Glutathione GSH

Glutathione is the body’s most essential and powerful antioxidant. However, glutathione performs countless other essential functions for your body. For example, glutathione enables other antioxidants, like vitamins A and C, to continuously perform their antioxidant activities effectively. As antioxidants neutralize free radicals, they themselves are neutralized as well. This occurs because in order to neutralize free radicals, antioxidants must give up an electron to free radicals. Glutathione’s presence in the body allows antioxidants to be restored to their standard electron configuration and become active antioxidants once again. When glutathione levels are high, this process takes place almost immediately after an antioxidant donates an electron. As a result, glutathione allows the body to maintain the levels of other functional antioxidants. However, glutathione itself is depleted as it performs its various functions. Therefore, it is necessary to replenish the body’s levels of glutathione to achieve optimal health and antioxidant protection.

In order to function effectively, your body needs glutathione to keep its organs running optimally. In order to deal with standard environmental stresses, your body needs to be flexible and capable of adapting and continuing to function normally. Free radicals are the detrimental effect of the human species’ reliance on oxygen for survival. Oxygen is a highly reactive element, so when it is circulated throughout the body, it is inevitably going to react with other elements in your body, causing damage. In order to counter this oxygen-related cellular damage, each cell in your body produces glutathione, the body’s principal antioxidant. Glutathione blocks oxygen-induced and other free radicals from doing damage to cells. When fewer cells are damaged by free radicals, the risk of cancerous growths becomes smaller and smaller. In summary, glutathione is the body’s most powerful antioxidant defense against free radicals caused by the body’s intake of oxygen. Glutathione needs to be replaced continuously because it is depleted in the body when it performs its antioxidant functions.

Glutathione also plays part in a synergistic relationship with other antioxidants in your body. Glutathione is the keystone to the performance of other antioxidants in the body. While antioxidants alone are powerful beneficial substances in the body, they break up as they are used, and, without glutathione, your body cannot restore them to their effective forms. The synergistic relationship between glutathione and the other antioxidants in your body is called antioxidant cycling. Antioxidant cycling is the process of the antioxidants in your body extending other antioxidants’ lives and making them more effective. The usual process goes as follows: Vitamin E gives up an electron, neutralizing a free radical. Vitamin E now becomes a weak free radical. Vitamin C, along with the enzyme Q10, come to its aid, converting Vitamin E back into its standard antioxidant form. By converting Vitamin E back into an antioxidant, Vitamin C becomes a free radical. Alpha-lipoic acid and glutathione recycle Vitamin C, returning it to its antioxidant form. Glutathione is deactivated by this process. It is easy to see that, without glutathione, your body would not be able to utilize the other antioxidants like vitamins E and C.

When glutathione converts other antioxidants to their functional forms, it loses an electron, and becomes ineffective. To convert ineffective glutathione back to effective glutathione, your body needs to synthesize its own glutathione. However, the production of glutathione is hindered by the limiting reactant in the synthesis process, cysteine. To restore your glutathione levels, you need to provide your body with enough cysteine to produce the requisite amount of glutathione necessary to convert the deactivated glutathione in your body back to reduced, functional glutathione. As you age, your body produces less and less of its own glutathione. Therefore, it is becomes more and more important to increase your body’s glutathione production as you get age and mature. In addition, those individuals with an already existing ailment are producing suboptimal amounts of glutathione, and will benefit from increasing their glutathione levels by supplementing with cysteine.

In conclusion, glutathione is the body’s only antioxidant that is manufactured internally. Glutathione is necessary for cell survival, and plays numerous protective functions for the body in general. Among glutathione’s benefits is that it enables the body to garner the positive effects of other antioxidants that are ingested, like vitamins C and E. This process is called antioxidant cycling. Glutathione is depleted in the body as it performs its duties, and needs to be replaced in order for the body to run optimally. Glutathione is synthesized within the body, however, synthesis ends when the body runs out of cysteine. Cysteine, then, should be supplemented in order to allow your body to produce the necessary amounts of glutathione. Because of glutathione’s important functions in the body, it is correct to say that it is the key to maximum antioxidant activity in the body.

Sources: http://hwmaint.ep.physoc.org/cgi/content/abstract/82/2/291 (antioxidant cycling)
http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.arplant.49.1.249 (antioxidant functions in the body)