Dr. Nayan Patel is a PharmD (a pharmacist), owns two compounding pharmacies, and is also the author of “The Glutathione Revolution: Fight Disease, Slow Aging, and Increase Energy.” He does incredible work in product development and research at Auro Wellness, and he’s here to share that knowledge with us.

As a pharmacist, Dr. Patel has a wealth of wisdom and decades of experience. Dr. Patel has been a pharmacist for about eight years now, and before that he worked in a compounding pharmacy since 1993. 

The most important thing he learned decades ago was that we don’t need any new medication because everything the body needs in order to survive we already have inside our body. Our job is to identify those molecules, those chemicals that make everything work and detoxify and rejuvenate and regenerate. If we can figure out those molecules and enhance them through diet, exercise, nutrition, supplementation, or medications to replace what we’re missing, that’s the ultimate goal.

Once we figure those things out, the next step is understanding where these molecules need to go in the system. If you swallow something, you might assume the body knows what to do with it, but it doesn’t. It needs clear instructions, or sometimes we need a delivery technology that can deliver the molecule exactly where it’s supposed to be. Without that, we end up with side effects and problems.

This might surprise some people, hearing a pharmacist say it’s not just about taking more medications. It’s about understanding what our bodies need and how we can support that effectively. I grew up with a father who was a pharmacist, so I grew up in an environment where this way of thinking was constant. It’s about preventing the need for medications and giving our bodies the nutrients and support they need to function better.

Many doctors today share this philosophy. There are cardiologists who used to do open heart surgeries making millions of dollars a year, and by their mid-thirties or forties, they gave it up to help people before they require surgery. The world is looking for better answers. People really want to take their health into their own hands, but they need proper information on how to do that.

Understanding Compounding Pharmacies

For anyone unfamiliar with compounding pharmacies, it’s important to understand the difference. A compounding pharmacist isn’t just making medications. The pharmacist is designing the medication, thinking about what needs to be done, working with physicians to identify problem areas and provide solutions. They’re choosing the right chemical, the right delivery system, and determining where it needs to go so we can get results with the least amount of side effects.

A compounding pharmacy means the pharmacist is thinking for the patient, working with physicians, identifying problems, and providing solutions that deliver the medication in the most cost-effective way. This means we can make a medication or substance into a form that’s individualized. We can create specific doses for specific people without problematic ingredients.

Pharmaceutical companies make things in masses, so they need products that are shelf stable. But with customized medications, you can eliminate fillers and chemicals because you’re making medication for this patient for the short amount of time they need it. Every patient is different. Identifying each individual’s needs is critical. If you don’t know what the problem is, how are you going to fix it.

The Glutathione Discovery

Let’s talk about glutathione, which is one of the most important substances we can discuss. Glutathione is something our bodies make, but we can help support that. 

Dr. Patel’s interest in glutathione started from working in a compounding pharmacy where glutathione was the solution for many patients. Unfortunately, available medications weren’t working. The delivery method wasn’t right. 

Glutathione needs to get inside our cells, behind the cell membranes, to actually work. If it can’t get there, even the best medication is useless. Additionally, glutathione doesn’t absorb well from the intestines. If you swallow it, it’s not getting to your cells. 

Glutathione is a tripeptide; an amino acid chain of glycine, glutamic acid, and cysteine. The body breaks it down, absorbing the amino acids and then puts them back together make its own glutathione. It doesn’t use the peptide from outside sources.

Injections were considered. There was a study where they injected ten patients with glutathione, and still, all of them broke down the glutathione into amino acids. So injecting glutathione didn’t solve the issue of absorption. Even though glutathione has so much potential, it wasn’t getting absorbed into the system. It didn’t matter if you used injections, inhaled solutions, suppositories, capsules, or liquids.

The question became, if the body needs the building blocks, why not give the building blocks. In the 1960s, the FDA approved mucomyst, which is N-acetylcysteine, one of the amino acids used to make glutathione. But you can have all the cysteine in the world, and the body still needs cysteine plus the other amino acids, two enzymes, two molecules of ATP (your mitochondrial energy), and one molecule of NAD to make glutathione.

