| We are excited to add to our high-quality supplement line up TruLipoGlutathione™, an innovative liposomal product to enhance cellular delivery and bioavailability of our critical cellular energy powerhouse, Glutathione. Together with our incredibly effective TruMitochondrial Boost™ (L-ergothioneine) formulation, you now have two of the most effective options available to naturally enhance cellular energy. Both of these cellular energy enhancers help with the stress our bodies face from many directions these days: physical illness, dietary imbalance, COVID shot adverse effects, environmental stress, and the mental-psychological stress of the uncertainty and upheaval in our daily lives. You can read more on L-ergothioneine in my earlier Health Tips, available in our archive at www.TruthforHealth.org.
Today, I want to focus briefly on our new option to boost Glutathione. Then in an upcoming Health Tip, I will explain how these two products work by different mechanisms to have a synergistic impact to improve cellular mitochondrial energy production. The impact on your quality of life, daily energy, mental clarity and overall health can be quite remarkable, as I have experienced myself since I added both of these products to my own regimen.
What is Glutathione?
Glutathione is a small molecule with a big job: helping protect your cells from the wear and tear of everyday life. Often called the body’s “master antioxidant,” glutathione helps control oxidative stress, supports natural detoxification pathways, and helps immune cells function properly. Your body makes it from three amino acids—the building blocks of protein in your diet—called glutamate, cysteine, and glycine. Your liver serves as a major production and distribution center, while cells throughout your body also make their own supply.
Making glutathione and maintaining enough of it are not the same thing. When stress increases from any source—mental or physical—the glutathione demand skyrockets. If the body lacks the raw materials—such as adequate protein in your diet—to make more glutathione every day, this essential defense system comes under pressure.
How do you support healthy glutathione production with practical steps that allow your body to maintain the cellular protection your body relies on every day? For many of us, diet is just not enough, especially as we get older, or are trying to recover from the damage of illness or the COVID shots, or life stresses. That’s exactly the reason I decided to add TruLipoGlutathione™ to our store for my patients and our readers.
When Your Body’s Defenses Face Greater Demands
Your cells constantly produce reactive oxygen species (ROS)—highly reactive molecules that form during energy production for our daily activities, immune responses to triggers we encounter daily, and other normal body processes. Environmental exposures to chemicals, allergens, pollulants and endocrine disruptors add significantly to that ROS burden. In controlled amounts, reactive oxygen species serve useful purposes, but when they overwhelm antioxidant defenses, they create oxidative stress that damages fats, proteins, other cellular components, and increases the destructive inflammatory burden on the body tissues.
Glutathione helps keep the balance in check between ROS and antioxidant effect. But it is difficult to maintain healthy levels of glutathione in our daily stressful lives, with aging, inadequate nutrition, and increased exposure to oxidants all combining to make it harder to maintain adequate glutathione. Poor nutrition with low protein diets clearly leads to inadequate amounts of the amino acids needed to manufacture glutathione. Certain medications, environmental chemicals, and ongoing oxidative stress increase the need for glutathione, yet without the building blocks necessary, the body can’t make it. Surgery, illness, strenuous exercise training are all examples of added stressors that greatly increase demand for glutathione.
Think of glutathione as part of a rechargeable cellular defense system. In its reduced form, called GSH, it is ready to participate in antioxidant reactions. After use, some becomes an oxidized form, called GSSG. Your cells recycle it back into GSH so it can work again.
Maintaining this balance in glutathione is critical for your cells to adequately respond to everyday challenges, acute new situations and demanding chronic ones, without allowing oxidative damage to dominate and damage your body.
When Life is Uncertain, Support Your Defenses From Within
During times of uncertainty, worry, and fear, stress can feel relentless. And the effects may reach beyond how you feel emotionally. Research links prolonged psychological stress with oxidative stress. Over time, this imbalance can contribute to cellular wear and tear. Emotional stress and oxidative stress are not the same thing, but they interact and intensify each other in causing damage to the body over time.
