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Katie: Hello, and welcome to the “Wellness Mama” podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And I’m here today with Steven Wright who has been on this podcast before. I wanted to bring him back to talk about a specific topic that I’ll get to in a minute. He is a medical engineer, a Kalish Functional Medicine Institute graduate, and a gut health specialist who I have known for many years and followed his research closely. He spent close to $400,000 overcoming his own health challenges using everything from Western medicine to Eastern medicine and everything in between. He’s the founder of healthygut.com, and he has a lot of expertise specific to a lot of particular issues. And today I wanted to talk about tributyrin which is a new molecule that I’ve been using that was, I believe, helpful in my Hashimoto’s remission. It’s also been helpful for a couple of my kids for various things, but it’s considered a breakthrough molecule for microbiome, histamine, and leaky gut. And we explain why in this episode.

We talk about what butyrate is and how it’s produced, how our gut bacteria feeds on some of the food we eat, and what this process does, what anaerobic bacteria are, and why they’re important to understand, the new information we know about leaky gut and how this comes into play, how restrictive diets can reduce butyrate production over time and how to fix it, understanding the histamine response, what mast cells are, why tributyrin is different from other supplemental forms of butyrate and the very specific gut effects it can have, and how to use it effectively for the extremes of different kind of issues and to find your own dose. Steve is so well-spoken, and I loved this episode. Like I said, this is something that’s been helpful for me and I was excited to share it with you guys today. So let’s join Steve.

Katie: Steve, welcome back. Thanks for being here.

Steven: Katie, thanks for having me again.

Katie: It’s always so fun to chat with you, and it’s extra fun when we get to record it and share because you are so knowledgeable about so much. Before we jump in, I just have a note in here about fun facts about you that you’re an old man at heart and that you eat dinner at 5 p.m. and go to bed at 9 p.m., which if that’s true, I love it because that’s supposed to be amazing for your circadian rhythm.

Steven: Yeah. It’s true. I kind of have an old grumpy man inside of me who likes things very regimented and early, and, yeah, I guess the side effect is better for your circadian health. I don’t know what it is. It’s just been like that since I was a teenager.

Katie: Well, that’s awesome. I feel like you’re probably naturally where all of us are trying to get as the goal. I’ve been doing some brain training, and the neuroscientists keep telling me it would be best to go to sleep around 9 and ideally to wake up naturally before the sun, which I’m getting much closer to but not quite there yet.

Steven: That’s awesome. Good luck.

Katie: Thanks. Well, and I know you’re here today. We’re gonna go deep on a lot of gut-related issues. And you’ve been on this podcast before. If you guys haven’t heard Steve, I’ll link to his other podcasts in the show notes, so you guys can find those. But I’m excited to really deep dive into tributyrin because this is one that I’ve been taking and that I’ve mentioned to people, and even some of my really educated health friends aren’t familiar with this one. And I’ve seen how profound of an impact it can have. So I wanna kind of break down the mechanisms by which that’s happening, but to start broad, can you define first of all what it is?

Steven: Yeah. So, tributyrin, really, I think is the next frontier of gut health, and tributyrin is a specific type of butyrate. And so some people or a lot of people are starting to hear about butyrate. Like basically, it’s what all that vegetables people tell you to eat and all the fibers people tell you to eat, all that goes down into your microbiome, and the microbiome, the good parts, turn most of that into short-chain fatty acids. And the most studied and considered the most important short-chain fatty acid is butyrate. And so tributyrin is a specific type of butyrate that is sort of the next evolution of supplements for humans and animals, and so it’s a pharmacokinetically superior form. And we can go into more details about that, but we probably should stick with butyrate and short-chain fatty acids for the beginning here.

Katie: Yeah. I feel like most people listening have probably at least heard of butyrate. That’s gotten some press in recent terms and then all of the different types of fatty acids and what the different ones do. Can you explain how the microbiome creates butyrate and these short-chain fatty acids, like what’s that mechanism?

Steven: Yes. I mean, I think, it’s best remembered in, like, silly terms because the gut can be so complex. I mean, I’ve been studying this for like 12 years, and it’s still…the complexity is amazing. And so the easiest way to remember this is your prebiotics or your fibers are taken in, and then your probiotics or your good bacteria poop out postbiotics or butyrates and short-chain fatty acids. There are other short-chain fatty acids. And if you’re like, “What is a short-chain fatty acid?” Well, if you’re taking MCT oil, that’s a medium-chain fatty acid or medium-chain triglyceride. And so this is just a smaller chain of fat molecules bound together, and butyrate just happens to be, you know, the most important one. Now, how do you actually make that? Well, like I said, it comes from the fibers that we don’t actually break down. Sometimes that’s resistant starch. Other times, it’s just specific compounds polyphenols, your brightly colored vegetables. You know, there’s various diets out there that weight the diet towards more brightly colored fruits and vegetables. Those seem to preferentially create more butyrate from certain types of microbiome bugs.

Katie: That makes sense. And some of the listeners may remember a previous podcast where we talked about, like, pregnancy nursing and how a lot of breast milk actually is not designed to feed the baby specifically but to feed the balance of bacteria in the baby’s gut. So similar, I would guess, pathway to this. Can you explain why butyrate is important for gut health? And also, I know it extends to a lot of areas of health as well.

Steven: Yeah. So basically, you think about that. You’re eating all these vegetables. You know, like, “I don’t really know why I’m eating these and all these different colors.” And so they go down. Your microbiome produces a bunch of butyrate and other short-chain fatty acids like acetate and propanoate. But 95% of your butyrate is used by your colon cells, and so it is the preferred fuel for these colon cells. Some people have heard that, you know, L-glutamine could be a preferred source for the small intestine. The preferred source for the large intestine is butyrate.

And so when the colon cells metabolize or do their metabolic process through using butyrate, they actually need oxygen. So they suck oxygen out of the colon, which is super important because, if you think about…we all want a really healthy microbiome. We know it’s important for food sensitivities, for aging, for immunity, for all kinds of things. The biggest part of the microbiome that’s considered healthy is a type of bacteria class called anaerobic bacteria, which…again, there’s a lot of names, and some are really hard to make sense of, but that basically means without oxygen. And so these bacteria love an environment that has a low oxygen content.

And so when your colon cells are actually metabolizing the butyrate that you make, they’re sucking oxygen out of the colon and creating the right environment for the good bugs inside of you to flourish and be like very diverse and really healthy. And so when that’s happening, a lot of really good things are happening, your mucous barriers, your mucous lining is healthy. Your microbiome is very diverse. Your colon is healthy. And then, yeah, it travels. It’s sort of like the magnesium of the gut. A lot of people are familiar with how magnesium is this molecule that’s responsible for like 300 interactions all over the body. Butyrate is very similar. It travels around. It’s very important for bone health and bone density. So, it helps create parathyroid hormone and T regulatory cells, which regulate bone mass. It’s been studied in asthma and allergies to help the lungs. There’s ongoing research around the brain and neurodegenerative diseases. So, butyrate in general is…the 5% that gets into the bloodstream and goes everywhere else is super, super important.

Katie: That makes sense, and it makes me wonder about I have a lot of listeners working through various health conditions, and for at least a time, I know you’ve had this experience as well. I also having to be on a more restrictive diet, and for me, even an AIP diet, which somewhat limits the number of fiber-rich foods that you’re eating. And now with the trend of carnivore, a lot of people eating almost no fiber. How does that impact butyrate production?

