Use Glutathione to Reduce Oxidative Stress, with Dr. Nayan Patel

Top 10 causes of death in the world. One of them is accidents. Let's take that out of the picture. The other nine are all linked to oxidative stress, cancers, metabolic disorders, autoimmune conditions, heart disease, and so on and so forth. So if they're all linked to oxidative stress and we need antioxidants to do that part, the body only produces one molecule to do that for us, which is glutathione.

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Hello and welcome to this episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. We have another awesome guest today, Dr. Nayan Patel. He's, he is a pharmacist, wellness expert, thought leader in his industry and he's been working since 1999 to develop custom medications and design patient specific regimens. After 11 years of clinical research on glutathione, he and his team have developed a patented technology to deliver glutathione topically. We're going to talk about it and it's changed the game on how to best absorb glutathione systemically. And he recently published the Glutathione Revolution. Fight disease, slow aging and increase energy. So Nayan, welcome. Thank you for being here today.

Well, thank you for having me today.

Yeah, it's a pleasure because we've talked, you come to a lot of the top conferences and we always learn a lot about from you and about you. So it's really interesting. And since your main topic is glutathione, what is glutathione?

You know, if you asked me this question 25 years ago when I first started, nobody would knew what the word peptide was. But today people know what it's peptides. Peptides are small amino acid chains that building blocks in the body. Glutathione is one of the smallest amino acid chain which is a three peptides coming to three amino acids coming together, the small peptide. But really people, people don't want to know what that is. People really want to know is that, well, why are we talking about it? And the reason we talk about this thing is because it is the most abundant peptide produced in human body. I know you cannot stay without water and air breathing but the third thing that's most important in your body is glutathione is what I feel like it. And so it is something that everybody should know about it, because what it does, as of right now, we know two things. One is a master antioxidant. It quenches all the free radicals, which is you exposed to the free radicals every single day in your life if you're breathing oxygen. But you also create free radicals because of chemical reactions happening in your body all the time. So that's one thing that we know. Enough. That's what most people know about glutath. It's antioxidant. The second component, it is a master conjugator. It helps clear your liver with all the metabolites and toxic chemicals that your body accumulates, and you somehow you have to get rid of it. And so gluten aids in the process of helping you get rid of those chemicals. And so those are the two things that we have known for. And the reason we only know two things as of right now is because until today, we never had the technology to deliver glutathione inside your body at a highest level. So we never did further studies than that. So over the last four or five years, I would say the number of inquiries on further clinical trials have just skyrocketed in my industry. So for me, this has been a game changer, because now people are coming out of the woodworks asking me, hey, can you be part of a study to help us learn more about glutathione?

Very cool.

So it's important. It's everywhere. And I'm assuming that the lack of it causes problems. How would people know that they have low glutathione?

Ah, so this is this. Our brain is wired to finding out, what am I looking for to know that I have a problem? Your body. Every single day, we are putting unknown objects inside our mouth. In terms of food, the body has to process it. And we don't even know how many chemicals we just ingested today. Or you put some makeup on, or you put some skin care or hair care products and so on and so forth. A lot of detergent in your clothing, everything. Your body is processing all those. All those chemicals. And during this process time, the body is constantly adjusting to the unknown chemicals that are coming inside your body. It's constantly adjusting. And when the adjustment period is over, the. The body says, I cannot deal with it anymore, it starts giving you some symptoms. And maybe not symptoms, but maybe some abnormal markers on your blood test or your saliva test or Urine test. And when those, when they go unnoticed or they go out of range for long periods of time, it starts developing some symptoms and eventually leads to diseases. Well, to me, looking for signs and symptoms is like a laggy indicator. I want to know way before what happened that lead to this problem in the first place. But again, we don't have the insights on how the body's adjusting because the body does it on its own. And so for the glutathione, it is so important that I don't want people to wait until they get symptomatic. So the symptoms are associated with. If you think about oxidative stress, oxidative stress is linked to literally every disease known to mankind. So if you think about it, 10 top 10 causes of death in the world, one of them is accidents. Let's take that out of the picture. The other nine are all linked to oxidative stress. Cancers, metabolic disorders, autoimmune conditions, heart disease, and so and so forth. So if they're all linked to oxidative stress, and we need antioxidants to do that part, the body only produces one molecule to do that for us, which is glutathione. And so let's not wait until the disease state. So before the disease state, you have some symptoms, right? Starting the age of 30s, you get some creepy forgetfulness, you have lack of energy of, we call fatigue or sleep disturbances. And of course you're going to blame the environmental factors that, hey, I just got a new job, I just got married, I have a new mortgage on my house, and there's a lot of stress in my life. And that's what's causing these issues. But in reality is that the body is, is trying to adjust and is not able to adjust anymore. Right. And so I want to make sure that every small signs and symptoms that people are getting is people need to think about it, say, hey, why is my body not adjusting fast enough and what am I supposed to do with it? So are there any particular signs of symptoms? The answer is no. And by the time you find out that you have low glutathione levels, is the onset of some sort of diseases? And so I want people to start early or not until, wait until the disease kicks in.