What if you have all the raw materials but no energy. You’re not going anywhere. As we age, energy starts declining. ATP production decreases. So you can take all the cysteine in the world, but your body’s not going to meet all the demands. The goal is full remission of problems caused by depleted glutathione.

The Development of a New Delivery System

Research on glutathione started almost twenty-five years ago. The first liposome technology product for glutathione didn’t work. The body breaks it down. But the question was, what diseases was glutathione affecting. Oxidative stress is linked to every single disease today. Stress is the number one killer. The only way we can expand our health span and longevity is by getting rid of the disease.

Two hundred years ago, the number one reason people died was infections, and penicillin was developed. Today, the best thing we can do is reduce oxidative stress, and the number one way to do that is improve glutathione.

Injectable forms were made and worked a little bit, but not satisfactorily. Money from selling injectable products was used to start research on new technology. Seven years later, there was a stable form of glutathione in the lab. When put through the mouth, it didn’t work. A nasal spray was tried. It worked, but it burned the nose. That’s not sustainable. The only route left was skin.

Getting through skin was achieved but then figuring out how to get through the cell membranes required a second technology. Finally a dual technology product was developed that bypasses both the physical barrier and chemical barrier, and delivers glutathione to the mitochondria inside cells. When that was done, the results started coming. 

When the technology was first developed in 2007, it was way ahead of its time. Currently there are about eight patents on it. The next fourteen years were spent figuring out how much to give, how often, how long, what are the results, side effects and complications.

How the Topical Glutathione Delivery Works

A topical product, called Glutaryl, was developed based on the new technology that makes it possible to get glutathione not just through your skin but into your cells. To know it is working, doctors applied different doses and measured levels in patients. That’s how it was discovered that levels were getting intracellularly and increasing. That’s how the actual dose was determined.

It was perfected to a reasonable amount, about half a milliliter, which is about four sprays. You apply it on any non-hairy part of your body: arms, belly, back, face, neck, legs. Hair doesn’t affect efficacy. It’s just that one of the molecules used is sugar dextrins that get sticky on the surface, so it’s uncomfortable if you have hair in that area.

Absorption is instantaneous. Within thirty seconds to one minute, just rub it until it’s completely smooth and dry, and you’re done. It’s recommended to wait forty-five minutes before washing it off because at forty-five minutes, peak levels are seen in the blood.

The product is amazing. It’s already known that glutathione is difficult to absorb. In clinical practice, patients taking oral liposomal glutathione get improvements just as much or better than IV. But when you see that a topical transdermal product can be used and it absorbs right through your skin, that’s remarkable.

We often forget how much we absorb through our skin. Skin can absorb a lot, especially oil-based products, so be cautious about what you expose your skin to. Skin needs a lot of glutathione, so applying glutathione through your skin means the skin gets it first. What do people notice over time. Fine wrinkles, age spots, blemishes improve. They notice texture, tone, firmness of skin improving. Most clients are physicians using these products for the benefits of improving glutathione levels.

The Power of Glutathione in the Body

Glutathione by itself doesn’t do anything, but it frees up your body to do the work. 

Imagine a very busy mom with a job. She gets up, makes lunches for the whole family, goes to work, comes back, prepares dinner, gets kids ready, does laundry. Being a mom is more than a full-time job. Imagine taking all the work away from mom. Everything’s done. Mom frees up. Will she sit on the couch and watch TV. No. She’ll figure out all the other things to do to make your house beautiful, make life blissful, and enhance our lives.

Glutathione is that thing that takes work away from your body. It’s an antioxidant. It’s a massive detoxifier. It helps the liver detoxify chemicals. Once you do that, the body frees up, and when it frees up, it starts healing, rejuvenating, regenerating. It’s a multitasker, a multi-tool antioxidant. Even applying glutathione on your arms, it circulates around your whole body and eventually gets to all your cells.

The technology works because every cell has what are like lipid rafts for cell to cell communication. In the lipid rafts, there are receptors that glutathione molecules attach to, and that’s how it gets inside your system. Once in your skin, it can travel from cell to cell all over the body.

Especially with the brain, whether mental health related, anxiety, depression, or dementia prevention, there’s significant difference. The brain is literally two percent of your whole body weight, yet it consumes twenty percent of all the oxygen you breathe in every single day. The highest amount of oxidative stress is in your brain, so the brain requires the highest amount of antioxidants. 

