What If You Started Taking NAC For 30 Days Straight?

NAC is one of the most research supplements in the world, but most people don't really understand what it is or how to take it. It can be incredibly powerful and has even been used in hospitals for decades. So the question is not whether NAC works. The real question is, how do you supplement it for the greatest long-term benefits? Hello, health champions. Today we're going to talk about what NAC is and what might happen if you were to take it for 30 days. So what is NAC? Well, there's this amino acid that the body uses called cysteine and it contains sulfur, which is critical for making something called glutathione, which is our most important intracellular antioxidants. And usually cysteine is referred to as the rate limiting ingredient for making glutathione. And that means that it's usually the one that is the bottleneck. It's the one that's in short supply. So if we don't have enough NAC or enough cysteine, then we don't have the raw materials. It's the thing that's usually missing for making glutathione. And NAC stands for Nacetyl cysteine and that is really nothing more than a stable form of this amino acid cysteine. Because cysteine in its free form is very unstable. That sulfur group reacts with things very, very quickly. So the acetyl group is added to the cysteine. And the N simply stands for nitrogen, which says that the acetyl group is attached to the nitrogen in the molecule of cysteine. So that's where the name comes from. But basically this acetyl group, it protects the sulfur group from reacting with things. So what's going to happen if we don't protect the cysteine is that it's going to oxidize almost immediately. And the two sulfur groups that are reactive, they're going to react with each other and get oxidized. And now two molecules of cysteine makes one molecule of cysteine. And now this is still the same compound, so to speak, but it doesn't work the same way. And in the body, we can still use it to make luthione, but it's very poorly utilized. So NAC is simply for protection and it's a delivery vehicle. It's just a way to get the active form of cysteine from our digestive tract and into the cell where it can be converted to glutathione because this is all about intracellular antioxidants. And by the way, when you get an active and potent form of NAC, it has to smell. There's going to have a sulfur smell to it. Someone described it as rotten eggs, and that's kind of harsh. It's not that bad, but once you open the bottle and if there's capsules in there, you will definitely get a whiff. Now once you eat the capsule, it's not going to taste bad. It's just when you open the bottle, there will definitely be a smell. And if you don't have that smell, then they probably done something to it. Like it's really not in the cysteine form, but it's in the cistine form or it's oxidized or they have done something else to cover up the smell. And that means that it's not really active and potent anymore. So what's the big deal about glutathione? Well, glutathione is our primary intracellular antioxidant. So you hear so much about antioxidants and we should eat foods with antioxidants and some people promote supplements with antioxidants. But here is the primary intracellular antioxidant for humans. And why is it such a big deal? Well, intra, that means inside the cell. That's where the action is. That's where we make tissue. That's where all the enzymes are. That's where we make energy. That's where we manufacture stuff. And because of that, because that's where we make most of the energy, that's where almost all the oxidation in the body takes place. So that's where we need to have a strong antioxidant defense. And that's what glutathione is all about. And you can buy glutathione as supplements, but it's very hard to get it into the cell. It's too large a molecule to naturally make it in there. So they can design various different delivery vehicles. And that gets very expensive and the absorption is still not that great. So you really want to make your own inside the cell. And that's what the cysteine that we just spoke of, the NAC, and acetyl cysteine. That's what it's all about. Because the NAC can get into the cell. It's the delivery vehicle that we talked about. So you can get the active form into the cell. And now you can make your own glutathione. So does NAC really work? There's really no question about that. Because it's been around for a long, long time. It's been used by millions as a supplement for decades. But more than that, it's been researched for decades because it is so potent. And why do we know that? Because it's been used in hospitals for many, many years as what's called a mucolytic. And that means it thins out mucus. It's one of the things that get really thick and sticky in mucus are these disulfide bonds. And NAC can help break those disulfide bond and thin out the mucus. So that's been the primary use in hospitals for a very long time. But it is also the standard of care. It is the thing to do for acute liver failure. So if someone comes into the emergency room and they have had an overdose, they've been taking too much of Tylenol, for example, or related compounds. And it doesn't mean that you had to swallow a whole bottle at one time. It means if you take even the recommended dose or even less than that, but you do it for a long time, you can still hurt your liver to the point where you get liver failure. And in that situation, the liver runs out of glutathione very, very rapidly. And the fastest way to replenish that is with NAC. So in the emergency room, they actually give people NAC intravenously. But here's what we need to understand. That is a high dose life-saving intervention. Just like medicine, it doesn't make you healthy. It keeps you alive when there is a crisis. But it doesn't restore the function that has been lost that developed the problem in the first place. So a typical dose, if you supplement NAC in a capsule, a typical dose would be perhaps 600 milligrams. And what we have to understand is