Every one of your cells, all 300,000,000,000 of them,
produce an antioxidant called glutathione. Imagine how important this must be if every single cell in your body is responsible for making it. It’s so important that it’s called the
Master Antioxidant.
Because you make it in your own body there should be no need to supplement with it. And there isn’t for a couple of reasons.
First, when taken orally, it’s broken down by your digestive system and can no longer be used inside the cells (1). So it does NO GOOD to take an oral glutathione supplement!
Second, it’s not necessary to supplement because if one cell fails to make proper
amounts, you have several hundred trillion others that still
will.
It is vital to produce proper amounts of intracellular (inside of the cell) antioxidants because they are what combat oxidative stress (2). Oxidative stress is caused by using oxygen as fuel. So, quite literally, just breathing and being
alive is causing oxidative stress in your body. You are always producing various degrees of oxidative stress (3).
And how does your body deal with that stress? With antioxidants, glutathione being the most important of them all.
But most of us are under more than normal amounts of oxidative stress so our bodies can’t make enough glutathione to keep up. Things like smoking, too much sugar, mental stress, lack of sleep, and too little exercise can increase oxidative stress beyond what our bodies are capable of handling (4).
This causes inflammation EVERYWHERE! Inflammation in the brain! Inflammation in the gut! Inflammation in the joints! Inflammation in the
veins and arteries! Do you see a pattern yet about where most diseases start?
Inflammation! The body’s inability to handle oxidative stress! To add insult to injury, we produce even less glutathione as we age (5). Making it even harder to control systemic inflammatory damage.
When you are fighting excess oxidative stress, you will also have a harder time losing weight (6), gaining muscle (7), and maintaining proper testosterone levels as you age (8). Oxidative stress has been linked to premature skin aging (9), greying hair or hair loss (10), weight gain (11), arthritis (12), cancer (13), Alzheimers (14), and cardiovascular diseases (15).
So how do we fix this excessive inflammatory condition inside of our bodies?
Well, I can ask you to eat better, sleep more, exercise, and eliminate stress from your life but that would sound like a fairy tale to most of you. The reality is that most of you won’t do that (I still want you to try, though), so you need to supplement with something.