Well, is there an age at which glutathione starts to go down or what are the factors that would influence glutathione not being in its productive state? Is it over demand, Is it under production and over demand, or where does the difficulty lie?

I think the body has the capabilities of producing of glutathione. I don't think that there's an issue about bodies losing this ability to produce glutathione at the early on. I'm talking about under the age of 40. After 40, yes you may. People say that by the age 30 you start losing the ability to produce glutathione. And that may be true in some cases. But if you're otherwise healthy by the age of 40, yes, you do start losing some ability to produce enough glutathione. Keep in mind you need three things to produce glutathione. The amino acids, which is a building blocks. The two enzymes to conjugate those two. The three amino acids and ATP, energy source for mitochondria, for the chemical reactions to happen. So if any of those substance is not abundantly available to the human body will have reduced in production. So if there's not enough ATP, which is the people call the mitochondrial aging, if there's not enough mitochondria, then yes, your ATP level drops and the ability to produce glucose also drops at the same time. Enzymes, I think they're enough in your body. So that's not usually a concern. But there may be another gene snips that's out there that I have not studied yet. And that could be one of the cause of reducing the enzymes in your body. That could be a really step as well. And the amino acids, if you have a proper diet, that's plenty of those things. But you're right, the demand never drops.

It's getting worse now I think about it. There's chemicals everywhere like you alluded to. There's then food stressors, emotional stressors, mental stressors, time stressors, lifestyle stressors, just, just.

Age itself, aging and, and, and our constant exposure to even the radiation outside and all the mold, metals.

Well, the thing is, if you think about it, animals don't destroy the planet, right? Humans, we want to create and build because we have this higher intellectual capacity that we want to create things. And I mean we are great at creating great things in, in, in this plan on this planet. But it is, it is coming at a cost, right? And if you think that things going to get better, they are not, they're not going to get better. You're not going to be able to avoid this anymore, right? It doesn't matter what part of the world you live in at this time. And so that's not going away. So let's be real about this. You can say it's, it's there. You can try to Avoid as much as possible, but you're not able to go zero.

Well, I buy glutathione. Like, why not vitamin C? Linus Pauling did all this work on vitamin C. I know we don't produce it, but if we take it in, it's an antioxidant or any of the other antioxidants. Why. Why is glutathione so much better? Or is it better?

Okay, so, absolutely. So that's. This is, this is something that I like answering this question because this is a big aha moment that I received in my life as well. So vitamin C is actually not an antioxidant at all. Chemically, it's a pro oxidant. At low concentrations of vitamin C, ascorbic acid, it, what it does, it provides energy to oxidize glutathione in your body and get them reduced again. And so.

So can you dummy that down for someone like me? You're scientific. I'm not scientific at all. Can you dummy that down and speak that in like, you know.

