Dr. A explains what NAC is, how it differs from L-cysteine, and typical dosing of 500 to 3,000 mg daily. The video covers its uses as a glutathione precursor, mucolytic, and liver detoxification support, plus the FDA's ongoing debate over whether NAC should be classified as a drug or supplement.
So as long as you have good product, the dosage, you're going to get some of the benefits out of it. Now, benefits generally would be in the area of— Welcome to the YouTube channel. I'm Dr. A. I've been researching and teaching in the naturopathic and integrative medical community for 30+ years now. Been seeing patients a very long time, and I use this channel to answer questions. So first off, what is NAC? It stands for N-acetylcysteine or N-acetylcysteine, and people will ask, well, what's the difference What's the difference between N-acetylcysteine and L-cysteine? Well, cysteine without any other letters is an amino acid. It's a sulfur-bearing amino acid. If you ever smell it, it smells like sulfur, and it is used for a number of things in the body. L-cysteine is a stable form of the amino acid, but N-acetylcysteine absorbs better orally, and it also is used in other means. And so N-acetylcysteine is the normal kind of supplement that is given. So you might see cysteine, but most oral supplements are going to be N-acetylcysteine. Now, the next thing would be, are there any quality issues? Well, largely because we're looking at N-acetylcysteine in regard to its use as a dietary supplement, you want to make sure that you have a reliable supplement manufacturer and one that does quality control checks. So any supplement manufacturer that you might use to purchase N-acetylcysteine should be able to have background information that is Quality control oriented. So does the company, as a general rule, test for impurities in the supplements that they're making? Do they look for things that shouldn't be in there, that are not N-acetylcysteine, etc.? Do they use approved raw materials? So when you buy these capsules of N-acetylcysteine, they had to come from somewhere. That will usually come from, you know, a one kilogram or a five or a ten or twenty kilogram tub of powder, and generally that has. To be of a certain quality to apply for appropriate use as a supplement. Now, one of the issues with dietary supplements, especially recently, has been certain online sources having kind of pirated or black label type of supplements where they copy the bottle from a particular supplement manufacturer and then they sell something that is not what that supplement manufacturer would sell. This also happens, for instance, in the, you know, topical products world. I know dermatologists that have, you know, skincare things, and they'll have people, you know, knock them off, and it won't be the same product as what their company sells. And the biggest problem is that the companies can go after these resellers that aren't selling the real thing, but by the time that, you know, they do, it's either so much money or the company— the resellers disappear and they come back in another form. So what I would say about that is you want to make sure if you're buying it from a distribution center, you know, some, something online where you're looking up and they've got, you know, 100 different supplement companies. Make sure that you're getting connected with the real supplement product. Many of the companies that you can find, you know, such as on Amazon or some other reseller, you can also go to them directly and order these sorts of things. So quality issues are generally going to be if you have a reputable company selling it and you're actually getting their product, you're going to have a good index of suspicion that they've done the things and they have the right background done. If you're buying it from a reseller and there's, you know, some sort of, you know, piracy going on and it's not what's supposed to be in there, you do not have that sort of suspicion. Quick interruption from the regular video. If you are a healthcare practitioner and you have an interest in this topic, we're going to put a link in the description below to my CE website and specifically the webinar that is about this topic. We'll see you over there. Thanks. Now, doses, and of course this is just general information. This is not medical advice, but doses for N-acetylcysteine for adults. Generally, the doses that are going to be medically useful are going to be somewhere between 500 milligrams to 3,000 milligrams, and it could be more than that. Generally, if you're doing more than that, it's probably have some medical advice around it. It does smell sulfury, and that means when you're taking it, your urine will often smell sulfury. And you're even, your bowel movements might smell sulfury. That's very normal. We had a comment one time that somebody was taking N-acetylcysteine and they smelled their urine. It smelled very like rotten eggs or sulfury, and they thought it was, it was a negative or adverse reaction. And actually that's a normal reaction. You, the sulfur works its way all the way through. So the doses generally we divide up. If you're just taking 500 milligrams to 1,000, you take it all at once. But let's say somebody's dealing with really thick mucus secretions. And they're taking it as a mucolytic to help loosen it up. We're probably going to give them 500 to 1,000 milligrams 3 or 4 times a day to help with that sort of a problem. So as long as you have good product, the doses, you know, are somewhere around what we said, you're going to get some of the benefits out of it. Now, benefits generally would be in the area of supporting antioxidant function through glutathione formation. That's one of them. Helping, as I said, as a mucolytic substance. It's also used in a phase 2 liver detoxification. And as a matter of fact, in emergency medicine, when somebody has an overdose, something like Tylenol, they will use N-acetylcysteine at very high doses to help with phase 2 to get the Tylenol damage to be minimized in the body. And then the final thing we wanted to put in NAC 101 was some questions we got around, isn't N-acetylcysteine a drug? And how does the FDA allow N-acetylcysteine to be used as a drug and sold as a supplement? It's a very good question. And the FDA has had that Same question over time. So what has happened is the FDA has N-acetylcysteine as a supplement in a safe harbor at the moment. What that means is if the FDA decided to tomorrow, they could take it out of the safe harbor and tell all supplement manufacturers, you can no longer make N-acetylcysteine as a supplement because it is a drug. Now, they are saying this because N-acetylcysteine was approved as a drug in somewhere around 1963 or something. So a long time. And their contention at FDA, at least a few years ago, was, well, it's— we approved it as a drug before it was ever used as a supplement. There's been a lot of back and forth legally around that. So the FDA decided, I think probably just so there wasn't a big public outcry, to have it in a safe harbor and say, well, yes, it is a drug, but we will allow it to be sold as a supplement. So if you're in the US, that's the controversy, but right now it doesn't affect anything. And acetylcysteine is still very safe in the food chain of dietary supplement use. So that's the controversy there. All right. Well, I hope this short video answered those questions here in NAC 101. We're going to post some other videos. We got a lot of NAC content because it's a super popular supplement. Get a lot of questions about it. We'll put those up here at the end. But thank you very much, all of you, for subscribing, liking, sharing, letting other people know about the channel, and I will see you all on the next video. Thanks.
