Supplement superstar

All we’re looking for at the moment is the easy way out—the magic bullet that is going to deliver us from this blasted virus. And the media and most governments around the world maintain that the only solution to COVID-19 is a vaccine.

“We’re going to have to vaccinate seven billion people,” says billionaire Bill Gates, who is helping to fund a number of products under development. “That’s how we’re going to end this pandemic.”

But there is another, potentially safer, magic bullet out there, something the pundits aren’t talking about, something that already has more science to show its effectiveness than any drug or jab.

You won’t read it in the newspapers or hear it on TV, but plenty of evidence shows that a simple supplement already in plentiful supply is a powerful, lethal virus hunter.

I’m talking about that lesser known antioxidant (at least to the public) called glutathione. As our cover story this month (page 28) details, this critical substance is needed by the immune system to fight foreign invaders, and it is positively brilliant at rendering dangerous viruses relatively harmless.

To understand how this could be, it’s vital to understand some basics about how the immune system works.

Your immune system is a complex army made up of organs, cells and proteins, whose main job is to combat foreign invaders like bacteria and viruses, once they enter our bodies, by neutralizing and removing them.

This army gets aroused by antigens—proteins on the surfaces of these germ invaders once they latch onto special receptors in immune-system cells.

This, in turn, alerts the innate immune system, which mounts a skirmish against the pathogens with its front-line defenders: the natural killer (NK) cells and white blood cells called phagocytes. Phagocyte literally means “eating cell,” and their job is to demolish these invaders.

Once attacked by a new germ, the body’s adaptive immune system springs into life and produces other white blood cells called lymphocytes. B lymphocytes are like a microscopic MI6 or CIA, gathering information about these invaders so that when they show up again, its army (T lymphocytes, often just called T cells) recognizes and destroys them.

Enter glutathione. The science shows that when the body encounters a virus, this, the mother of all antioxidants, primes the white blood cells like NK cells and T-cells to mount a tougher counter-attack.

Glutathione supplements have been shown to boost the weaponry and effectiveness of NK cells by 100 percent after six months.

In addition to its crucial role as an antioxidant, mopping up all the reactive and cell-destroying oxygen produced in the body as a result of the myriad little chemical explosions that make our bodies work, glutathione is a powerful microbe hunter.

In a 1997 study of patients infected with H1N1 influenza given a placebo or N-acetylcysteine (NAC), a precursor that’s converted into glutathione in the body, just 25 percent of those taking the supplement displayed any symptoms, compared to three times that many among the patients taking the sugar pill.

Other researchers, from Georgia State University, discovered that
giving patients a cocktail of supplements to help boost their body’s production of glutathione was 90 percent effective in halting Zika virus replication.

And numerous doctors are finding that patients with higher levels of glutathione recover better and more quickly from COVID-19.

A team of US researchers from the College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific in Pomona, California, carried out a review of the activity of glutathione and reported that besides geeing up the NK and T cells, it inhibits the growth of the tuberculosis bacteria inside macrophages.

But they also discovered an important puzzle piece in the COVID story. The California researchers showed that the lower the level of glutathione in the body, the higher the level of pro-inflammatory cytokines in tuberculosis infection.

Ordinarily, cytokines are the immune system’s communication system, traveling through the bloodstream in an orderly fashion between cells to relay vital intelligence about the level of attack needed.

But when too many of them get produced, they dissemble into a crazed riot, which in turn sets off an autoimmune nuclear war within the immune system.

Soon the immune army moves beyond the infection itself and begins attacking all manner of healthy cells causing blood vessel leakage, eventually even organ damage—and often death.

A cytokine storm is what leads to acute respiratory distress syndrome and multiple organ failure, and what ultimately kills many COVID-19 patients.

Glutathione, it seems, may well keep the possibility of a cytokine stampede in check, as does vitamin D.

Some researchers are tentatively suggesting that the COVID virus cannot replicate when the body has high levels of glutathione, which is why they’re seeing lower viral loads and hence milder cases in these patients.

But that’s not all. This antioxidant is so important for the smooth functioning of the body that as Celeste McGovern reports in our cover story, one doctor went as far as to call death a “glutathione deficiency disease.”

Numerous doctors are experimenting with intravenous NAC or glutathione for COVID, and several clinical trials are now underway. But for now, it makes sense for all of us to start taking this indispensable medicine.

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