Okay, so layman's. So glutathione is a. It's in a. It's in an active form inside your body, which is called GSH molecule. It's an active form. What it does, it, it takes away the free radicals, quenches all the free radicals, energy from there, and in that process gets oxidized, becomes GS molecule, the H goes away. The two GS molecules comes together and make a stable component in your body called gssg, which is an oxidized form of glutathione. It's inert, has no properties, doesn't do much in your body other than it just tells you that, hey, I'm just staying stable inside your body until something comes up. And I can revive this and make into two molecules of glutathione. Again, that energy source comes from either short exposure to sunlight or products like vitamin C, CoQ10, vitamin E and things like that that provides the energy to revive glutathione back into an active form. So chemically, vitamin C is actually a pro oxidant, not an antioxidant. And it provides the energy to glutathione and to make it active again. So at low concentrations of vitamin C, it acts as if it's an antioxidant because it revives the glutathione. And at high concentration of vitamin C, it becomes a pro oxidant. Okay, so that's that. So, I mean, the doctors knows about this all the time. They Say, hey, yeah, low concentrated vitamin C is an antioxidant and high concentration becomes a proxy. That's what we use for cancer therapies and chemotherapies and things like that. But in reality, chemically it's the same product no matter where it goes at. Okay, so let's, let's talk about the vitamin C product. Yes. And I have nothing wrong with Linus product. Amazing work. But our body has three things that we do to reduce oxidative stress down. One is glutathione that the body produces. Two is you take the chemicals from outside sources like vitamin C, vitamin E, CoQ10, resveratrols or C 60s and methylene blues. And there's so much antioxidants that's out there that people claim that they are so that I call it as bucket number two. Bucket number one is glutathione. Bucket number two is outside sources products that we take. The bucket number three is your body produces enzymes like gluten peroxidase, sod, which is superoxide disputase or catalase. These are the ends of the body produces to help glutathione in the process of quenching free radicals. So that's bucket number three. If you combine bucket number three and bucket number two, which is the outside chemicals and the enzymes, glutathione is stronger than those two buckets combined. And so that's why when I first learned that part, that's why I said, oh my God, it doesn't pay me anything to work on these molecules. That doesn't do much for my body. I want to work on the master body or master molecule that can, that have a profound impact on, on human lives. That was one of the reason why glutathione was something that I really worked on when I was hired 1999. This, this is the, the real story, right, that somebody, a doctor came to me and said, hey, can you make me some liposome nutraceutical products? At that time, liposome was not something new something, something with it already. But I want to introduce nutraceuticals and it make me a vitamin C. And so we did. It was cost prohibitive, but I think three or four years later somebody came up with liquid things to drink in your drink with liposomes. But in the background I asked him, I said, why not glutathione? He goes, it's too hard to work with. Plus it smells pretty bad and it tastes pretty awful. So no, don't work on that one. Just work on the vitamin C. Of course, in the back of my mind, thank you. I said, I'll work on the glutathione on my own. I don't need your help anymore. So that's where the whole process started with the liposynth technology was the first one. And it did not work on my patients. It did not work. And that triggered the whole research for me. Anyways, we're going off a tangent right now, but those three, if you look at those three things, that's why even though vitamin C is used abundantly in the world, it won't even come close to antioxidant benefits like glutathione will do for.

So the question I have is it doesn't sound like the body can make too little. The issues arise when you have too much exposure. But could you ever have too much glutathione in the system? Are there any clinical issues with having too much?

Yes. And the thing is, until today, if you think about what FDA has done, FDA has designated glutathione as a GRAS product. Gras, generally regarded as safe. There's a grass status that can take any amount you want. You can take 50 grams of growth and nothing happens to you. Right. So that's what the grass that comes in, unfortunately. Well, fortunately, all the products in the world as of today, I.e. intravenous forms, liposome technology products, capsules, all those different technology products, the body doesn't absorb any one of them anyways. The body breaks it down and it produces endogenously glutathione. So until today, we never had an issue of overdosing anybody on glutathione. Now that we have a technology that I can actually bypass all the barriers and introduce it to the cell, there's a potential of getting it overdosed. And so that's why when I said that first 11 years of my research was just getting the glutathione ready and then another 10 years to launch the product. Because whenever the product was ready, I can launch it. Because I started seeing some reactions in patients with going overboard, like when you go overboard, like when you go from oxidative stress to reductive stress, it's a whole different paradigm shift for the human body. And body becomes lazy and infections kicks in and all kinds of problems could happen because of that. And so when I saw that for the very first time in my patient population, we stopped the whole project immediately. And then we went into studies and tried to figure out. So, yes, now that we have a Technology, we can push people over the edge. And when we push people. People over the edge, they can start experiencing effects like excessive rashes, itching all over the body. What else? I have seen extreme fatigue, headaches, things like that. It's. Even though it's temporarily. Even though it's temporarily. It could happen that part. If that happens to you, you got to come back.

So do you remember we had a patient like, seven or eight years ago who had profound liver dysfunction, and I had given her, I think it was a gram of I glutathione. And on the car ride home, she developed a rash and itching. She had a detox reaction is what I thought of it as. So when you're talking about too much glutathione, is it essentially that people are having a profound detox reaction or is it harming the system? I'm just trying to understand.

And also, is there an internal downregulation if you're getting it externally?

Okay, so that's two questions.

Okay, that's a third question.

I know, but I'm getting it in because you're.

