In today’s toxic world full of heavy metals, plastics, mold, and synthetic chemicals, there is one superstar nutrient working overtime to keep your body functioning optimally. Meet glutathione: your body’s master detoxifier!
No other nutrient works harder to eliminate mercury, lead, aluminum, mycotoxins, parabens, phthalates, and the hundreds of other toxic substances we come into contact with on a daily basis. I literally refer to it as “glorious glutathione” in my New York Times bestselling book, The Autoimmune Solution, because that’s how much I love it! It’s incredibly helpful for those of us dealing with chronic illnesses such as mold toxicity, heavy metal overload, autoimmunity, Hashimoto’s, Graves’, and other conditions.
In this article, I’ll be covering what glutathione is, why we need it, the health benefits of glutathione, and how to get more of this powerful nutrient!
What is Glutathione?
Glutathione is a nutrient naturally produced by your liver that can be found in nearly every cell of the human body. It is comprised of three amino acids: cysteine, glycine, and glutamate. Glutathione helps your body process and eliminate toxins, supports energy production, is a potent free radical scavenger, and boosts your immune system. Recent research has even correlated levels of glutathione in your cells as a predictor of how long you will live!1
Although your body does produce some glutathione naturally, a poor diet, toxins, medications, stress, and illness deplete your glutathione levels, or halt production completely. Exposure to heavy metals such as mercury, cadmium, lead, or arsenic can also lead to glutathione depletion.
Low glutathione levels are a critical factor in the onset of inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and psoriasis.2 Studies have shown that patients with autoimmune conditions tend to have lower blood concentrations of glutathione than those without autoimmunity.3 Without enough glutathione, your body cannot properly detox, which means toxins linger in your bloodstream or get stored in fat, wreaking havoc on your immune system and setting you up for chronic illness.4
Living in a Toxic World: Why We Need Glutathione
Every single one of us is exposed to an unprecedented amount of toxins in this day and age. There are over 80,000 chemicals registered for use in the United States, and each year about another 1,700 are added to that list. Many of these industrial chemicals are the basic ingredients in our cosmetics and personal care products. An average of seven new industrial chemicals get approval by the U.S. government daily, and 80% of these are approved in three weeks or less, with little or no safety testing done.
You read that correctly! The FDA does not investigate or test for the safety of personal care products before consumers buy them! Instead, the Cosmetic Ingredient Review (CIR), an industry-appointed and funded panel, reviews the safety of cosmetic ingredients. According to EWG, there are approximately 10,500 ingredients used in cosmetics in our country, and in its 30-year history, the CIR has screened only 11 of those ingredients. This means that, if we do the math again, nearly 90% of cosmetics ingredients are left unreviewed and untested for safety.
The consequences of our increasingly toxic world can already be seen in the skyrocketing rates of allergies, asthma, cancer, and autoimmune disease over the last half century.
In 2003, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) partnered with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City to test the “body burden” of the average American. That’s not people who are working with chemicals or living in polluted areas, just regular people who they assumed were relatively safe. Out of 210 different substances tested, they found a total of 167 in the group with an average of 91 toxins in each person’s body, including industrial chemicals, heavy metals, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), insecticides, dioxin, and benzene.5 Of the 91 toxins found in the average person, at least 53 are known to suppress the immune system. This is a key piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding today’s autoimmune epidemic and the surge in chronic illness.
Maintaining a healthy diet and lifestyle is a good place to start when it comes to keeping your immune system functioning optimally. I recommend a two-step approach for taming the toxins: 1.) minimize your exposure, and 2.) support your detox pathways. However, the bombardment of environmental toxins we face each day — in the form of water and air pollution, pesticides and herbicides in our food, and chemicals in our beauty products and cleaning products — requires us to turn to our body’s most powerful methods of detoxification to keep up with our individual toxic burdens. That’s where glutathione comes in!