According to Dr. Patel, brain issues or diseases are generally more difficult to reverse because they’ve been there a long time. If there’s a way to detoxify and neutralize free radicals in your brain starting at age thirty onwards, there’s a possibility that in the future we’ll never have brain diseases.

Glutathione and Women’s Health

I, Dr. Doni, focus a lot on women’s health, particularly women dealing with high-risk HPV virus, which causes ninety-nine percent of cervical cancer. 

I do a lot of thinking and researching about how to prevent the progression to cancer. In standard medicine, HPV is thought to never go away, and women are told there is nothing they can do about it. But there’s so much we can do to heal the cervix and help your body address HPV. The immune system and microbiome can address it. 

The Dr. Doni’s HPV Protocol™ includes different antioxidants, including vitamin C, vitamin E, zinc, selenium. At the same time, glutathione can also be helpful. 

Dr. Patel responds by sharing that using glutathione to help women prevent cervical cancer works in several ways. One is by preventing the virus. The second is about antioxidants. The third is by helping build up the immune system. 

Glutathione isn’t a drug. It’s not antiviral. It’s not antibacterial. But it removes garbage from your system, allowing the body to heal and better equip itself.

A human trial was done in 2023 at Western University School of Medicine published in the Journal of Antioxidants. It was a three-day trial. Within one hour, they saw reduction of mycobacterium infection. Mycobacterium infection has no cure currently. They drew blood in a test tube and infected the blood with mycobacterium. The test tubes with mycobacterium saw reduction in mycobacterium load within one hour.

At seventy-two hours, they saw profound increase of all immune markers. They saw an increase in interleukin-2, IL-12, TNF alpha, and interferon gamma. These are cytokines that enhance when there is a positive immune response. Researchers concluded that glutathione isn’t doing anything directly to the immune system, but it’s allowing your body to hyperactivate the immune system. Because the body isn’t busy doing garbage work, it is free and equipped to do additional work.

Even though it may not be antiviral, it has a positive impact on improving your own immune system, and your immune system will help reduce the load of viruses. When you do that, cancer that is secondary to the virus can be prevented.

Understanding Antioxidants and Peptides

Antioxidants can be put in three different buckets. Bucket number one is all antioxidants you’re taking from outside sources: vitamin C, CoQ10, vitamin E, pomegranate juice. There are so many products claiming to be antioxidants. Not to get too technical, but vitamin C is chemically a pro-oxidant. It’s not an antioxidant at all. But it’s the number one antioxidant sold in the world today.

Bucket number two is that our body produces three enzymes to deal with oxidative stress. One is glutathione peroxidase, GPX. The second is superoxide dismutase, SOD. The third is catalase. If you don’t have catalase, that’s why you get gray hair. Bucket number three is a non-enzymatic molecule produced by the human body, which is glutathione.

Glutathione by itself is more powerful than bucket number one and two combined. If you get stuck on an island and have one thing to protect your life, one thing is glutathione. It is that powerful because it’s by far the most abundant antioxidant produced by the human body.

Like other peptides on the market today, like people injecting peptides for weight loss, those are bioregulators. They’re signaling molecules that don’t do any work, but they tell your brain to stop eating. 

Glutathione isn’t a bioregulator. It’s actually a worker bee. It reduces oxidative stress by physically quenching all free radicals. It’s a massive detoxifier by physically conjugating with chemicals and getting rid of them from the intestines, from the liver. It’s a worker bee doing actual work.

Why Glutathione Gets Depleted

Glutathione is such an endangered species in our bodies. It’s getting depleted because of excessive usage. By the time you wake up in the morning and leave your house an hour and a half or two hours later, you expose your body to at least seventy different chemicals that your liver has to neutralize and detoxify. Throughout the day, you’re exposing your body to about two to three hundred different chemicals every single day.

Also, as you age, enzymes start decreasing in your body. The mitochondria decrease, and even mitochondria that produce ATP start decreasing. This shows up in fatigue and energy levels. The number one problem is feeling tired. Fatigue is so common. If you don’t have mitochondrial energy, how are you going to make glutathione in the first place? 

