N-Acetylcysteine: Is It REALLY Dangerous? Dr. Anderson Explains

So if we starve all of the cysteine out of the person, we will kill the person. We also know that if we marinate cancer cells of certain types, not all, in cysteine as N-acetylcysteine administration, they might get stronger. We don't want that either. Hi, I'm Dr. A. This is my YouTube channel. Thanks for joining us. Today we're going to break down some questions we got about N-acetylcysteine and safety. So let's get into it. I want to get into N-acetylcysteine, which we have other content on. We'll link that. You can go look at that. But we got a ton of questions about the safety of N-acetylcysteine, and this is a really, really good topic. So I want to break it down into a couple of primary areas where people get concerned about the potential for safety, and then some ancillary areas where we got questions. So the first one, which is more of an ancillary area, is my N-acetylcysteine that I got smells like rotten eggs, smells like sulfur. Well, the first thing to keep in mind is cysteine is a thiol. It's a sulfur-bearing amino acid, so it's always going to have some sulfury smell. Now, when it is first produced, often you won't smell as much, and if the bottle of the pills, for example, gets warm or there's other things that go on, you might smell more sulfury activity in there. If it's pure N-acetylcysteine, a sulfury smell would be more normal, but My experience has been a real sulfury smelling product might have been not in a well temperature controlled storage, so that the smell it doesn't make it good or bad, but it's a little more distasteful if it's really really stinky to take it. The other question we got was well it makes my urine smell like rotten eggs. If you're taking a thiol like N-acetylcysteine, it's going to go through your system and you're going to smell it on the way out. So it's going to smell sulfury in the urine, and there's not much you can do about that because that's just downstream metabolizing. Now the next ones. are a little bit more potential danger, and so I want to talk about them, and they're kind of on par. One is, if I have a sulfa drug allergy, is it dangerous to use cysteine, N-acetylcysteine? And the other is, what about if I have reactive airway disease or asthma? Is it dangerous to take N-acetylcysteine? Both of these are ratcheted up in the danger category. We don't want to be having more reactive airway problems, asthma. And we certainly don't— if we're allergic to sulfa drugs, we don't want to trigger that reactivity because that could make us very sick or even kill us. So how does cysteine fit in there? Let's handle the respiratory side first. So asthma, reactive airway disease— does cysteine or thiols like cysteine actually trigger asthma? Well, the answer is it can. The way that it triggers it though is usually that you take in a thiol, goes in and metabolizes in your body. And then one of the things that will happen is if you don't have enough cofactors to metabolize the cysteine out or into other products in your body like glutathione, then you will wind up putting it through the degradation pathway where it backs up and makes sulfite. Now, you might have heard of or experienced sulfite reactions like headaches and things to red wine and other sulfites. Well, if your metabolic pathways back up, you get more sulfite, so you can have a sulfite reaction. Now, if you have asthma or reactive airway disease that might be triggered by increase in sulfites, yes, that can actually trigger it. Normally, with sulfite-sensitive people, what we look at then is why aren't they metabolizing the extra sulfite out of the system down to sulfate and out through the liver, or why aren't they putting the sulfur molecules, the cysteine, into the formation of glutathione? Well, this is worse, this problem, in people that have genetic single nucleotide polymorphism, SNPs, in glutathione synthetase, the glutathione-creating enzymes. So that's one group of people. Also, the other way out, is through an enzyme system called sulfite oxidase. Sometimes you see it called SUOX, S-U-O-X, and that enzyme system gets plugged up with other toxins. So people who've been exposed to certain toxic metals and other toxins will, will slow their SUOX down, and then the sulfury molecules get stuck, and then they go back up into more sulfite, more reaction. Okay, so genetic reasons, toxic reasons. And so if you're a person like that, you have reactive airway disease, asthma, and you're sensitive to sulfites, you would not want to also take N-acetylcysteine till you get the other things cleaned up. Okay, so that's a really important thing as well. Now on the sulfa drug allergy side, this is a little different. So if you consider— so if you're watching the video, I'll do some hand motions here, but I'll describe what I'm doing. So if you consider the sulfa A lot of people, because it sounds the same, will say