Chronic stress challenges the balance between use and loss with production and recycling of our glutathione stores. Uncertainty and fear drain your supplies and limit replenishment of the defense mechanisms upon which our bodies depend. You cannot always control the chaos around you, or make the world less demanding. But you can give added support to your body’s internal cellular defenses while you navigate daily life challenges. That is where supplementing glutathione, the body’s “master antioxidant,” provides a tool to help improve your cellular energy and resilience to deal with stressors.
We can’t really switch off emotions or eliminate life’s pressures. But we can make the choice to support our body’s glutathione production to help maintain an antioxidant system our cells literally must have every day! TruLipoGlutathione™ added to your supplement plan is an additional way to help your body cope with stressful times.
More Than an Antioxidant: What Glutathione Supports
- Everyday cellular protection
Glutathione works with protective enzymes to neutralize peroxides and other reactive compounds before they damage cellular structures. It also helps restore vitamin C to its active form, which in turn helps recycle vitamin E. Glutathione doesn’t just work alone, it supports a connected antioxidant network with your other core vitamins and hormones. We will explore these interactions in more detail in upcoming Health Tips. But here are some big areas to consider right off the bat:
- Your body’s natural detoxification pathways
Your body already has sophisticated systems for processing and eliminating unwanted substances—and glutathione is part of that machinery. With help from enzymes, it attaches to certain reactive compounds, including some drug metabolites and environmental chemicals, making them easier for the body to process and remove.
This attachment process, called conjugation, is one reason glutathione plays such an important role in liver and cellular health. Glutathione supports normal detoxification processes going on 24/7 in our liver—but I am not saying that taking glutathione “flushes out” every toxin or is a substitute for medical treatment after a harmful exposure.
Immune cells need glutathione to maintain their internal antioxidant balance and carry out their work. These include lymphocytes, part of our family of white blood cells, (including cancer cells). Maintaining adequate glutathione helps support the cellular conditions these defenses need to function properly. Human supplementation studies have reported improvements in laboratory measures of immune-cell activity. These findings are very encouraging, especially for individuals prone to or more susceptible to infections or with a weakened immune system, such as those who have taken the COVID shots.
Glutathione helps protect cellular membranes and participates in processes that regulate proteins, cell division, and mitochondrial function. Mitochondria are the cell’s energy factories producing the majority of the usable energy for every cell in our body. Supporting the mitochondrial anti-oxidant environment helps maintain normal mitochondrial cellular energy production which in turn helps our cells to function optimally. This is another important foundation for healthy aging. Early research also suggests possible benefits of glutathione supplementation to help reduce visible signs of skin aging. In a 12-week, randomized, placebo-controlled study involving 60 healthy women, researchers found that 250 mg daily of glutathione showed improvement in wrinkle measurements and skin elasticity. Coupled with estradiol therapy after menopause, this is an exciting option to consider.
Human Research On Glutathione Supplementation
One of the strongest findings overall from studies of oral glutathione
supplementation is the increase of the body’s glutathione stores, and favorable changes in markers of oxidative stress and immune-cell function.
In a six-month, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, 54 healthy, nonsmoking adults took 250 mg or 1,000 mg of reduced oral glutathione daily, or a placebo. At six months:
- The 250 mg group showed increases of approximately 17% in whole-blood glutathione and 29% in red-blood-cell glutathione.
- The 1,000 mg group showed increases of approximately 30–35% in red blood cells, plasma, and lymphocytes.
- Both supplemented groups showed improvement in the balance of oxidized to reduced glutathione, a marker researchers use to assess oxidative stress.
- At three months, natural killer cell activity in the higher-dose group more than doubled compared with placebo.
I highlighted this study because of an important finding: the use of Setria® oral glutathione, a patented delivery that enhanced delivery and bioavailability. The study findings supported the ingredient Setria®’s ability to replenish glutathione stores and favorably change oxidative stress and immune-cell function in the body. Setria® is the branded ingredient featured in the unique formulation of our TruLipoGlutathione™! |