that is for short term therapeutic use. This is if you have, for example, an acute oxidative stress from something. Or if you want to do a short, intensive support for the liver, you could take 600 milligrams and you'd be totally fine. And you could use it temporarily for a heavy detox load. But for the long term, if you were to take that much, it's not like the most dangerous thing, but it's far from optimal because it can start shifting your redox balance. And what is that? Well, in your body, we oxidize things. You oxidize things with you use oxygen for making energy, for example. But excess oxidation creates damage and stress to the body. So it's all about balance. And making energy is obviously a good thing. And so is the way the immune system uses oxidation because it uses potent oxidants to kill off pathogens, for example. So we definitely need to have it. And then the opposite of oxidation is reduction. And when the body uses reduction, it uses it for things like repair and signaling. But if we take too much antioxidants, what could happen is we may blunt our normal cell responses, our normal cell signals. And we could also somewhat reduce our adaptive stress responses. And while we're looking to always make the cells more resilient, taking too many antioxidants could actually make the cells less resilient in the long run. So you want to think about redox balance as basically fire versus fire extinguishers. A fire can be really good. It produces heat when we want heat. A little bit is a good thing and at the same time a fire extinguisher can be a real really good thing when there is too much fire, when there is unwanted fire. So both are very appropriate, but if we let one take the upper hand just completely and dominate, now we're disturbing that balance. So even though cysteine is critical for glutathione manufacture and we absolutely depend on glutathione, we don't need a whole lot. That's the key to understand. Cysteine does occur naturally in food, obviously, because we still survive and we still made glutathione before there were supplements. So the thing though about cysteine is most of it is used very, very quickly before it ever gets to the cells to make glutathione. And a lot of it is used by the intestinal cells. There's a huge turnover. You get a new stomach lining. You get a new gut lining every few days and that takes a lot of amino acids and a lot of repair to replenish that. So a lot of the cysteine is used just to maintain your intestinal cells. And then it is converted to cysteine. Again, it's very reactive. These sulfur groups are going to hook up together in these disulfide bonds and become cysteine and that is how it's transported in the body. And then a lot of the cysteine is going to be used for protein synthesis. So the cysteine and cysteine, they are, like we said, it's pretty much the same compound and the body can transform it back and forth. So we're going to use a lot of the cysteine for protein synthesis for making tissues. How the body is built up of protein and one of the amino acids is going to be cysteine. And as a result, very, very little of the cysteine actually reaches the inside of the cells, of most cells to become glutathione. And then when we take NAC as a supplement, however, like we said, that's a protected delivery package. So NAC is going to bypass this digestion. And then the NAC is delivered to the inside of the cell and it can be used directly to make glutathione. But if the normal way for humans is to have such a small amount, make it to the cell to become glutathione, why do we need supplementation at all? And the answer is that we have more stress and we have more toxins. We have more pollution. We have poor gut health. There's so many factors of stress that have changed since our ancestral times that what they got away with may not necessarily be enough for us anymore. So long-term dosing is about 100 milligrams. That's what you can take safely. And we have to understand about NAC and cysteine that it's not the final product. It's not the thing that becomes glutathione. It is just one building block for glutathione. But it is the rate limiter. It's the thing that is usually in short supply. And 100 milligrams would be enough to support a long-term steady production of NAC. And at the same time, we can respect the body's normal balance and the feedback systems that we're not disturbing or pushing them too hard. So we always want the goal to be to support the physiology without forcing chemistry. We don't want to impose on the body's balance. We just want to support it. But for most people taking NAC as a supplement, there is a missing piece. And that's called methylation. So what is methylation? That's the term that's been thrown around a lot. But what is it? Well, it is simply when you add a methyl group. And the methyl group is CH3. It's a carbon with three hydrogens attached to it. So it's a molecule that gets passed around a lot. So methylation is basically a transfer or a passing over of this CH3 group. And we do that a lot. We do that trillions of times per second. Every cell does this millions to billions of times in a day. So this is not some rare occurrence. This is one of the most basic principles in the body. And the purpose of methylation is to turn things on and off, to turn reactions on and off, to move things along, to make a process go faster or slower, or to neutralize toxins. So it functions in the body to detoxify hormones. Hormones are only supposed to be active for a certain time. We release them, then they're supposed to be broken down so that they don't send their message forever. And toxins need to be neutralized and broken down. And it also helps regulate neurotransmitters. It is critical both in the manufacture of neurotransmitters and in turning them back off. Methylation is critical for DNA control. We all have a certain genome. That's our DNA. That's the composition of our DNA. But epigenetics is controlled by methylation. And that's how we express our genes, which can be very, very different. That's why lifestyle