Steven: Yeah. The quick story here is that it goes down, and so there’s nothing wrong. I don’t believe in doing a food elimination diet, or a carnivore diet, or various types of FODMAP diets, things that reduce the fermentable carbohydrate load, especially if you’re symptomatic. However, the research is very clear especially when they study FODMAP diet set. Starting around six to eight weeks, your butyrate production starts dropping off a cliff.

And then, you know, if you’re like me, and maybe you’ve seen this as well, Katie, but a lot of folks when they do these really restrictive elimination diets, I don’t know what percentage, maybe 50% or higher, really struggle to add the foods back in. And they get caught in this loop where they felt better for a while, but now they can’t get back to a regular diet, they can’t participate in normal life, and their health starts to plateau or get worse. And it’s in that area that the sort of the cycle of food is sort of broken, and I believe that’s where we’re creating our own basically dysbiosis through using diet. And so to get yourself out of that, you gotta figure out how do you get your butyrate back up because when you do that, you can really control a lot of the factors that create food sensitivities, right? Food sensitivities are very complex. Some people are histamine-driven food sensitivities. Some people are leaky gut-driven. Some people have enzyme issues. But in general, butyrate, and a high production of butyrate or using the right butyrate supplement can get you through almost all of those conditions. It’s sort of the linchpin for me when it comes to people who are stuck without…unable to reintroduce these foods.

Katie: Yeah. I heard someone say recently, and I thought this was a great point that you can view those more extreme restrictive diets as almost like a pharmaceutical intervention. They can have their place, but they should be thought of as very short-term for a very acute thing and not a long-term ideal. I think often people get sucked into thinking of those as the gold standard for long-term when they feel better, and then, like you said, they see that rebound effect and end up a little bit worse off long run, not to mention that, like, I found on my own health journey getting rid of Hashimoto’s, the goal should be to be able to eat a wide range of foods and be highly adaptable and not react to them.

And for me personally, my last holdout food was eggs for a long time, and I now tolerate eggs just fine. And I think maybe tributyrin is part of the equation for that because I was taking your enzymes and tributyrin and HCL when I eat them for a long time, and now seem to have no problem with that. Can you kind of explain maybe what happened there?

Steven: Yeah. Sure. So, yeah, food sensitivities is a very complex topic because, for instance, an egg, I would wager to say that the majority of the reaction there is related to the protein in egg. But a lot of other food sensitivities like FODMAP sensitivities are related to the carbohydrate structure. And so you have this…depending on the type of food and what macromolecules and micromolecules make it up, it can be very complex. But when it comes to egg and other protein dominant food sensitivities, a lot of that I believe is related to leaky gut and then an immune system that’s super overreactive.

And so, you know, you and I have been talking leaky gut. I think that was one of our first podcasts many, many years ago, and back then, I and almost everybody in the field thought of leaky gut as just the zonulin molecules, the tight junction sort of separating between your gut cells. Now we know that it’s so much more complex than that. There’s actually four layers to leaky gut. And so this is, I think, one of the reasons why, you know, things like high-dose L-glutamine and certain probiotics and other things just help, but they don’t ever really get you through, for instance, the egg sensitivity. And the reason why is these four layers. So layer one is those tight junctions, so closing those up, super important. Layer two is your mucous membranes. They have to be really thick. They actually protect the gut wall from being exposed to these things. Three is your immune system in and around your gut. You want that immune system regulated and sending out these defense molecules that sort of bind bad things and also signal back to it to be, you know, overly reactive or less reactive. And then fourth is your microbiome. If you have a diverse microbiome, it also sort of helps you in that area of being able to tolerate a lot.

And so the cool thing about tributyrin is that in the research studies, it’s been shown to increase all those things. So it helps the expression of tight junctions and strengthens the gut wall. It expresses MUC2, which produces mucus which thickens your mucous lining. It regulates…like I said, T regulatory cells helps lower cytokine release, other immune systems in the gut. And then four, it’s been shown to increase your microbiome diversity. So, I’ve never really seen…I mean, you know me. I order stuff from all over the world I try. Like, I don’t care what miracle you wanna tell me about, I’ll give it a go. Let’s see if there’s truth here. Does it work in a body? Is there science? Is there biology to back this up?

And I don’t take it lightly when I say that tributyrin is one of the most exciting compounds in the world right now for these types of issues. It’s doing things for people who are stuck on five foods, or seven foods, or whole classes like eggs or FODMAPs, things like that that were just off-limits for the majority of their life. And I too and like you, I believe that resiliency is what we wanna build. We wanna build, like, the ability to tolerate all types of foods and be able to choose. And so when you have a lot of butyrate, and you have, you know, something like tributyrin to come in and potentially rebuild those pathways, it produces pretty amazing stories, and it’s very exciting.

Katie: Yeah. Exactly. I was recently at an event, and it was a wonderful event, but it was very kind of biohacking-focused. And I found kind of an odd contrast of these people who are doing all of these extreme things to keep their health in check and eating very restrictive diets and considering that resilience. And I understand, like I said, the need to do that in certain instances to recover, but it was really kind of striking, and it really brought up to me, like, shouldn’t the goal be to be highly adaptable and able to handle when you have to WI-FI, or blue light, or gluten, or whatever the food may be long-term, even if your body’s maybe not there right now. And you mentioned histamine intolerance as well, which I think is something I’m hearing more about from listeners and readers. It seems to be maybe on the rise, or at least there’s more knowledge about it right now. Can you talk more specifically about that histamine interaction and how maybe butyrate contributes?

Steven: Yeah. So we have these things called mast cells and we need the right amount of histamine, really. So just like all of our hormones, we don’t want too little, we don’t want too much, histamine is the exact same way. We want the right regulated response of histamine to our environment and what we’re doing with our bodies. There’s a bunch of mast cells that are concentrated in the gut wall, and if these mast cells are perchance more exposed to what’s happening inside your gut because of a low mucus lining like a thinned-out mucus lining, or if these mast cells have been triggered into high alert due to infections, or toxicities, or inflammation over the years, they can basically overexert histamine. And that can cause all kinds of things. You know, you get flushing. You can get tachycardia. You react to all kinds of foods. This eliminates a lot of your wines, your fishes, your beers, anything fermented, mustards, all kinds of things like that. Like I said, it can become to the point where we have people in our community who like basically can get tachycardia and have to go lay down for hours because just too much histamine will raise their whole body.

And so is it growing? It might be, but I think there is a lot more awareness to what it is. And the cool thing about the options out there for histamine, there’s a lot of people talking about taking like a DAO enzyme. DAO helps break down histamine. There’s people who take a lot of quercetin with their foods or quercetin during the day that helps lower the amount of histamine that’s released as well. But a lot of times, if you don’t respond to just those simple interventions, you get on this little hamster wheel where it just gets more and more aggressive. And tributyrin is one of the first supplements I’ve found that can kind of, like, just insert a foot into the door and stop the cycle from happening and also start to reverse it.

And so part of what’s been studied in animals is that it sort of, like, bays the mast cell in a way that it sort of re-regulates it to an environment so it stops expressing so much histamine. And so I would say some of the coolest stories out of our community have been people who, for instance, ate a strawberry in February of last year and went to the hospital because of the histamine release. And then they took our products throughout the year, and for Thanksgiving that year, they were able to eat the meal with their family and have a glass of red wine and not have any issues, which if you don’t know about histamine and mast cell, mast cell issues that doesn’t even really matter to you, you’re like, “I don’t understand.” If you have those issues, that’s like a really big deal for someone like that.

