Transcription
These are the surprising benefits of acetylcysteine that nobody's ever told you about.
Hey Wellness Warrior, I'm Dr. Nick Sarowski, and N-acetylcysteine has some incredible ability to transform your health. It's inexpensive and can be used right in the comfort of your home. So, we're going to talk about not only these benefits you've never heard of but also how it decreases the number one cause of death.
But let's first start with antioxidant production. This is very important because when you boost antioxidants in your body, what you're essentially going to do is protect your tissues from being damaged. The way that you're going to use N-acetylcysteine to accomplish this is when you take N-acetylcysteine; it boosts the master most important antioxidant in your body known as glutathione. When you boost glutathione, it's going to help protect you from disease, have an anti-aging component to it, and help keep your cells healthy. We need this glutathione at a healthy level in order to actually, as I mentioned, protect your tissues and be healthy on the inside.
So, we're going to get the antioxidant production from NAC, and then it's also going to help nourish our brains. This is really interesting because NAC is going to help balance a neurotransmitter known as glutamate. Now, when glutamate starts to increase and glutathione starts to decrease or become depleted in the body, you can actually start to develop a lot of different brain conditions like schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and even bipolar disorder. This is the thing that's so wild about brain health: when your brain health starts to decrease, a lot of mental or mood conditions start to arise.
When we look at nourishing our brain, NAC is going to help decrease anxiety, decrease depression, all while improving cognitive performance and memory, and protecting you from Alzheimer's. So, if we look at NAC, it has some really good benefits to nourishing your brain and keeping your brain healthy. I don't know about you, but I am always worried about keeping my brain healthy. You know, Alzheimer's has been in my family history, so therefore it's something that I'm always thinking about—how can I protect myself against this?
Let's look at blood sugar now. This is another thing that I'm concerned about. Most patients I work with have blood sugar instability. If you look down and you see a belly, well, you probably have it too. But there are some good things that you can do and easy things that you can do, and it's not all just about your diet. It's not all just about, "Did I eat sugar? Did I not eat sugar?" Sure, that's very important if you want to get your blood sugar under control, but there's another factor.
Here's a secret to somebody who overcomes type 2 diabetes or insulin resistance quickly and somebody who takes a very long time to overcome it: if you only focus on cutting sugar out of your diet, though that's a very important piece to it, you're missing one component, and that is decreasing inflammation. This is where NAC can be very powerful because when you take NAC and it focuses on decreasing inflammation through that master antioxidant glutathione that we talked about, essentially, it's going to help heal the cell receptor so that you can more effectively get sugar into the cell, and you start healing insulin resistance. This is where it can really support decreasing your blood sugar and stabilizing it—very powerful stuff.
Now, how is it going to decrease the number one cause of death? Well, it's going to decrease oxidative stress, and by decreasing oxidative stress in your body, you're reducing your risk of heart disease and stroke, which is the number one killer of people prematurely. A lot of people say, "Well, Dr. Sarowski, you're healthy; you don't have to worry about this stuff." No, I think about this stuff because I have so many family members—and I'm sure that you do too—who have struggled with things like this or brain issues or even dying very young. I could list probably four people that I have known personally who have died in their 50s from a heart-related cardiovascular condition.
So, what you're seeing here is that NAC is very good for cardiovascular health. One of the other things it's going to do is increase something called nitric oxide in the body. What you really need to know about that is it actually improves blood flow, and this is very important for somebody who's going to have a good, healthy cardiovascular system.
Now, I want to talk about the safety aspect of it, right? Because whenever we talk about these very simple, inexpensive things, one of the things that you'll hear a lot of naysayers start to talk about, like NAC for instance, is, "Oh, well, you got to be careful of the side effects." The side effects of NAC are slim to none. These same people who'll try to scare you about N-acetylcysteine will go and recommend a pharmaceutical that has 50 different devastating side effects.
So, when we look at the side effects of N-acetylcysteine, it's things like gastrointestinal distress if you take a lot of it. That's like almost anything—eat too much salt, you can have gastrointestinal distress; too much vitamin C, gastrointestinal distress; too much magnesium—I mean, the list goes on. Of course, we don't want to take too much of it. The other thing that it could potentially do is thin your blood. This is a good thing in a lot of cases unless you're taking a blood thinner medication. But overall, the safety of it is incredible. It's inexpensive, and so what I'll do is I'll put a link in the description below to the NAC that I use in my own clinic—the NAC that I use personally—so you can check that out and read further on it.
I really support you educating yourself, just like you're doing right here watching this video, so that you can make informed decisions about your health. Educate yourself on it and see not only the benefits here that I mentioned but all the other benefits that I didn't mention when you read that article.
So, I hope I've encouraged you to take the next steps in your health. I'm Dr. Nick Sarowski, and if you like this video, watch this video right here.