Our modern diets are also depleted of the three essential amino acids we need. We might not be getting enough glycine and cysteine.

 If you’re wanting to increase glutathione in your body, don’t take a product first. The first thing to do is reduce your use of glutathione. Ninety percent of the time, you’re in your house, your car, or your office. Those three places you have full control over the air you breathe. Make sure you have better quality air so that your air doesn’t deplete your glutathione.

You can start making diet and lifestyle changes and already improve your glutathione because your body’s going to keep trying to make more. If you have the right building blocks, you can make glutathione. The problem is we’re often missing parts of the recipe or missing the body’s ability to turn it into glutathione. But if we can help our bodies out, they can do it.

Genetic Variations and Glutathione

Some people have variations in glutathione processing genes that can affect their ability to recycle glutathione.

There are three ways to increase glutathione levels: stop the use of glutathione, eat a diet rich in cysteine, and use a topical form of glutathione. Nine out of ten times, people will do the first two things, but you can use the topical product too so levels can be enhanced faster.

What if you have a gene mutation where your mitochondria cannot make your own glutathione effectively? Just because you have the genes doesn’t mean you have the disease. It has to be expressing. If you have stress, stress causes it to express. There are people who have BRCA genes, breast cancer genes. You may have the genes predisposing you to getting breast cancer, but you don’t have breast cancer yet.

If the gene is expressing very early in life, it’s easy to spot. If you have the gene variations and they’re not expressing, you wouldn’t know. If it’s not expressing, you’re fine. But if you have the gene and you’re expressing it, you need glutathione on board instantaneously. Otherwise, you’re going to go downhill really fast.

GSTM, GSTP, and GST are gene mutations where you have a decreased ability to conjugate glutathione. There are other gene mutations like MTHFR, which is very common. In those variations, patients can produce glutathione but have a difficult time keeping up with the workload. Using the prior analogy of a mom doing all all the work, it’s like she now has two families. That’s what happens when you have expressing gene variations.

If the body cannot detoxify with methylation pathways, glutathione detoxifies with conjugation pathways. It’s a different way. But if methylation isn’t working, the body goes to glutathione and says, can you please help me. In that case, glutathione is doing extra work. 

If you have these problems, please don’t waste time. You can eat the foods and do everything correctly but get on supplementations immediately because that’s going to be an absolute game changer for the rest of your life.

Safety and Usage Guidelines

Glutathione is safe for children. It’s been used in a one-month-old baby. It’s been used in a one-hundred-year-old person. 

When it comes to contraindications with glutathione, so far there are not any drugs that are contraindicated with the use of glutathione. That said, many oncologists prefer not to use glutathione with chemotherapy or radiation therapies. You need to work with your practitioners to determine the best choice in your case.

Keep in mind, regardless of what disease you have, the body’s trying to make enough glutathione on its own. Using a supplement is only enhancing your own body’s production. But that’s a choice you have to make, and you work with the professional that understands your particular condition.

About people who have sulfur sensitivity: glutathione is a sulfur-containing molecule. It smells like sulfur. It’s a thiol group. However, it is important to know that there are endless patients with sulfite allergies that take glutathione with absolutely no problem. 

There are families who drink red wine and flush because they have sulfite allergies. By using glutathione, it actually detoxifies those chemicals out of the body. Many families have said that now they don’t get flushing right away. It’s absolutely a massive detoxifier.

Recycling Glutathione with Vitamin C

Let’s talk about recycling glutathione. 

Glutathione in short form is referred to as GSH. Glutathione in the body as an antioxidant will accept a negatively charged particle, neutralize the free radical, and then this molecule becomes GSSG. Two molecules of GSH come together and become a GSSG molecule. That GSSG molecule is the oxidized form of glutathione. The oxidized form circulates in your body until it gets an energy source from vitamin C. That’s how it gets regenerated back to glutathione.

That’s why vitamin C at low concentration acts as an antioxidant, and at high concentration acts as a pro-oxidant. Vitamin C is injected at high dosages to deal with infections and cancer protocols. But at low doses, it’s an antioxidant. Vitamin C isn’t that smart of a molecule to have dual properties. It’s actually a pro-oxidant. At lower doses (less than one thousand milligrams per day), vitamin C revives the glutathione, and that’s why you see an antioxidant response. It’s coming from the activity of glutathione.

