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How to Keep Your Glutathione Up with Diet and Supplements

  • Barbara Depta
How to Keep Your Glutathione Up with Diet and Supplements

 

Glutathione is the front line in our body’s defense system. Inactivity, insomnia, pollution, and even healthy aging are just a few pieces of normal life that can increase damaging oxidation and inflammation. In our last post, we covered the lifestyle decisions that can enhance our glutathione. Exercise, good sleep, and getting rid of stressful triggers with yoga or meditation are some of the most powerful ways to decrease oxidative stress and how to increase your glutathione.

But what if we don’t have the time to exercise or sleep enough every day? When you’re being pulled from all sides, sometimes it feels impossible to take a moment for yourself, let alone an extra hour for a yoga session!

The good news is: you can keep up a healthy antioxidant system with what you eat too! 

The best way to increase your glutathione levels is by eating glutathione rich foods.

When all else fails, natural supplements can raise glutathione as well.  More is not always better when it comes to antioxidant supplements. In fact, taking high dose vitamin C and E supplements can prevent some of the positive adaptations to endurance training. Yikes! You don’t want your anti-inflammatory supplements to work so well that they block healthy, adaptive inflammation too! 

Instead of focusing on antioxidants themselves, we’ll be looking at the supplements that can raise your whole antioxidant system. Plus, we’ll look into the research behind some bunk claims from less trustworthy sources on the internet. Even though we’re taking a look at the research to empower you to make your best decisions, it is still important to discuss any new supplements with your healthcare provider.  

     The Best Glutathione Food Sources

    • For plants, fruit is generally higher than vegetables. Apples, pears, bananas, oranges, tomatoes, and watermelon (if you eat enough of it!) have the highest levels. 
    • For proteins walnuts and almonds are the nut of choice, and most unprocessed meats are good sources.

    Besides your greens and pungent veggies, other sulfur-rich foods help keep glutathione levels up. For a list of other foods high in sulfur, see our post “Not your normal antioxidants: glutathione and sulfur”.

    How to Increase Glutathione levels

    Generally speaking, if you have a condition that depletes antioxidants or lowers muscle strength like natural aging, supplementation might be helpful to get your levels back to a healthy baseline.  But if you are already pretty healthy, antioxidant supplements might be doing more harm - especially if you’re trying to maximize your workout! 

    Take for example, a study done with Taekwondo competitors. Yes, short-term supplementing with 2000 mg of vitamin C and 1400 IUs of vitamin E (those are some high doses!) lowers muscle damage and inflammatory responses.  But it’s been shown over and over that whether you’re training for strength or for endurance, as much as those antioxidants might lower the pain, they can also lower the gains (check out this study, this one, this detailed review on antioxidants in resistance training and this great review of antioxidants in endurance training). If you want to prevent massive damage to your muscles after a workout, go for it, but don’t go crying when long-term use leads to weaker, slower muscles! 

    Find glycine in animal products like meat, low-temperature treated whey protein, bone broth, or at lower levels in veggie proteins like nuts and beans. It’s especially high in our versatile and delicious collagen blend!

    Think that going carnivore might pass as a good way to get your glycine? Think again! If you’re eating a lot of meat and not enough collagen you might be putting yourself at a disadvantage. Because of the way one of the proteins which is high in meat (methionine) interacts with glycine (which is high in collagen and organ meats and higher in plant-based diets), you should get 1 gram of collagen for every 10 grams of animal meat. This translates to grabbing one serving of collagen for every half pound steak you throw on the grill! It may be hard to get enough glycine to support your best joint, bone, mental, and anti-oxidative health in your food alone, so think about varying up your routine a bit with supplemental sources of glycine.

    Keeping a good level of selenium might be harder than it looks. Levels in food can be low or high depending on where you live, and might be changing with global climate changes, so it’s hard to say if you’re getting enough even with a healthy diet. Get it in a handful of Brazil nuts, most seafood, and organ meats. Wondering if you’re getting too much? Stay tuned for our next post on antioxidant recycling, but we’ll give you a hint now: watch out for a fruity breath!

    • Phase II inducers.  This may get a little technical, but we’ll keep it brief.  For the same reason that exercise can create oxidative damage and then compensate to make you stronger, plant chemicals can have a similar response.  Silymarin in milk thistle and curcumin in turmeric may have a similar positive effect on glutathione levels, but studies in humans haven’t been done. Since there are so much better ways to increase glutathione, we don’t recommend these as front-line approaches.

    Bottom Line How To Increase Glutathione.

    Work hard, rest hard, and eat a varied, eat good glutathione food sources. Such as a diet that includes a lot of vegetables, high quality organ meats, and the occasional supplement to maximize your glutathione. The most impactful recommendations are:

    Eat the rainbow, including greens and pungent white veggies like garlic and onion.

    Try out a Mediterannean diet with lots of plants, some seafood and meats, and enough olive oil to bathe in. (Just kidding, but studies use 1 liter (about 1 quart) a week as a healthy amount.)

    Alcohol saps your antioxidants, so drink an amount that lets you feel great the next day and consider wine or non-alcoholic beer.

    Get glutathione from food in juicy fruits and veggies, walnuts, almonds, and lean meats.

    Get glycine from food in collagen, like our delicious collagen recovery blend.

    Get other nutrients to support your antioxidant system in liver and organ meats, poultry, lean meats, seafood

    If lifestyle and diet aren’t going to work for you, some supplements you could consider include glutathione, N-acetyl-cysteine, glycine, and selenium-rich foods.

    Whether you’re a young athlete pushing yourself to your limit, or your youth has been ousted by wisdom, start with your lifestyle, then focus in on what you eat, and finally supplement if you’re  worried about low glutathione status to keep your defenses up!

    Your glutathione levels might be up, but is the whole system working in top shape? Learn more about enhancing your whole-body system to defend against inflammation and oxidation in our next post on the micronutrients that support your whole antioxidant system.

    We want to hear from you!

    Comment below with your thoughts and questions and we’ll get back to you in future posts. 

    Click here to subscribe to your trusted source for nutrition, supplements and healthy living information.  See our next post in this series on total antioxidant capacity with “How to Keep Your Antioxidant System Running Smoothly”. You do not want to miss out on it!

    ***Note*** We strive to be your fact-based source for nutrition and supplement information. Unlike other companies that are just trying to sell you their stuff with clickbait and fake news, we make sure there’s a research study to backup everything we say.  Want to learn more about a topic? Click on the red text to be redirected to a scientific article. We believe that if you have the right information, you’ll be empowered to make the best decision for yourself. And if you decide that our science-backed products are right for you, then hey, that’s a great perk for both of us!

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    Written by registered dietitian, Detrick Snyder, MPH, RDN. Updated 09/22/2020

    1 comment

    Patricia Fenkell

    Jul 18, 2020 at 22:06

    I’d been searching for information on Glutathione for a couple of days trying to find a list of foods by highest %. I haven’t found it, but what I found here instead was a comprehensive collection of information about this antioxidant how it works in conjunction with other peptides and how they can be healthfully increased. What I came away with is the knowledge that my diet may already be supporting an adequate amount of it. I especially appreciated the information given for specific groups given, i.e. athletes and seniors.
    My only question that I’m not completely clear about is how much cooking or heating of vegetables or meat can occur before rendered these foods ineffective. Would fermentation would be preferable?

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