Powerful new ways to much better health....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 10-4-2012

The health meaning of panacea is solution or remedy for all diseases.  And a phrase with a similar meaning is cure-all.

Is there such a thing?

Likely not but regular exercise comes close.

AND there are also 3 things in your body right now that may even come closer than exercise to being panaceas.  Here they are:

They each tend to create good health and help you keep it if you have an abundance of them. 

Not having enough of them is a virtual guarantee of bad health and poor recovery from illness.

So it would clearly pay you to know what they are and how to ensure you have enough.

1.  We just posted last week about vitamin D3.  Many people unfortunately including many doctors and some otherwise well informed health experts do not yet know you need 3,000 to 4,000 iu a day to twice that much for good health.  But that’s what people used to get from sun exposure and don’t now.

Vitamin D3, when you take that much, does fewer things than the other two in this post. But the list of things it does do is impressive. 

Getting enough vitamin D3 has benefits ranging from the cancer protection or reduction we posted on last week to helping prevent Alzheimer’s disease, to keeping your bones strong, to making autoimmune disease less likely, to making vaccines, including the flu vaccine, more likely to work. 

So vitamin D3 DOES give you outstanding and extremely valuable health protection if you take enough though there are things it doesn’t do.  It’s not a panacea.  But it IS that desirable for good health.

2.  We’ve also posted on the next one. 

Eating a diet with several kinds of carotenes and perhaps taking some beta carotene in your multi and taking lycopene have many health benefits notably including lessening sun damage to your skin and preventing or turning down cancers.

Although some of the foods high in carotenes such as broccoli have cancer prevention effects and other health benefits when eaten raw, eating each of these foods cooked with some kind of fat or oil, notably extra virgin olive oil puts more of them into your blood stream where you get the most benefits from them otherwise.

Squash, yams, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, and dark green vegetables such as kale, broccoli, chard, collard greens etc all are high in carotenes.

And I did a blog post on two recent discoveries about carotenes.

When you get an abundance of them from these foods people think you look healthier!

Why?  You actually look different because your skin has a slightly reddish color that people have come to associate with a glow of good health.

This is not entirely conscious.  People know you look healthier even if they aren’t sure why!

But the second one is the on kind of carotene that tests strongly enough that it comes close to being a panacea.

There was a study done showing that the more alpha carotene people had in their blood the better their health was.  If they had a lot their health was good and their risk of death was way lower than average.  And the reverse was true.

Given this, besides eating a lot of the vegetables high in carotenes in general most of which have some alpha carotene, eating the food that has the most is important.

When I saw that study, I looked it up.  The vegetable which had by far the most alpha carotene was, CARROTS.

They are also high of course in beta carotene.  But being high in alpha carotene may be far more important.

At that time, my wife had been after me to eat some carrot sticks with my raw broccoli florets in my weekday lunches “for variety.” 

I’m not that found of carrots and was resisting a bit.

Bingo!  The minute I found carrots are highest in alpha carotene I realized my wife was creating good luck in my life again. 

I immediately endorsed her idea to include carrots in my weekday lunches and have eaten them ever since, including some a few minutes ago for my lunch as I write this now!

Is alpha carotene a panacea?  Apparently it comes pretty close.  Best of all, it’s not hard to get.  Almost every food store you are likely to walk into sells carrots in some form. 

So since I’ve posted on those two separately, why do today’s post?

3.  Because the third thing on this list IS a panacea or it’s so powerful it’s extremely close.

It’s less well known than the first two but may be as important to your health as the first two added together.  Yet few people know it exists!

It’s called glutathione.  Even more than alpha carotene, if your level of glutathione is low your health is not likely to be good and is likely to get worse.

Fortunately the reverse is also true. High levels almost guarantee good health.

Dr Mark Hyman, who is one of the best and most fully educated doctors now alive,  recently posted an article about glutathione on Facebook.

After reading Dr Hyman’s article, I thought I should pass on the information including how to boost your own levels of glutathione.

Virtually every molecular exchange of every process in your body causes free radicals to be released.  That includes getting vigorous exercise.