Katie: Got it. And you mentioned examples of stories that you’ve heard. I know you’ve heard a lot from your community. I know I saw a difference in my own health. And one of my kids who had eczema in the past, it seemed to be really helpful for her. What other kind of stories do you hear from your community?

Steven: Yeah. I would say some of the other major ways that it can really help is people who have loose stools. So, this could be IBS, IBD. You know, the actual underlying structure is not all that important. It just seems like most people are either too slow in their digestion. That’s just like their phenotype, if you will. If you’re familiar with that word, it’s kind of like body types but applied to the gut. Some people are too slow in general. They’re always skew that way. Some people are too fast, and some people alternate.

And so when they’ve studied IBS people who are diarrhea dominant or constipation dominant, they do have low butyrate in both conditions, but constipation is always more complex than diarrhea. And the cool thing about diarrhea dominant people is Tributyrin-X is like one of the first things that is almost like just a 95%, like, recommendation. There’s almost no way it doesn’t work. And so we’ve had people who have been on all different types of pharmaceuticals, all different types of supplements, they’ve seen 20 plus doctors, still having loose stools, and they’re able to use a higher dose of Tributyrin-X and finally have normal bowel movements. And that’s like a really big win if you’re someone who’s chained to the toilet.

So, the constipation people, on the other hand, we’ve seen some pretty wild successes there if they go really slow for a long time, so like 12 to 14 weeks of like every other day dosage versus someone with diarrhea might take like nine a day. And something, I think, flips inside of the constipation biome or the constipation gut such that people just report like suddenly, they’re using less magnesium, they’re using less laxatives, things like that, somewhere around that 12-week mark. And so I think it goes back to this ecosystem idea of are you setting up the conditions to, you know, really have a healthy gut. I mean, we take all these pills, and these killers, and these probiotics, and these prebiotics, and I believe in all that stuff. But if we’re throwing it into like the dumpster fire of our gut versus like a really nice remodeled home, they’re gonna do two different things. And so I think a lot of the stories that are really successful from the community are related to taking it for like 12 weeks or more, and, you know, things like, “Oh, wow, that skin patch I had, I never knew what it was. I didn’t even notice, but it was gone, or you know, that bloating I always got with broccoli, I didn’t even realize it, but now I don’t have that anymore. I just stopped eating that food.” It’s really little things like that that matter to people, the details, but also some of these bigger histamine and diarrhea-related things.

Katie: And to circle back, you mentioned, especially with restrictive diets, that many of the listeners have probably tried at some point or another, that you can have that downshift in butyrate production in the gut. And I know like with tributyrin, you can just take it, and that seems to be extremely helpful. But long-term, how can we get back our natural butyrate production if that’s even possible, and what does that look like?

Steven: Yeah. That’s my hope for myself and for my family and for everybody listening here is, you know, tributyrin is sort of inserting the stop in the door, like I said, and beginning to reverse and repair everything. But the goal, as we’ve talked about several times already, is to be able to eat all kinds of vegetables and make your own butyrate. And so to do that, we have to think about the ecosystem again. Number one, we gotta be eating foods that have fermentable fibers. Number two, we need the microbiome to be able to break…that microbiome will give off enzymes and basically break that fiber down, and then you have butyrate specific species of microbiome or bacteria that make the butyrate.

You need basically all three of those things to create butyrate on your own. And so how do you do that? Well, for instance, pomegranate and cranberry are shown in the research to help increase butyrate-producing species. There are species now that people are talking about like Akkermansia F. prausnitzii. I think I pronounced that wrong every time. But there’s these specific strains…and Clostridium XIVa. You can search those strains online for different types of foods, but in general, it tends to be these high polyphenol foods. So, the goal, I believe, is to take probiotics and prebiotics that sort of increase the diversity such that maybe we can recover that internal butyrate production.

Katie: And butyrate seems to be a bit of a buzzword right now, and there seems to be, at least what I’m seeing, a lot of research coming out. What is the difference between tributyrin and other products that contain butyrate or that claim to help with butyrate?

Steven: Yeah. So butyrate by itself is kind of a fragile stinky molecule. Like it smells like terrible vomit. Like you don’t wanna smell…you don’t wanna open these capsules. And you may have bought some sodium butyrates and smelled the bottle and just be like, “I gotta get my money back. I can’t take this.” That was the first generation of butyrates. They were butyrate bonded with salt, either sodium, magnesium, or calcium usually. And these salts are absorbed really, really quickly in the upper intestinal tract. And so you have to do a few things. Number one, you have to make a product that humans can actually not gag and eat. And so sodium butyrate was a huge breakthrough, and there’s been a ton of research on it. It’s a very helpful compound. But it suffers a lot of issues. One is, it’s hard to contain the smell. It still smells pretty bad even when you put it in very high-tech capsules. Number two, it’s just naturally absorbed really, really quickly because absorption of salts in the intestinal tract is based on a gradient. If it’s really salty in one area, it just moves across the membrane right away. And so then you’re also getting a lot of sodium, or calcium, or magnesium, or something like that extra on top of the butyrate. So it’s less of, like, a full-on butyrate supplement and more of like a combo supplement. So that can make dosing a little hard.

Then there was this breakthrough like three or four years ago where people started to realize that they could take the tributyrin molecule, which is butyrate backed by fat. It’s a glycerol molecule. They could take this natural what they call pro-drug of butyrate, and they could wrap it in special capsules or fat molecules and create liposomes. And that would reduce the smell and protect it from the stomach and get it deeper into the intestines. We actually want our butyrate to be released like basically top to bottom. Like somewhere in the small intestine, you want to open, you’re gonna try to get it down into the colon as well. Now, it might be counterintuitive because the majority of it’s made in the colon upper large intestine.

But all the research that we’ve been done, except for the suppository research on butyrate, has been done in capsules that opened in the small intestine and were quickly absorbed in the small intestines. So what I can say is that practically speaking and human research speaking, we want a butyrate product to release in the upper small intestine and make its ways as deeply as we can down into the large intestine.

And so tributyrin does that naturally because it needs lipase to split it apart, and so it’s a natural time-release molecule versus the sodium butyrate molecule, which is just a quick salt absorption. When you basically do something like what we did, which is a patent-pending capsule, it’s an enteric capsule, so some people are like, “Well, the product I have or the other brand has a really nice capsule too.” And it’s true, but we’re the only ones with an enteric capsule. And you’re like, “What’s enteric versus gastro-resistant?” And I’m like, well, it’s the difference between the iPhone 5 and iPhone 10. If you drop your iPhone 5 or your iPhone 6 in the toilet or in the water, you had to get that thing out right away because it was water-resistant, and most of us know that basically meant it was toast, you know, put it in some rice, it’s probably gonna die. iPhone 10s and ups were the next level of water-resistant, and they were like basically what enteric capsule is. At some point, if you leave an iPhone 10 in the water, it’s gonna die. At some point, our capsule will open up in acid, but in general, there’s been no leakage at over two hours in the studies. And so basically, what that means is getting intact and projecting it from the acid, which allows us to go up to 99% purity, and then when that opens in the small intestine, the natural time-releaseness just gets it deeper. That’s one of the reasons why our product is I think special compared to the other products out there.

