If you are the scientific type, or if you like to really stretch your intellectual “legs”, I recommend subscribing to the amazing collection of blogs at scienceblogs.com. I stumble across the most fascinating things there. One of their latest articles dovetails right into Inflammation911.com so I wanted to share the highlights, in layman’s terms of course.

Yes, the title above is not hype and is based on the article from scienceblogs.com/moleculeoftheday about glutathione. Here’s the gist of the article:

“Nothing is immune to oxygen’s effects, though – oxygen inevitably occurs in some forms that are toxic to all life – even us aerobes. Despite the fact that we live in a profoundly oxidizing atmosphere, your cells are a profoundly reducing environment. Whatever reactive oxygen species are present are neutralized by things like glutathione (italics ours)…the scalpel to molecular oxygen’s grenade.”

In other words, glutathione neutralizes free radicals which are a result of oxidation. As you may know, glutathione is not a supplement, it is actually made by the body for the beneficial purpose mentioned above (among other things). Thus, we refer to glutathione as the “master antioxidant”.

In fact, the article continues, “Glutathione, being so useful, has evolved numerous roles in metabolism beyond that of a simple antioxidant. Tomorrow, I’ll explain why Tylenol would kill you if you didn’t have the stuff!”

There you have it, the intro to that fantastic claim and the headline above. The next day the article from scienceblogs.com brought the point home.

“Acetaminophen/paracetamol (essentially, Tylenol) is a great drug. It comes without a lot of the GI irritation problems of aspirin and other typical COX inhibitors. Unlike aspirin, it doesn’t increase clotting time. No nagging feeling you’re going to give your kid Reye’s syndrome.

However, it has an unusually low threshold for overdose, due to a quirk in its metabolism. A small fraction…gets converted to a toxic metabolite: NAPQI.

NAPQI is a potent hepatotoxin – much at all and your liver is shot. As I intimated yesterday, glutathione provides reducing equivalents – this is another time it comes in handy. It can detoxify NAPQI. However, you’ve only got a limited pool of glutathione – generating these reducing equivalents in an oxidizing atmosphere is energetically “expensive” – think of it like running a fridge outside in summertime. So when you’re out of glutathione, as in an overdose, you stop detoxifying NAPQI.”

So, on a molecular level, glutathione can detoxify the “toxic metabolite” known as NAPQI which is a by product of Tylenol. More research on glutathione would reveal to you that it is actually essential to the body on three levels; as an antioxidant, an immune response booster and, as was related in the article, a potent detoxifier.

As a side note: the scienceblog.com article said that “you’ve only got a limited pool of glutathione…think of it like running a fridge outside in summertime.” This is very true and is one of the main reasons Inflammation911.com was established. Very few are aware of the fact that although glutathione cannot be ingested as a supplement, a person can encourage the body to make more glutathione. This is accomplished with a selectively healthy diet and bioactive whey protein.

In summary, let me just say that I never cease to be surprised by the medical research that often times flies in the face of traditional medicine. I don’t think the intent of the article in scienceblogs.com was to discourage the use of Tylenol but boy aren’t we glad our body knows how to process the chemicals we (perhaps unwisely) chose to put into it?