matters even though we have a certain DNA. And for the purpose of this video, methylation is necessary for glutathione production and recycling. So glutathione doesn't just stay in one state. They get converted back and forth and we need methylation for all of that. And methylation is also necessary for taking NAC and cysteine and making glutathione. And here's why most of you should pay very close attention. There's a gene called MTHFR. And it codes for an enzyme called methyl tetrahydropholate reductase. And this is a gene where more than 50% of the world's population has a variant of that gene, where it's not working perfectly. So more than half the world actually has a reduced capacity to make glutathione. And they have a reduced capacity to recycle homocysteine, which is it's an intermediate metabolite that delivers it breaks down certain things and it makes homocysteine, which shouldn't be a problem because it should get recycled back into glutathione. But if you have this gene variant, your body doesn't do that very well. And now that homocysteine builds up and that's inflammatory in itself. And if you have this gene, you also have a reduced capacity to methylate, to transfer these methyl groups and perform all these tasks that we talked about. So in the end, what all this means is you're more prone to inflammation and high homocysteine is an independent risk factor for heart disease. So there's a lot of supplements on the market that will address the MTHFR gene and the homocysteine and that would help with methylation. But curiously, there is only one that I've designed called U-Methyl B. It's the only one that has NAC in it in addition to some of the other active factors. And it's also the only one that supports all the pathways involved that we've talked about. Plus, it helps a bit with digestion because it also had some hydrochloric acid to support your stomach acid. So I'll put a link down below if you want to check that out. And to help you start out the new year right, there is a massive discount on it right now, but it's only for the next five days to the end of the year. So what would happen if you take NAC for 30 days? Well, you would increase your capacity detoxify. You would support your liver and the phase two part of liver detox. And when detox is working better, then there is less of a buildup of reactive and inflammatory and oxidating intermediates. And there would be less spillover into peripheral tissues. So with that, a lot of people are reporting that they have improved digestion and improved food tolerances, as well as calmer skin and fewer supplement reactions as well. Some people who are extremely sensitive to supplements can end up tolerating them better. However, there's an exception and that's if you have a methylation sensitivity. There's a small group of people that even though methylation is critical for your body to function, they can still be extremely sensitive to adding even a little bit from the outside. So if you have a reaction, then you know that that's probably what's going on. The second big factor would be that you reduce oxidative stress systemically, because that's the main thing that glutathione does as an antioxidant, is it reduces oxidative stress, it gobbles up free radicals and so forth. And with a reduction systemically, there would also be less oxidative disruptions in neurons, in your brain cells, in your signaling cells. And with that, there would be less interference with cellular signaling. And you would also see cleaner mitochondrial function. And why is that? Well, remember, making energy is oxidation. We use oxygen to burn fuel, and that all happens inside the mitochondria. So that's where most of this oxidative stress happens. And if we can control and balance that better, now the mitochondria are going to make their energy better. It's going to make the cleaner in that process. And a lot of people are going to see improved tolerance to stress. They'll have fewer crashes. And you will also probably notice improved recovery from both stress and also exercise. And the third big thing is that you would probably see improved methylation of neurotransmitters. Again, neurotransmitters are the signaling molecules for the nervous system. And they get created and turned off with this little methyl group that we talked about. So with that, we're likely to see an improvement in neurological regulation. And as a result, probably better regulation of your sympathetic, parasympathetic balance as well. So if we have less stress responses, less sympathetic activation at night, now chances are that you would find a cleaner headspace as well as better quality sleep. And the fourth big thing is the fact that NAC is a mucolytic. Remember that's the primary use in hospitals as to break down thick mucus. So you could probably see an improvement in mucosal and barrier function. So every cell layer, every edge, every shell, so to speak, is a barrier. So the skin is a barrier. The digestive tract is a barrier. Your airways, that's a barrier. So first NAC will help break down these guy-sulfide bonds in the mucus. That makes it thick. But also we'd see less oxidative damage to the airway surfaces and to the intestinal surfaces. So we'd probably see an overall improvement in barrier integrity, fewer leaks, if you will. And with that, we'd see an improvement in mucus and respiration. And you could also see an improvement in the consistency of your digestion. So NAC can be very powerful and it's very inexpensive. But remember that it has to smell to be active and it needs methylation to be converted for these processes to complete. And most people have some MTHFR compromise, which means that they can't utilize NAC efficiently, but they also need some other help to process their homocysteine. So for most people, this is a little bit bigger than just NAC and most people would need a little bit more complete homocysteine support. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love that one. And if you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video.