Katie: You also mentioned magnesium a minute ago, and on a personal level, I’m really curious about this because that’s one piece of my own health I haven’t been able to fully figure out yet in that I seem to have a skin reaction to a lot of forms of magnesium. I also tend to stay awake from them whereas they help most people sleep, and I wonder about a potential histamine pathway. You mentioned the potential of this to help with not needing as much magnesium. Can you go deeper and explain what’s happening there?

Steven: Yeah. If I did, I misspoke. I don’t know that taking tributyrin would reduce your magnesium need, but I do know that for people like you who have, like, what’s called a counter-intuitive reaction, anytime you…like if everybody reports, you know, most everybody says, in this case, “I get sleepy from magnesium.” And you’re someone who has a counter-intuitive reaction, you get energized from magnesium, then it’s typically another pathway like you mentioned.

Dr. Dan Kalish has actually done some work on this, and he’s pretty familiar. I can’t remember off the top of my head what he said is needed to sort of fix the magnesium hyper-reactivity. I will say that Tributyrin-X, one thing I forgot to mention is that we have a whole group of people in our customer group who use it as a sleep pill. And so this doesn’t make a lot of sense at the first glance, but there’s a mouse study where they give tributyrin to mice, and they experience much deeper sleep and deeper stages of sleep and longer. And so there’s like people, like, we have somebody on our team who just got some bottles at their home. The wife who’s a mom of three, and she’s got a lot going on, right? All the kids are under 10. She just saw it on the counter and started taking one before bed, and her Oura Ring scores or sleep scores are going up. And so I’ve had other biohackers who track their deep sleep states and their HRV states report better outcomes using Tributyrin-X right before bed. So, I’m not sure how to solve the magnesium thing off the top of my head. I know Kalish is the way there.

Katie: Awesome. I will check that out. Are there any contraindications when it comes to tributyrin supplementation or times people would need to be especially cautious?

Steven: Yeah. The biggest thing is that for the constipation dominant people, the number one side effect is as your body’s sort of reabsorbing the butyrate and reusing it, it can slow your motility down even farther. If you’re using our product or anybody else’s product, and you tend towards constipation, I would go very slow and very low, so like once every three days, something like that. That’s probably the number one contraindication. Otherwise, I don’t know of any others.

You know, ours, for instance, is not a vegetarian or a vegan capsule. We could not find an enteric capsule that was actually able to be vegetarian based, and so for people who may have an animal sensitivity or just prefer to not do that, it wouldn’t be suitable for them as well. But, yeah, in general, the coolest thing about tributyrin versus sodium butyrate. Now, sodium butyrate, again, really good research. I’m not saying don’t take it, but I am saying if you’ve ever taken it, try someone’s tributyrin, whether it’s ours or…like the other good product is Pure Encapsulations, but it’s a liquid, so especially good if you have children who don’t swallow things.

So the interesting thing there is that in humans, back in the day, they realized that butyrate could be helpful for cancer. And so there was a study done in humans where they gave a ton of oral tributyrin, not oral sodium butyrate, but tributyrin actually. They get up to 42,000 milligrams a day per person. They did see some side effects, some GI side effects, things like that. As far as a safety profile goes, tributyrin orally is one of the best out there. Like in this case, in order to replicate that study, you’d have to swallow our entire bottle of pills, which I don’t recommend, and I don’t think anybody would do. So I think the really cool thing about the safety profile here is there are clinical research studies checking, is this a bad thing? Could there be side effects? And it’s very high, you know, amounts that I’ve never seen or heard reported before other than that study.

Katie: Got it. Okay. What about the brain connection because this is another area that I see a lot of butyrate-related research, and I see people experimenting with it almost as a nootropic? So, what is happening with the brain when we get enough or make enough butyrate?

Steven: Yeah. I mean, this is early, early days of research, and no one can really tell you. But my theory is that it’s traveling up the vagal pathways and the portal pathways right up into the brain. We see almost all neurodegenerative diseases when tested, do they have a disrupted microbiome? Do they have low butyrate production? The answer is pretty much always yes. And so there’s ongoing clinical data right now on things like Alzheimer’s and, you know, whatnot. I’m not willing to comment on that. I haven’t heard it anecdotally, and I don’t know the results of those studies. But as I mentioned prior, I mean, sleep is a very brain-driven component, and the sleep data so far as I said is that most people who take a tributyrin supplement or Tributyrin-X close to bedtime, like within a half-hour to an hour of bed, typically report more REM sleep, more deep sleep, and then better restedness in the morning. How the pathways and how that’s all working, we’ll find that out in the next 5 to 10 years.

Katie: That’s exciting, and it’s super exciting how fast research seems to be moving right now. I’m definitely keeping an eye on a lot of these.

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This episode is sponsored by Olipop. At least six times a day I get the question, “Mom, can I have an Olipop?” Usually once from each of my kids. And I’m happy to say yes. While I sometimes drink regular soda as a kid and usually felt pretty awful after, I love that my kids get to sip on something that taste like the sodas I grew up with. But unlike other sodas that are full of sugar, corn syrup, and artificial ingredients like aspartame, Olipop is made with natural ingredients that are actually good for you. They use functional ingredients that combine the benefits of prebiotics, plant fiber, and botanicals to support your microbiome and to benefit digestive health. We’ve all heard that many people consume much more than the recommended amount of sugar. And Olipop is much, much lower in sugar than conventional sodas, with only 2 to 5 grams of sugar from natural sources and no added sugar. Their vintage cola, for instance, has just 2 grams of sugar as compared to a regular Coca-Cola that has 39 grams of sugar. I’ve worked out a special deal for my listeners to receive 15% off of your purchase. I recommend trying their variety pack if you’re not familiar with them, so you get to sample all of their flavors. Go to drinkolipop.com/wellnessmama and use the code “wellnessmama” at checkout to claim this deal.

For a lot of people listening, especially when we talk about food sensitivities, I’m guessing a lot of people are wondering all kinds of questions related to kids because we see certainly food sensitivities on the rise in every age group of kids right now. So, are there any guidelines? I’m sure you have parents asking, “Can this be given to kids, at what age, in what dose? How do we use this with kids who already have food sensitivities?”

Steven: Yeah. Well, I guess like everything we should say here, you know, Tributyrin-X doesn’t treat anything. It doesn’t treat IBS, IBD, anything, asthma, you know, sleep issues, anything. It’s just supplemental to everything else you’re doing. If you have any questions, do check with your provider, your healthcare, general doc. But what we’re seeing is that, you know, butyrate since it is a normal production inside the body, there doesn’t seem to be any contraindications from our users when they’re giving it to their kids.

The biggest issue is around swallowing a gel cap. Our product is a very small gel cap, so it’s one of the easier pills for a kid to swallow. But if not, then that’s where Pure Encapsulations SunButyrate, which is a…it’s like a blueberry lemon liquid. That’s another good option and can be much easier to use.

So, when it comes to kids, you know, check in with your doctor, be monitoring them. And then as I mentioned earlier, especially with kids, you do want to try to get their diet more diverse. If you’re gonna use tributyrin to, you know, basically stabilize the gut, get them out of their acute symptoms, you know, allow them to feel better, then you immediately as a parent, I would hope anyways to begin to get more prebiotics and probiotics in their diet so that we hopefully rebuild that microbiome before they pick up too many sort of like allergies or immune issues as they grow.

