Glutathione, A Protein Vital to Life

Glutathione, (pronounced gloota-thigh-own) you should get used to saying it. It is going to become as popular a term as cholesterol. Glutathione is a fairly recent discovery and over the last 20 years, there have been over 25,000 scientific papers written about it. If you type ‘glutathione’ into Medline on the Web you’ll find 44,000 references. 25,000 of these are scientific papers, most from the past 3 years.

So, what is Glutathione? Glutathione (GSH) is a small protein substance inside every cell in your body and it is vital to life. Without GSH your cells would disintegrate from uncontrolled oxidation regardless of how much or what type of anti-oxidants you were consuming. Without glutathione, your body would have little resistance to disease. Viruses, bacteria and cancer would rule the day. GSH prevents your liver from choking with toxic overload. Yes, glutathione does all this…it is the body’s “master anti-oxidant”, it feeds your white blood cells, including lymphocytes, T-cells and leucocytes and it is your cell’s transport mechanism for ridding the body of toxic material, oxidation breakdown products and damage from pollution.

Without glutathione, all the anti-oxidants that you take are unable to work. When vitamin C or E or lycopene or other anti-oxidants reduce a free radical, that free radical gets handed off to glutathione for transport out of the cell. The same occurs when ultra-violet light, car exhaust, radiation, or lawn chemicals damage a cell; the damage is removed by GSH. A patient, admitted to an ER with an overdose of certain drugs, such as acetaminophen, is given an injection of n-acetyl-cysteine, which serves to rapidly but temporarily boost the glutathione level of the ill patient and remove the offending drug toxins from his system.

Your body’s ability to recognize and deal with foreign invaders, such as bacteria and viruses as well as cancer cells, depends to a very large degree on the level of glutathione available to your immune system. The greater the supply of GSH, the higher the immune response and the healthier a person can stay.

Many clinical studies have shown that GSH may address some of the major health issues of today: diabetes, heart disease, strokes, asthma, hepatitis, AIDS, and the diseases of aging such as Alzheimer’s and arthritis. The Lancet in 1994 (344: 796-798) showed that low glutathione levels were associated with neuro-degenerative diseases such as MS (multiple sclerosis), ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and others.

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic