Dr. A compares NAC and GlyNAC for raising glutathione levels. Cysteine is the rate-limiting factor, so adding glycine to NAC may work slightly faster, though both raise glutathione. No head-to-head clinical trials exist yet, and you can take glycine and NAC separately instead of buying a branded GlyNAC product.
If I just put glutamine in and there's no, there's no cysteine, or we run out of cysteine, you're going to stop making glutathione. I'm Dr. A, and this is my YouTube channel. And today we're going to talk about N-acetylcysteine versus GlyNAC. So let's dig into this. Big question is, is it better to use GlyNAC as a primer versus just NAC? If we want to answer that appropriately, we can Get to why the question comes up. The question comes up because there's been some research to show, well, you certainly can raise glutathione levels using GlyNAC. Okay. You also can raise glutathione levels using NAC. Is there a difference? Is one better, et cetera? So why not dig into it? So the first thing we wanna understand about glutathione is it's a tripeptide. So it's 3 parts. There is glycine, the amino acid. There's cysteine, the amino acid. And then there's glutamine, the amino acid. 3, 2 Gs and 1 C. Cysteine is normally given as a supplement as N-acetylcysteine. So it's NAC. So the first thing that we should know from the research is if you give any of those 3 alone, you'll raise glutathione levels. So there's nothing magical about the addition of 1 or 2 of them together other than you have 2 primers instead of 1. So to the question of is NAC enough or should glycine and NAC be given, both of them are going to work. Now, just from a chemical point of view, if you take glycine and NAC, hence known as GlyNAC, you are going to have 2 substrates for glutathione formation. And since all 3 substrates are shown to raise glutathione levels, of course GlyNAC is going to maybe work a little bit faster to raise glutathione levels. But you also should know there's research that shows that glutamine, L-glutamine, will raise glutathione on its own without the other 2. So all 3 can be helpful. Why does NAC as the cysteine source— remember cysteine's in the middle as a sulfury amino— why does NAC get so much press then? Well, the reason is, is that biochemically cysteine is the rate-limiting amino acid of the 3. And what that means is I can put in glycine and I can put in glutamine, but if I don't have enough cysteine, the glycine and the glutamine will slow down and slow down and slow down and won't make any more glutathione. If I put cysteine in and the body has enough glutamine and glycine, then I'll make glutathione. That's the rate-limiting part of cysteine. Now, L-glutamine, glutamine in the human body, glutamine, it's the highest amino acid in the human body. So any living person's gonna have plenty of glutamine around. Glycine is a much lower level amino acid that we get from our diet. And so probably one idea in studying the GlyNAC, the glycine and NAC together, was we know NAC is the rate-limiting step, but why don't we add the other kind of weaker member, the glycine, and put them together as glycine and acetylcysteine? So I got 2/3 of the tripeptide of glutathione. Yeah. And we already know there's a ton of glutamine inside of humans. Makes total biological sense. What I haven't been able to find, but maybe is out there in the research somewhere, is has anyone looked at them head-to-head? Meaning, we gave 2 groups of equal individuals to the degree that you can have equality in a study. So, humans of roughly the same age, gender, et cetera. We gave one group GlyNAC, we gave one group N-acetylcysteine, and then we gave one group nothing, and then we treat them for X amount of days or weeks, and then we check their glutathione levels. That would be a next really interesting follow-up study because then you could see the difference between people with no supplementation, people with NAC only, or people with GlyNAC as a combo. But it just, from a physical chemistry point of view, makes sense that if I have 2 of the substrates out of 3 going into you, I'm likely to make more glutathione out of that. If I have a rate-limiting step problem, this is why just supplementing L-glutamine can be problematic, is if I just put glutamine in and there's no, there's no cysteine or we run out of cysteine, you're going to stop making glutathione. So it makes more sense to have cysteine as part of the protocol, either alone with NAC or as GlyNAC as a combo. And it also makes logical sense that GlyNAC would do a little bit better job. Now, someone might ask, well, do you have to have a special supplement that's GlyNAC together? And actually, you don't. You can take glycine, the amino acid, and N-acetylcysteine as individual products if you want. There are mixes that you can get too. So, it doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be anything special. You just need those 2 amino acids to pull that off. All right. So, hope this answers the questions around NAC versus GlyNAC. And it's not that one is better than the other in all likelihood, but Chemically speaking, the combination of glycine with N-acetylcysteine may get the job done a little bit faster, which is why we see that being used more and more clinically.