Katie: Yeah. Absolutely. It seems very much a both/and equation, and like, we talked about already, with the goal of much more adaptability and resilience and being able to interact with lots of different substances without having a reaction in the long term. I know you also have personal experience in gut healing, and for anyone who’s maybe starting off or experiencing some of these more severe problems, you have talked before about kind of the 80/20 of gut health. And I’d be curious, any personal advice you have on just getting started with that. Like I know for me, in the long-term, short fast like three to five-day to reset the gut, and then some of these products were really effective versus more long-term restrictive diets. But I’m curious what your experience is and any helpful tips you would give people for starting.

Steven: Yeah. I mean, you just nailed it there with fasting. I mean, some people are on the verge of going to the hospital, or they’re in a real bad place, or a lot of people will buy these very expensive cleanse kits and things like that. It’s much cheaper and actually much more beneficial just to do a water fast for, you know, two to five days depending on whatever you can tolerate and have experience with. So, that’s gonna be your best bang for your buck when it comes to fasting, and I guess bang for your butt as well probably. So, either way, that’s really good.

And then I would say the biggest 80/20 here is if you focus on the ecosystem… Again, I’m an engineer, so I think about things a little differently. But I always try to think when it comes to behavior change or anything, we wanna set up the conditions for the outcome we want. So, like, for instance, if you’re trying to go work out every day and you just can’t figure it out, one of the best things you can do is put your shoes and your clothes right underneath your feet when you get out of bed, so when you get out of bed, you literally fall on the floor on your shoes because then you’ll be like, “Oh, right.” It disrupts all of our mental patterning, and it creates the system or the ecosystem for you to actually be into fitness and do it every day.

So I think about the gut that way as well. I take probiotics, I take prebiotics. You know, from time to time, I’ve had to use killing programs to kill off certain things. I’ve taken other specialty products, you know, depending on what’s happening for bloating or things like that. But the number one thing I’ve always come back to is if your ecosystem isn’t working correctly, if you don’t have the stomach acid to actually break…neutralize, you know, incoming pathogens and break down your foods and things like that, if you don’t have the enzyme release to actually break apart the molecules in your food, and if you don’t have the butyrate to keep your microbiome healthy and keep the food sensitivities at bay, like, you’ll just be chasing your tail. You’ll be eliminating foods, you know, month after month. You’ll be trying this supplement, trying that supplement, all of which supposedly will help you with those things, and they will. But it’s the 20% that doesn’t really matter that much until you get that bigger 80% working. If you get the actual underlying architecture of the body working again, then all those things matter so much, then the probiotics matter, then the prebiotics matter, that kind of thing.

Katie: Yeah. That’s such helpful perspective. I think two important things you said. The first being about that tip for putting stuff in your way where it’s gonna trigger a reaction. Even small things like supplements that are supposed to be taken at meals like your HCL or certain probiotics I’ve taken, I put them on the table with the salt. So, I see them and then remember to take them, or nighttime supplements, put them next to my toothbrush, things like that, and it helps so much with actually remembering to take those things. And then, like you said, that 20%, I think it’s easy to wanna get caught up in these fancy biohacking things or all these cool new devices. But I agree with you, if we don’t have those foundational things in place, those things aren’t gonna be as effective, or they’re gonna be marginally effective compared to what they could be. Whereas I always tell people, if you can optimize sleep especially and light and stress and the basic foodstuff, then anything else you add on top of that is gonna be so much more effective. I’ve also seen you talk about how bell curves should rule your health choices, and I’d love for you to elaborate on this a little bit.

Steven: Yeah. I should say that a little easier for people, but basically, statistics should rule how you think about your supplements. So, this might be a lot for somebody if this is…you know, depending on where you are in your health journey, this might be too much for you to hear, but I need people to start to get this message, which is that everybody’s genetics, epigenetics, their health history, their environments, like you said, their light exposure, their food is different. And so this idea that whatever the back of the bottle says is what you should be taking, or whatever you hear me say on a podcast or someone else who’s a “expert” say, that’s just straight-up bullcrap. We fall in a statistical probability based on all those factors.

And so there’s something called the long tail, which is if you’ve seen a bell curve, it’s like this bell-looking thing, and at either end, it’s about 34% of people. That’s of a standard population. Now we’re talking about people with, like, for instance, food sensitivities. Well, the chance that you’re in that long tail on either end if you have food sensitivities is even higher. So, for people listening to the show, you might fall…you know, there might be a greater percentage than 34% that fall in this long tail. And the long tail basically means you need way more or way less than whatever is the general recommended dose.

This can work for pharmaceutical drugs as well. It definitely works for vitamin D supplementation. So there’s some people out there who can take 10,000 IU of vitamin D3 and see, like, no movement. They might have like a 30 on their score, which is, like, just barely good enough. And other people can take 10,000 IUs of vitamin D3 and get to like 70 or 80 nanograms for IU, which is like a lot. And some people might say you might need to take less. The same thing is true, especially in your gut. You really need to work with a provider or, you know, get a certification yourself or get educated yourself to realize like, “Okay. You know, in this case, Tributyrin-X, like, you know, based on my symptomology, I might need more. I might need to dose higher. I might need to dose less,” and, you know, getting regular blood work done like that to help out as well. This comes to like curcumin. This applies everywhere.

But there’s so many people who listen to a show like this or are working their butts off to get healthy, and they just haven’t been in the industry like you and I have for this long. And so they don’t realize that, for instance, you know, 500 milligrams of curcumin is statistically not gonna do crap. Like, it doesn’t matter how “bioavailable it is.” The research data basically says above 1,000 milligrams a day is where you get like the joint reductions, the inflammation reductions. And so being willing to take chance, dose yourself a little higher, dose yourself a little lower, understanding the risk profiles I think is really important because one of the worst things, I think, is when someone has an emotional breakpoint, and they’re like, “I’m gonna handle this. I’m gonna get my health back.” They choose the right product or the right grouping of product because they’re, you know, listening to the right shows, and they’re doing everything right, but then they under-dose it, or they overdose it. You know, that’s just so sad to me because you’re so close to what you want.

Katie: I’m so glad you brought that up. I’ve been talking more and more, and I know we’ve even talked about it in one of our past episodes about the importance of that personalization aspect and how we’re also individualized. And that’s why I’m hesitant when people are like, “What exactly did you do to get over Hashimoto’s?” I’m like, “I can share it with you, but use it as a framework, not a blueprint. Like follow it loosely and experiment. Work with someone who knows what they’re doing and figure out your own actual variables.” I think it’s a two-sided thing. On the one hand, we can learn something from almost every interaction, every experience, every expert, but at the same time, we have to then take that and personalize it to ourselves and not just accept it at face value without experimentation. So that being said as a caveat, I’m curious what your own personal 80/20 for health right now are, and what those consistent things that you figure are the most important for you.

Steven: Yeah. It’s a great question. I need the supplements every day. So I take the HCL, the holoenzymes, the Tributyrin-X every day. So keeping my gut pretty healthy with those is really important to me. I really need to exercise most days. That just really helps me, I don’t know, just getting my body, get out of my head, I’m behind a computer screen a lot. It helps me not think about stress, things like that. The other thing is meditation and gratitude journaling. This is also super important. I can get into these rabbit holes, or maybe I’m nitpicking my own health or like worried about a loved one in their health. And meditating and gratitude practices, when I’m doing them, I find that I have much more acceptance and faith for what’s unfolding, and I think that’s as important as almost anything else out there.