But free radicals are so interactive they create damage everywhere they go unless you have some kind of protection from them.

The protections you have are called antioxidants. 

Antioxidants prevent damage and chronic inflammation and most cancers.  And by preventing LDL from being oxidized they help prevent heart attacks and strokes and other blood vessel diseases.  Those diseases also include every kind of mental decline.

That’s why eating fruits and vegetables high in vitamin C are so important.  So is eating health OK fats and oils high in all the parts of the natural vitamin E complex.  So does eating foods high in carotenes and getting enough of the animal form of vitamin A as long as you don’t overdose on it.

Taking vitamin C and the natural form of vitamin E and some form of vitamin A and 200 mcg a day of selenium adds to your antioxidants also.

The antioxidant supplement alpha lipoic acid is so important and valuable in part because it’s soluble in both water and oils.  So if you take it, you get extra antioxidant protection everywhere in your body.

But it seems that your body contains a substance almost as effective as all of these put together and it even is believed to restart those antioxidants so your body can use them over and over again for multiple health benefits.

That substance is real and some is in your body right now. That’s what glutathione is and why it’s so incredibly important.

But for your best shot at good health, you need a high level of glutathione.

How do you do that?

The key is to know what it is made up out of.

Dr Hyman said this:  "What is Glutathione?

Glutathione is a very simple molecule that is produced naturally all the time in your body. It is a combination of three simple building blocks of protein or amino acids - cysteine, glycine and glutamine.

The secret of its power is the sulfur (SH) chemical groups it contains. Sulfur is a sticky, smelly molecule. It acts like fly paper and all the bad things in the body stick onto it, including free radicals and toxins like mercury and other heavy metals."

So eating foods or taking supplements that contain these building blocks and anything that helps your body make glutathione out of them will boost it.

a) No surprise, eating onions, garlic, and other related foods works because they are each high in sulfur compounds.  Nor does it hurt that these foods have other health benefits.

Then Dr Hyman added something I’d not realized. 

b) ALL the cruciferous vegetables are high in sulfur compounds. So in addition to making great foods for fat loss when you eat them raw AND helping you to prevent cancer both when eaten raw and when eaten cooked with an oil, every cruciferous vegetable you eat ALSO boosts your glutathione levels.

Broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, water cress, kale, radishes, cauliflower ALL work.

Wow.  And I’d thought cruciferous vegetables were good for people to eat for good health before!

c)  Exercise tends to boost glutathione levels although that may only work well if you get enough antioxidants separately.

d) And there are a whole list of supplements that boost glutathione and some that boost it a lot.

Dr Hyman says all the other antioxidants tend to boost it including all the antioxidant  supplements and foods listed above.  And of those, I once read that taking alpha lipoic acid may work the best to boost glutathione.

Milk thistle protects your liver and may do so in part because it boosts glutathione which both protects your liver with its antioxidant effects and may help your liver more easily get rid of toxins by doing some of that itself thereby reducing the work load on your liver.

The most effective supplement to boost glutathione is NAC which stands for N acetyl Cysteine.

Your body apparently takes that cysteine and makes glutathione with it.

Dr Hyman also says that nutrients that are methyl radical donors both help good health directly AND boost your glutathione.

So these supplements help:  folic acid, vitamin B6, and the methyl version of B12, methylcobalamin.  I take each of those daily.

The folate version of that B vitamin that’s actually in foods is also valuable for this so that’s an added reason to eat the cruciferous vegetables and the high carotene vegetables.

But surprisingly he left out two of the best glutathione boosters.

He does say methyl donors help and that glycine is a building block that glutathione is made out of.

So taking these two supplements works quite well to boost glutathione!:  DMG and TMG which stand for Di-methyl glycine and Tri-methyl glycine.

Also note that every one of these things listed lowers homocysteine and both DMG and TMG help you add lean muscle mass in addition.

After reading his article I was pleased and delighted.  I do everything on his list including taking all of the supplements he lists and that I list here.

Remember, the more of these things you can manage to do, the more glutathione your body will have.

And a high glutathione level is a panacea level health protector of great power!