So. Yes. It could happen both ways. Right. The symptoms are identical if you have too much of glutathione or if the body is detoxing too fast. So what you experience with the 1 gram of IV push, it was a major detox reaction. And it usually happens, like, about half an hour to an hour later. Right. And the reason is because, guess what? The study was done in 1991. When you give IV push of glutathione, the body clears the glutamine of five to 15 minutes. It's all in the urine, everything. But then what happened was they saw an increase of cysteine in the blood. Half an hour to an hour or hour and a half later, the cysteine went up. And when the cysteine went up, the glutathione levels in the body went up as well. So cysteine was actually being used to produce your own glutathione. And when that happened, that's when you saw the reaction happening for the rashes and headaches and things like that. With the topical version that we have, the reaction is pretty fast. I mean, you get the rashes in five, 15 minutes or so. And so if that happens, that means the body's detoxing too fast. You just have to cut back on the dose a little bit, and they should be okay. Now, if you do not. If you don't do anything, and let's see, the patient have no symptoms and if they're good, okay, for about a year, and then you increase the dose on them. And if the dose has gone to a too high of a dose and it goes overboard, the same symptoms come back again. The headaches, the nausea, the diarrhea, the itching, extreme fatigue. That's where you know that you have gone overboard. That's too much of glutathione. You got to come back on it. So the same symptoms, if it happens earlier, which is the first month or so, then it's a detox reaction. If it happens six months afterwards, that's too much of glutathione. And so I just want to make sure people understand that part.

Yeah, and I have a follow up question before we get to your question. I don't want to minimize it, but I just. If we're looking at patients who I would consider to be super toxic, I mean, the patient I'm referring to had alcoholism and her GGT was out of this, off the charts. I think her ggt was like 265. So ridiculous. And we're aiming for it to be under 20.

You know, that's not a typical patient.

And she was very atypical. I mean, she was. So are there patients who, when we're looking at adding in glutathione for detox, we want to tread lighter with, and are there some metrics that we can go, okay, if your ggt is between 60 and 100 or over 60 or whatever it is, is there any type of metric that we can put on this to understand who's at risk of having a detox reaction? And who do we warn, like, hey, you might have a detox reaction because your system's pretty shut down Just to.

This is a tough, tough, tough question because I deal with all kinds of people with mold issues and alcoholic fatty liver issues. It's liver cirrhosis patients, patients that have chemical sensitivities that they can't do anything, they can't even smell something and not have a reaction from it. And unfortunately, I have not come across a common link where it tells me that this person is going to respond favorably, that they can take the full dose and no problem. And some people cannot take even one spray twice a day. And so it's very hard for me to understand that portion yet as of right now. And I'm relying on the physicians like you to basically tell me some stories and say, hey, these are some of the cases I have. So I'm collecting data at this time. And I could not figure out A commonality at this point. So I'll just tell you. I have patients that are completely healthy. They have taken four sprays and knocked out for two days in a row. They can't get out of the bed completely healthy otherwise and they couldn't get out of the bed. And I have people that are absolutely sensitive. They can't even smell something, it is completely toxic. And they can take a full dose and feel fantastic the first day. And so I could not figure that portion out yet. So what I tell people is that, hey, the first day or two, please forgive me if you get a reaction. I'm sorry, I don't want to shortchange your therapy. I don't want to reduce the time of how you, how much I can make you feel better as fast as possible. So the first time you start the products, if you get a reaction, stop it, let everything settle down, go back to half the dose or even one fourth the dose only and then slowly, slowly ramp it up again over seven, every seven days. You increase the dose every seven days until you get to four sprays, which is about 100 milligrams twice a day. That should be, that should be the clue that they should be feeling fine. But, but most people, when they do this way, within two weeks after they reach the full dose, they feel absolutely fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. So yeah, I don't know the answer to that one yet. So I cannot tell you. But I just have to be trial and error at this time.

How about the downregulation question?

Yours? Let's go to Ed.