Katie: I 100% agree. I find that, for me, sunlight and meditation fix almost every problem as long as I’m not doing anything super bad in any of the other areas. I feel like sunlight just feels like I’m charging, and meditation helps me ground. And together, those two are definitely super impactful for my health. And as expected, our time is, of course, flying by because I could talk to you all day long. I know we’ve covered a lot, and I’m gonna put more links for everybody listening to go deeper on some of these topics, and I know you also have more information on your website. So I’ll put those links, as well as you have special links for everyone listening. But another question I love to ask toward the end of interviews is if there’s a book or a number of books that have had a profound impact on your life, and if so, what they are, and why.

Steven: Yeah. Well, definitely, listeners should go check out those links because you have $15 off and free U.S. shipping for the Wellness Mama community. So, we’ll hopefully take care of you all there. The books for me, I would say the two biggest ones are “The Surrender Experiment” by Michael Singer, which for me as a type-A personality who’s hopefully trying to help the world, things like that just kind of shows me, like, what happens when you do yoga and meditate every day, and you really surrender to life. And like, you know, he ends up being the CEO of a publicly-traded company that’s indicted by the FBI, and like his whole internal journey during this crazy leadership experience. And then the other one is “Man’s Search for Meaning.” That book is just a regular read for me, just helps me put things into perspective. I think for most people listening, life is probably more intense today than it was two years ago, even a year ago. And I think with all that’s going on in the world, we can really get wrapped up in things that are happening. And then when you go read about something like what’s it like to go into a concentration camp and survive, to me, it helps put what I’m dealing with in perspective.

Katie: I love both of those books as well, and I think you’re right. Viktor Frankl was so great for helping reframe current situation and the stress that we all experience. I’ve read about him and another member who was in the concentration camps, and both of them their mindset going into it was that they were going to try to be a presence of love for everyone they encountered. And it was amazing when they studied it after how much even their biology reacted differently, and they didn’t experience some of the really negative long-term physical effects. I think that mindset piece is bigger than we even understand yet. And lastly, what is one piece of advice you would like to leave with everyone today, could be gut-related or not?

Steven: Yeah. I mean, there’s so many pieces of advice I’d like to get out there, but I think that just…you know, when we’re recording this in 2021, I think one thing I want people to do is really focus on their mental health. And there’s lots of components, and you could take that any number of ways mental health is a…you know, it’s not really a very definable word. For me, there’s key characteristics of mental health that help myself know that I’m in a good frame of mind.

And one of the biggest ones is holding paradox, just being able to say that, you know, when somebody’s on the other side of a point from you, and they’re being very vocal or very aggressive, and you’re on the other side being just as defensive and vocal, that you’re probably both slightly right and slightly wrong. And I feel like we’ve lost that in the world today for a little while. I hope it comes back. There’s actually a component of a true adult or a mature adult can hold two simultaneously opposing ideas at the same time and not make either one right or wrong. And so I think that if we could do that more as even like this, even that this talk is right and wrong for you all at the same time today. I think it’s really, really important for us all to be a little bit better at being critical thinkers and then just being positive forces of acceptance like, “Yes, I get that that’s important to you, and this is important to me, and we’re probably both right a little bit here.”

Katie: I love that and the idea that a different viewpoint should in no way take away from your ability to love a person. I think I love that you brought that up as your advice, and the world can certainly use more of that right now and always. So I love that we’re gonna end on that note. And, Steve, thank you for your time. It’s always such a pleasure. You’re so knowledgeable and well-spoken. I learned a lot today, and I know the listeners did too. Thank you for being here.

Steven: Yeah. Thank you, Katie.

Katie: And thanks as always to all of you for listening, for sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the “Wellness Mama Podcast.”

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.

This article was originally published by wellnessmama.com. Read the original article here.

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Katie: Hello and welcome to “The Wellness Mama Podcast.” I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and wellnesse.com. That’s wellnesse with an E in the end. And this episode is all about glutathione, free radicals, antioxidants, and aging. I’m here with Dr. Steve Morris who is a physician who is currently serving as a scientific adviser and principal formulator in the nutraceutical industry. He has done a lot of research and worked in various areas and approaches, but today we talk specifically about his work on glutathione.

We go deep on what a free radical is and why it matters, why it’s considered the master antioxidant, exogenous versus endogenous antioxidants, so ones that you consume versus ones that your body makes, the worst free radicals that we are exposed to, and spoiler alert, they’re made within our body, how mitochondria creation of ATP creates free radicals., why we see an age-induced decline in the body’s ability to produce glutathione, what superoxide dismutase is and why it’s important, and so many other topics. This is really fascinating episode, especially if you have any kind of inflammatory response. We’ll talk about the role of these compounds on inflammation and aging. I definitely learned a lot, I would guess you will too. Let’s jump in. Dr. Morris, welcome. Thanks for being here.

Dr. Morris: Hi, there. Great to be with you.

Katie: I’m excited to get to deep dive on a topic you are an expert in today. Before we jump into that, though, I have a note in my show notes that you lived in Brazil for a couple years, and you speak fluent Portuguese. I’m curious, why did you live in Brazil?

Dr. Morris: Good question. I was actually down there as a missionary for a couple years, doing all kinds of service. And when they do that, you go down there, and, I mean, I didn’t speak a lick of Portuguese at all. And you’re just kind of immersed in the culture immediately, and, you know, you have to get trial by fire. Learn it or you don’t eat. And so, anyways, yeah, so, I came back. And it was interesting speaking it for two years and not really speaking English. I had a hard time transitioning back to English when I came back. So, anyways, it was a good time, fun experience.

Katie: Wow. Were you at the point of even thinking and dreaming in Portuguese?

Dr. Morris: Oh, yeah. Yeah. That’s another thing. That’s when you know you’ve really learned a language, when, like, you have a dream about you’re, like, family members at home that you know don’t speak that language, and they’re speaking to you in it. So, yeah, it was weird.

Katie: I’ve always thought the way we teach language in school is highly ineffective, because I took four years of high school Spanish and was, like, roughly able to get by. And then, spending two weeks in a Spanish-speaking country, it all just clicked into place. So, that’s really cool that you got to do that.

Dr. Morris: Yeah, it was a good time. Good time. I agree with you on that, for sure.

Katie: Well, I know you are an expert in a topic that I’ve gotten quite a few questions about, and I’m excited to learn more about today, which is the topic of glutathione and a lot of things related to that. But I’m pretty sure most people have at least heard of glutathione. But to start broad and kind of build a foundation for this conversation, can you walk us through more specifically what glutathione is?

Dr. Morris: Yeah, absolutely. So, it’s often… Well, let’s start with, actually, if you don’t mind, start with antioxidants, or, excuse me. Let’s start with oxidative stress. What are free radicals? We hear that word all the time, right? You know, free radicals are bad for us. You need to be taking this and taking that, and it’s, you know, antioxidant here, antioxidant there. What is a free radical? Well, from an educational standpoint, a free radical is an erratic, unwhole, unstable atom or molecule, okay? So, atoms, by nature, like to be whole. When they lose a part of them, which is usually an electron or a hydrogen atom, they become erratic, and they go around scavenging, trying to find another electron or hydrogen to replace it. And that’s what makes them dangerous, because the place they often go is to DNA or cellular structures in your body that are vital, and it, you know, can wreak havoc on your body. And that’s what oxidative stress is.