The more common scenario is a lack of glutathione (not a lack of vitamin C). Most people don’t have enough glutathione. After using glutathione topically for six or seven years, two or three thousand milligrams of vitamin C can be taken, and it can revive glutathione back to normal.

This is why it’s so important to understand the importance of using the dextrin delivery topical glutathione, so that you can increase your glutathione levels effectively. Then you can also take a low dose of oral vitamin C because vitamin C helps you recycle your glutathione and keep it lasting longer. 

But you don’t actually have to take a separate vitamin C because the topical glutathione product also has topical vitamin C in it already. It’s all in one. You can absorb vitamin C through your skin too.

Conclusion and Next Steps

Everyone listening should understand how amazing this is! You can increase your glutathione levels with a product you put on your skin. 

You’ll be getting glutathione and vitamin C that helps maintain and recycle your glutathione. Then you can be preventing all different health issues, the ones we talked about today and more. 

The endless list of health issues we experience is caused by the effects of stress. And the effect of stress on our cells is oxidative stress. The way to reverse oxidative stress is with glutathione. And the best way to get glutathione into your body and into your cells where it is active is with the topical glutathione Dr. Patel developed called Glutaryl. 

If you want to learn more about Dr. Patel and how glutathione can help you with your health, you can go to Auro Wellness, where you can find more information about his glutathione product called Glutaryl, and his book “The Glutathione Revolution.” You can also find him on Instagram @auroskincare and Facebook @Auro Skincare.

Note from Dr. Doni

Thank you to Dr. Patel for coming to share the science behind glutathione. I can see that you are a chemist at heart who understands all the chemistry of the human body. Thank you for discovering a way for us all to benefit from glutathione. And thank you so much for joining us here on How Humans Heal today.

Whenever struggling with any health issue, we need to consider what is underlying, and very often the underlying issue is lack of recovery from stress, trauma, and toxin exposure. 

I love this conversation with Dr. Patel because he’s found a way to support our bodies to recover from stress and toxin exposure using glutathione, our most powerful antioxidant. Antioxidants protect our cells, and protecting our cells translates to protecting our SELVES!

I wrote about stress, oxidative stress and glutathione in my most recent book: Master Your Stress Reset Your Health. In the book, you’ll learn all about our stress response systems, how we all respond to stress and trauma uniquely as individuals, and how you can use natural approaches (diet, lifestyle, nutrients, herbs, and more) to help you recover from stress and trauma. 

In the book, you’ll also find out your Stress Type and how to optimize your cortisol and adrenaline levels to effectively erase the impact of stress on your biology. 

As Dr. Patel emphasized, one of the best ways to protect our health and our glutathione is to reduce toxin exposure and to detoxify. The issue is that many detoxification programs are not effective and can even make people feel worse. 

After following many detoxification protocols myself over the years, and helping patients to detoxify safely and effectively, I decided to create my own detoxification program. 

My detox program includes two protein shakes per day that contain all the nutrients to support liver detoxification, and two clean-eating meals per day. It also includes antioxidants, and videos from me to teach you to use mindfulness, as well as to replace toxins in your food and home. In this way, you can reset your glutathione levels and cell health all while carrying on with your daily activities and routine. You can find more info about my 14-Day Detox Program here.

I can tell you that it IS possible to heal from stress and trauma, to recover from anxiety and depression, and to rebalance what was disrupted by stress, such as hormones, digestion, neurotransmitters, and immune function. In this way, we can also prevent long term health issues, including risk of dementia, heart disease, and cancer.  

I love to support patients to recover from stress and toxins in my practice. I can help you virtually – by phone or zoom – wherever you are in the world. Get started by setting up an initial breakthrough session here. Working with me one on one includes a strategic plan based on your health needs, including sessions with the health coach on my team to help guide you to implement my proprietary C.A.R.E. and Stress Mastery programs. 

Thank you, everyone, for listening in to How Humans Heal and learning all about glutathione from Dr. Patel. If you found this information helpful, please make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes of How Humans Heal.

I look forward to connecting with you soon! 

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