So it's. So the thing is when you think about downregulations and upper regulations, we're talking about endocrine system because that's what my brain is wired is that hey, if I take anything from outside sources, my body's going to shut down its own production. Which is not a good thing if you're dealing with pituitary hormone, hypothalamic hormones, hormones, things like that. But when it comes to peptides and proteins, it's a whole different ball game because there's no stimulus in your body that's telling your body to produce more glutathione. It's based on what your needs are going to be. And if the needs are met, the body doesn't have to produce anymore. The body needs the enzymes, the amino acids and the ATP to produce all this product. So my guess is that, and we just did one human trial with this one is when you give glutathione, the body will basically don't have to produce anymore, Right? And so that was my first study that I did. I said, I need to figure out how much to give you. Because when I got the reactions happening to the patients, because I was giving them five to 600 milligrams twice a day or three times a day. And when I got to give that high doses, people are having all kinds of reaction. So one of the doctors in Utah I was working with, he said that, you know what, man don't know worry about. Let me help you with this one. He took a bunch of patients and started giving them some glutathione to try to do this blood draw. What we found out was 100 milligrams was probably going to be more than enough to reach high normal levels. I said, oh my God, why do we have to give anything more than that? But what we also found out that the minimum dose required to reach the high normal level is 50. At 50, you're basically just giving you what your body's already making. And so based on that theory, what we found out was we also give 25mg and the levels directly drop. So we're assuming that the body is going to negative feedback and is studying on its own production because you get from outside sources. So that is happening is. I think it's already true for that one. And so I always want to give them more than what your body is producing. So I usually. The dose that I Give is about 100 milligrams, which is about 104 sprays.

I have a technical question, which My.

Eyes are gonna glaze over here. I can tell.

No, I don't think. Well, I'm. I always have a hard time. Help. Help me draw the line between antioxidant stress and inflammation.

Oof. Okay.

Like, because we say inflammation's a lot of the. What's behind a lot of disease, but also, as you talked about, it's all the oxidative stress. So how do we.

What comes first?

Is it a continuum?

Well, that's what I'm trying to understand. I'm not drawing my. In my brain. I'm not drawing the line. So do you have a line to draw for us?

So I will. I will. So 2023, Western University School of Medicine over here in Pomona, California, did a clinical trial. They did a human trial with. With our product. It was a 30 patient trial. It was a three day trial. Three days. You cannot expect much in three days with a nutraceutical product like this. But I just said, just do the Three day trial, I really want to see the absorption is there or not. But the doctor that was doing the trial was also an immunologist. And he goes, you know what? If I'm going to do the three day trial and if you say that glutathione gets absorbed intracellularly within the first, first 15 minutes or so, I should see a response pretty fast. And so what he did was he applied the glutathione and then he measured the blood draw. See, the levels went up in the rbc. So that was that, that, that part of the study was done. But then he started checking the markers on melanaldehydes, MDA levels that actually dropped in the first four hours after applying glutathione. So I said, okay, great, so this is also working. So it's, it's reducing oxygen stress down. He went one step further and what he did was draw the blood, infected the blood with Mycobacterium infection and was measuring all the cytokines, the IL2, the IL12, TNF alpha, interferon, gammas, because they wanted to see if there's, is there an immune response to this thing because that's where the inflammation comes in, right? From infections. And so when they did that infections, what they found out was all the immune markers in the glutathione groups went up. It went up to the point that within one hour post infection, the bacterial load went down. In the treatment group, the placebo group, it didn't matter, it just kept on going up. In the treatment group, the actual load went down. And so the question you ask me is that, hey, what comes first? Oxidative stress and inflammation. I think the first thing that comes first is oxidative stress. And if you can lift oxidative stress in the butt, the inflammation comes down as well.

Just because your cells can handle all the other stuff.

All the other stuff, yeah, because all you're doing is you're helping, you're aiding the body to detoxify, to process better to remove all the free radicals because a lot of the free radicals are binding to those receptors and not allowing the body to respond properly. So if you remove all those free radicals, the body responds better, can bring the inflammation down pretty fast. It's not an anti inflammatory drug itself. It's a secondary response that the body's experiencing, but the primary is reducing the oxidative stress down and reduces free radicals.

Interesting. Okay, cool. Where can people find you? Where can people find more?

So we can go to orowellness a u r o wellness.com you can buy off the website. But more importantly, we only allow physicians to. To allow them to stock it because I want them to help the patients as well. So they can go to physicians offices and pick up from there as well or they can come to the website.

Okay, we'll put that. We'll make sure that goes in the show notes.

And obviously we carry the.

Yeah, we carry it because we. I mean, I use it. We love it. And you're going to start using it too.

I am going to start using it.

He was just about to say that. Actually.

I was just about to say that. Yes.

All right, so I'm going to close out the podcast.

Thank you again because we're running for sharing your heart to the product.

Yeah, like your dad sounds really special. So thank you for being here for this episode of the feel freaking amazing podcast and joining us and sharing about Glutaryl and for the listeners. Hope this was valuable for you and thanks for joining us for another episode. So thanks for being here.

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