So, antioxidants, what they do is they readily donate these electrons or hydrogen atoms to these bad guys, and render them inert. Now, glutathione. Glutathione is often referred to as the master antioxidant in the body. And it is. And the reason why it is is…there’s multiple reasons, and we’ll talk about those today. But the main thing is is that it readily, more than anything else that we ingest, or inside our bodies, it readily donates. It’s a giver. It readily donates an electron or proton to, you know, these bad guys.

You know, there’s two forms of antioxidants. There’s exogenous, and those are things that we eat. So, like, the fruits and vegetables and dietary supplements, and, you know, they’re good. But there’s a thing called bioavailability, which is a fancy word for, you know, like, how much of something does your body actually…is your body actually able to use when you ingest it? And, oftentimes, a lot of these, these exogenous antioxidants, the bioavailability, or, you know, their effectiveness, is really low. You know, it just kind of goes right through us. And then there’s endogenous, and that’s what glutathione is, and that means it’s what your body makes. And your body makes glutathione.

Katie: So, just to recap, because this is a little bit of a flashback to potentially some high school science for a lot of us, when we’re talking about free radicals, because they’re unstable, they are designed to move to whatever area they can become stable by essentially bonding with what they need, correct?

Dr. Morris: Yeah, pulling, pulling, you know, like cherry-picking an electron off of a, or a hydrogen atom off a, you know, a strand of DNA. And then, you know, we have mechanisms in our bodies to repair that. But as we age, you know, that doesn’t occur as much, and, you know, it just, with time, we get less effective at fixing those things. And then you get, you know, mutations, which lead to chronic disease, like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, you name it.

Katie: Okay, so, if I’m understanding it, in an absence of an adequate amount of antioxidants, these are more likely to pull that from vital tissues in the body. Whereas if we have antioxidants available, it’s gonna more easily bond to those?

Dr. Morris: Perfect. Exactly. Yep. The key to this glutathione is the sulfur atom, okay? It’s called a sulfhydryl group. And all that is is a fancy term for a sulfur atom attached to a hydrogen. That sulfur bond to the hydrogen, it is really weak, so to speak. It, more than anything else, it readily gives up that hydrogen, or electron, to, you know, free radicals better than anything else.

Katie: Got it. Okay. And where do free radicals come from? I would guess that a lot of different potential sources. And I would guess that maybe we’re having a higher exposure than we have in the past to some of these sources, considering things like chronic disease and cancer are on the rise. But how are we exposed to free radicals?

Dr. Morris: So, there’s, really, there’s two ways that we’re exposed. And once again, it kind of goes back to that outside/inside thing. Believe it or not, the worst free radicals we’re exposed to, we actually make inside our bodies. If you go back to the high school chemistry days, or not chemistry, biology days, learning about the cell, the powerhouse of the cell, mitochondria, that create, you know, the energy currency of the body. That process of creating the energy currency, ATP, creates really, really, really bad free radicals. Now, in healthy cells, and healthy mitochondria, those free radicals are rendered inert by glutathione and other things. And they don’t pose a threat. But, once again, as we age, or if we have a chronic disease, or, you know, we’re under a lot of stress, it can make those mitochondria leaky, so to speak, and allow these free radicals to leach out into the body and cause damage.

The other place we’re exposed to, obviously, is outside. I mean, we’re constantly bombarded by free radicals, the foods we eat, the air we breathe, the sun. And I’m sounding like a doomsdayer. I’m not. It’s really, it’s just part of life that our bodies have evolved to an extent that we’re able to control this for the most part. And that’s why we’re, part of the reason why, you know, we’re able to live as long as we are.

Katie: And it would seem like, especially if these are things created within our body, like you said, there’s a natural process for handling them. And it would seem like there’s also kind of a threshold component here that, like, within a certain amount, they serve a purpose, I would guess, within the body, and our body knows how to handle them. So is this more an issue of we’re having, like you just mentioned, exposure to a higher number of these, and also probably a depleted consumption and creation of antioxidants as we age? And so, this is, like, a balance, like, we’re never going to eliminate free radicals, so we’re creating a threshold in which we can safely handle them?

Dr. Morris: Yeah, exactly. It’s a combination of both. Exactly. I, you know, I don’t have any hard data. And I don’t think anybody does, really, as to, you know, we have an X percent rise in the number of free radical exposure from 1970 to 2021. We just don’t know that. But we postulate that. I do think that’s one of the components. And the other component is is that we, as we age, it is proven. There was a study done in “The American Journal of Nutrition” that actually showed that by about the ages, between the ages of 30 and 40, we start to see a decline in the body’s ability to not only produce new glutathione, but also, what I call recycle it. And I’ll explain more about that. And it’s, once you reach the age of 60 to 70, you’re looking at two and a half to three times lower amount of glutathione in your body than when you were, you know, 30 or younger.

Katie: I’m in my 30s, and I’ve noticed it does feel different than being in my 20s for sure.
Dr. Morris: Oh, yeah.

Katie: But in some ways, also a lot better. I’ve had some positive health changes. But before we dive deep on glutathione, I’m curious, can you just give us an overview of some of the other sources of antioxidants? Because certainly, we’ve all heard things like green tea has antioxidants, certain foods have antioxidants. What are some other sources? And how do those compare to glutathione?

Dr. Morris: You know, endogenously, once again, inside our bodies, our bodies make what’s called superoxide dismutase. It’s a long word. We abbreviate it SOD. You’ll see that on the shelves of, you know, dietary supplement stores. How bioavailable, once again, how, like, how much of it we’re actually able to use when we consume it? It’s not much. So, it’s, once again, it’s created in the body. You know, other areas, obviously, you mentioned green tea, and then, with the product that we’re gonna talk about today, the formulation, you know, quercetin is another really big source of antioxidants. Alpha-lipoic acid, resveratrol, broccoli, which contains sulforaphane, is the fancy chemical name inside broccoli, and cauliflower. Elderberry is another one. Basically, any fruit or vegetable that has, if it’s deep and rich in color, contains antioxidants or polyphenols. So, that’s what you need to be looking out for if you want to increase, you know, even more.

Katie: Got it. Yet another reason to consume lots…a wide range of micronutrient-rich foods and fruits and vegetables.

Dr. Morris: Perfect.

Katie: Yeah, I think that’s a recurring theme for sure. I’m also curious, before we delve into this, since this is a natural bodily process, is there a time and a place for that response, and/or a time and a place when you wouldn’t want to blunt that response immediately? So, for instance, I’ve seen kind of conflicting data on immediately post-exercise, for instance, taking antioxidants, because there’s a role of you actually want some version of that response after a hard workout. Is that, am I remembering that right? Or can you explain what’s going on there?

Dr. Morris: To a degree, yes. So, a comparison I often use, and it’s… For instance, when you get sick, when you mount a fever, that fever, to a degree, is good for you. Not only is it increasing the temperature of your body, which makes you uncomfortable, but that increased temperature is two things. One, it helps minimize the growth of the bacteria or viruses causing the infection, because it can’t operate in that hot of an environment. Two, it means that there’s more metabolic processes going on, meaning your white blood cells are attacking them, okay? And so, we take ibuprofen or Tylenol to reduce the fever, we feel better, but it’s, in some ways, blunting the response, our immune response. Now, I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing that… I take ibuprofen all the time. But it’s a very, very similar thing.

