate and increase our glutathione levels. So what actually supports glutathione production? Well, it's first food. So eat a lot of foods that contain sulfur molecules. And 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, water watercress, cilantro, these are all very good detoxifying molecules and they help to boost glutathione in the body. And, they have sulforaphane and glucosinolates 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 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 age because 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. 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 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 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 it'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's website to reduce my toxin in 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-Acetyl Cysteine. We call it Mucamist. And we would use it inhaled for inhalation, for example, with asthma. But we'd also use it for people who 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, 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-acetyl cysteine, 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, injection with dye, which we used 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. Alpha-lipoic acid 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, on the health bites soon, but it's, it's a, 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, you know, autism. I mean, you, you name it, it's, it's, 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, 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 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 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. And so I hope this was helpful because if you learn about glutathione and you learn how to upregulate your body's own glutathione and avoid toxins, it's going to be a huge contributor to your overall health. So, I hope you like this health bite. That's it for today. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to share with your friends and family on social media. They probably need to boost their glutathione too. And leave a comment. Maybe what have you done with boosting your own glutathione and detoxifying? We'd love to hear from you. And we'll see you next week on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I wanna tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff, from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to drhyman.com/pix to sign up. That's drhyman.com/pix, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you.

My favorite stuff that I use to.

Enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer.

Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.

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