sulfur like the element sulfur, S sulfur. They'll say sulfur drugs, right? Well, they're not really sulfur drugs. They're sulf, uh, which is sulfonamide. Sulfonamide is a giant molecule that has sulfur, the element, in it. What we need to remember is when you're allergic to sulfonamide, to sulfa drugs. That's a number of things. You're allergic to that big giant molecule. You are not allergic to the element sulfur. Cysteine is a very small molecule that has a sulfur arm on it. It's a thiol. It's a sulfur-containing amino in this case. So is there cross-reactivity between small thiols like N-acetylcysteine and this big giant Death Star-looking thing, Sulfur? Well, again, sometimes is the answer, right? So, if we're going to administer N-acetylcysteine to someone and they say, I have a bad sulfur allergy, we will often test them first. And there are ways to test without challenging and endangering the patient to make sure they handle the thiol. In a minority of people who have sulfonamide, sulfur drug allergy, they'll have cross-reactivity with thiols, but it's much more rare than other types of reactions. If you have never taken N-acetylcysteine and you have a life-threatening sulfonamide or sulfa drug allergy, you would really want to be in a monitored setting where you would be tested for sensitivity or lack of it to the N-acetylcysteine before you go and take it. There's a possibility, not a universal possibility, but small one. And then the other safety one, which is kind of at the top of the heap because of the criticality Although certainly sulfur reactions and asthma are very, very bad and they can kill you. Is what about cancer? I've read one of the questions says N-acetylcysteine will make cancer worse. So this is an important question, and it actually relates to other video I've done about glutathione and cancer. For example, it's a similar set of logic. It's a similar set of biochemistry and pharmacology. So let's get into this. Topic of N-acetylcysteine and cancer. There are research data that will show the same as glutathione, that if we saturate the body when it has cancer with N-acetylcysteine, there are some, not all, but some cancer types that will be made stronger by all that excess N-acetylcysteine. Now, if you go back to the glutathione cancer one that we did, the video, you'll see this is the same thing I'm going to say for that as I said for this. We have to remember that the human body, when it has cancer, still has more normal cells than cancer cells. If you're still alive, your normal cells really cannot operate without glutathione. They cannot operate without cysteine, acetylcysteine to cysteine. So if we starve all of the cysteine out of the person, we will kill the person. So we don't wanna go that far. But we also know that if we marinate cancer cells of certain types, not all, in cysteine as N-acetylcysteine administration, they might get stronger. We don't want that either. So this is where this all-or-nothing thinking can kind of take over and people can say you should never take N-acetylcysteine during cancer, or maybe you should always take it or something like that. Because the normal cells require cysteine, you should rely on your diet for cysteine intake. And then like I said, with therapeutic glutathione, Thione, similar with N-acetylcysteine. If you have cancer but you're needing the N-acetylcysteine for a respiratory problem, okay, you're using it as a respiratory agent, say through a nebulizer or something, that's fine to use acutely as you need it, and then you can stop. The danger with thiols in cancer is not so much that you use them during a need. Danger is if you use them every day, all the time. And you keep raising the thiol pool with N-acetylcysteine in this case, and then you wind up marinating the cancer cells and some of them may become stronger. So what we do with N-acetylcysteine therapies is give them as they're needed, say it's respiratory or a detox thing or something like that, and then when we don't need the extra N-acetylcysteine anymore, we stop. person has active. If somebody has an ongoing issue, say with respiratory problems, we will cycle the N-acetylcysteine, and so what that means is we may give it 2 or 3 days and then give a break for 3 or 4 or 5 days, okay. So every week there's some on and some off, so then the body gets a burst of it, normal cells get a burst, and then we're not having it every single day. So the answer around Glutathione and acetylcysteine and cancer is, it depends. We don't want to marinate the body, but we also do not want to starve the body of it. And so we're going to give what we need, but we're not going to give extra. It's a clinical decision. All right, that's all the questions we got in this round. I know you're going to have others, so send them in. Comment below, like, share, subscribe. Thanks for all of you joining our community. We love it. I will see you all in the next video.