What Is Glutathione? How It Works + Mitochondrial Benefits

Watch the full video on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v7h1cu2-what-is-glutathione-how-it-works-mitochondrial-benefits.html

What Is Glutathione and How Does It Actually Work in Your Mitochondria?

Glutathione is the molecule your cells use to shut down free radicals before those free radicals wreck your mitochondria. This is going to be a few slides worth of explanation, but once you see where it sits in the chain, the whole thing makes sense.

Start with the energy pathway, because glutathione only matters in the context of what it is cleaning up.

Inside every cell you have mitochondria, and inside those mitochondria you have something called the electron transport chain, which is a series of protein complexes that pass electrons down a line to build ATP, the molecule your body runs on. Electrons go in one end, energy comes out the other.

What are free radicals? Well, a free radical, if you remember in my master class that I did about mitochondrial function and ATP production on the electron transport chain, what occurs through the process of transporting these electrons through the electron transport chain to produce ATP is sometimes those electrons can fall off.

This can happen because of damaged mitochondria, or poor cardiolipin health, which is the fat that lines the inner mitochondrial membrane and holds those protein complexes in position. When that lining degrades, the handoff between complexes gets sloppy, and sloppy handoffs leak electrons.

And when those electrons fall off and those free radicals exist, they create a lot of chaos, damage inside of the cell, which reduces its efficiency and ability to produce ATP. This is what happens with age, more free radicals, more damage, poor mitochondrial health, less efficiency.

That's just basically the concept, a leaky chain producing loose electrons that cause damage, which slows energy production and in turn causes more leaking, so the whole cycle keeps feeding itself.

Which raises the question of where glutathione actually fits into this chain of damage.

Glutathione is a tripeptide, meaning it is made of three amino acids: glutamate, cysteine and glycine. And the cysteine's thiol group is the business end, meaning this is what's doing all the heavy lifting in terms of managing the free radicals.

A thiol group is a sulfur atom paired with a hydrogen, and sulfur holds onto its electrons loosely enough that it will hand one off without falling apart itself, and that loose grip is the whole trick behind how this works. A free radical is an unstable molecule missing an electron, and it will tear one out of whatever is nearest, which is usually your cell membrane or your DNA, so instead glutathione steps in and hands one over on its own.

So this peptide, when we inject it, is going into the cell, donating those electrons from the thiol group of cysteine and basically neutralizing those free radicals.

OK, bottom line is if we're going to take out the nerdspeak, when you inject glutathione, it goes into your mitochondria and neutralizes all the free radical electrons that are happening in there, creating damage by basically shutting them down with another electron that has the effect of shutting it down.

Once glutathione gives up that electron it is spent, and it has to get recycled back into its usable form, which is why people talk about a glutathione pool the same way they talk about an NAD+ pool, since what you are topping up is a reservoir that cycles rather than a single dose you burn through once.

OK, so what does all this mean and what are the benefits? Well, what this does for you as far as actual benefit for you of injecting glutathione is it's going to help you to detoxify by improving the function of the liver. Immune function, skin health, neurological function and mitochondrial protection follow from the same mechanism, because every one of those tissues is running the same leaky chain.

More is not better here, since this whole system runs on balance rather than volume, so dosing past what your body needs just doesn't buy you anything extra.