I think working out, post-workout, yeah, there is a release of free radicals and different toxins from the muscles, for sure. If anybody’s, you know, here has had a very deep tissue massage before, if you don’t drink lots of water the next day, you can feel really sick after. It’s because you’re releasing certain toxins into the bloodstream. I wouldn’t say that it’s a bad thing to take a glutathione supplement afterwards. It’s not going to necessarily blunt any positive return that you would get from working out. If that makes sense.

Katie: Yeah, the data I’ve seen, if anything, it just seemed to be in a very narrow window, like that immediately after working out… Same with, like, an ice bath. You wouldn’t necessarily, if you were trying to gain strength, want to do it immediately after, but it has a lot of benefit in a window after that.

Dr. Morris: Yeah, there… In essence, when you’re working out, you’re breaking the muscle down. You’re not actually building, you’re not… You know, you may feel like you’re pumped up, you know, when you’re lifting weights and working out, but really, you’ve just torn the muscles down. The building occurs afterwards. So yes, you are right.

Katie: Okay. So, let’s go deeper on glutathione. You mentioned this is a thing our body does produce naturally, but it declines with age. What’s the process by which we create it endogenously?

Dr. Morris: So, it’s a two-step process. And there’s three building blocks, key building blocks. One of them is the rate-limiting, like, most important building block, and that is cysteine, which is basically an amino acid. You know, you can buy it off the shelf, it smells like sulfur, because it has sulfur in it. It is the rate-limiting factor in the production of glutathione. If you don’t have enough cysteine in your body, or sulfur, you can’t produce the right amount of glutathione. So, that’s one building block. The second one is glutathione. Or excuse me, sorry, glutamine. It’s also an amino acid, okay. And the third one, that we will talk about too, is glycine. So, and that’s another amino acid. So, those three building blocks are the three that make up the molecule of glutathione. And it goes through two steps. There’s two enzymes that are utilized that are in the bloodstream that make this, and that’s how it’s made. So, really, what it boils down to is is, you know, are we getting enough sulfur in our diets, number one. And, along with that, are, you know, are we getting enough cysteine donors, or molecules that are able to readily donate cysteine to make this?

Katie: Gotcha. And I know you have a specific solution to this, but I’m also curious, what are dietary sources of sulfur and/or these amino acids? And are those worth supplementing with if someone knows that they might be either at an age or have a reason for their glutathione production to be lower?

Dr. Morris: No, definitely. Most definitely. You know, I’ve got a list. You know, if meats don’t bother you, turkey, chicken, fish. Beef even has high amounts of it. If we get into plants, we look at nuts and seeds, grains, legumes, especially walnuts, like, as far as nuts go. Then we have what are called Allium vegetables. That’s A-L-L-I-U-M. And those are the vegetables that we typically think of that have kind of a very strong odor or taste. So, that would be like onions, garlic, leeks, scallions, shallots, things like that, that… And you’ll know, usually what I say is, if you cook with it, and you put it in the fridge, and the next day, it smells like sulfur when you open it up, that’s a sulfur-containing one. And then the other one is the what are called cruciferous vegetables. And those are things like broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, arugula, kale. All those sorts of vegetables. So, those are good places to get sulfur. Sulfur is very, very key, not just in the production of glutathione, but in several enzymatic processes in the body. So…

Katie: Yeah, that brings to mind another podcast guest I’ve had in the past, Dr. Terry Wahls, who had an amazing recovery from MS. And her protocol involved a lot of brightly colored vegetables, Allium vegetables, and cruciferous vegetables every day to, like, hyper-load that response and flood the body with micronutrients. And it makes sense based on what you just explained.

I would guess there’s also a point, certainly, I would guess things like any kind of gut issue and absorption issue would decrease the amount of these things you can even absorb from food. Also, you mentioned these all slow down with aging. So, our ability to convert slows down with aging. So, that makes me think, you know, like, obviously I always defers to it when it’s possible. It’s great to get everything from food. But also there’s very much a time and a place to support the body supplementally, especially in today’s world, with declining nutrient density and an increase in free radicals like we’ve talked about. How might a person know if their glutathione production is declining, or is that a thing we can just essentially assume happens with age?

Dr. Morris: I think you can essentially assume that it happens with age. I mean, it’s pretty much proven, like I said, in that study, and there’s been various other studies too, that have demonstrated that, but there’s a couple of things. I mean, there is a blood draw that you can get, that is a ratio of what’s called reduced glutathione, which is the stuff that’s active. And then it’s a ratio of that to the oxidized form of glutathione, or spent. And most of the studies, that’s what they look at, is they look at the ratio of that. You want that ratio to be higher. You want more reduced glutathione versus the oxidized form. The body has a way of recycling glutathione, has an enzyme that basically takes what’s called glutathione disulfide, which is two glutathione molecules hooked together, they’re missing their hydrogens, or their electrons, they’ve given away. And it then adds another electron or hydrogen to it. And it creates two brand new forms of glutathione. And both of these…so, what contributes to the reduction of glutathione with age is not only are we producing less, but we’re recycling at a slower rate as well.

Katie: Got it. Okay. So, then, definitely seen a lot of information about glutathione supplements. What happens when we take an exogenous glutathione versus when we create it internally in the body? Does the body recognize those as different? Or does the body use it in the same way?

Dr. Morris: Good question. So, I often refer back to it, like, you know, in the hospital, when we have patients come in that have overdosed on Tylenol, what ends up, unfortunately, killing them is the fact that they’ve literally oxidized every last molecule of glutathione in their liver, and in their body. And so, we, the only way we have to supplement them in a hospital, effectively, is aerosolize, or, you know, through a breathing treatment, what’s called N-acetyl cysteine, NAC. And it’s a cysteine donor, okay? It happens to be on the market readily, once again, as a dietary supplement. The problem is is if you take it in a capsule, or ingested, basically, its availability to the body is 10% or less, it’s not that high. And that’s why we have to aerosolize it. You know, if we could do that at home, that would be great. But unfortunately, that’s a drug, it then becomes a drug.

Pure glutathione, for instance, you’ll see that in the market as well. Its bioavailability is extremely low, even lower than NAC. And then, there’s some companies that are, you know, touting what’s called, liposomal glutathione, and that’s basically glutathione that’s been kind of encapsulated so that when you ingest it, it doesn’t get broken down by the stomach or the liver. And the problem with that is this. Just like…you’ve heard the term, you know, moderation in all things, right? You can have too much of a good thing, okay? The body has an innate mechanism that we developed over time, as, hundreds if not thousands of these, actually, called inhibitory feedback mechanisms. So, the way I kinda relate it is when you go to fill up your car with gas, put the pump in, you know, and you click the handle on and you let it go, right? That pump has a sensor that senses when it’s starting to get full, and it clicks off. Okay, it’s a feedback mechanism, all right? If it didn’t have that, and you may have seen this at the gas station, where it’s, you know, it’s defective or whatever, you get spillage and overflow. And, you know, that can wreak havoc. Fires, whatever.

The body knows how much glutathione it needs. And it may need more at a certain time and less at another time. And so, by taking liposomal glutathione, you’re bypassing that process, that innate process. And what, in essence, what’s happening is that you can enter what’s called a hyper-reductive state. So, instead of being in a hyper-oxidative state, where you got all this oxidation going on, you’re in a hyper-reductive state, which is equally as bad. If that makes sense.

Katie: That does make sense. And I definitely agree with you that too much of a good thing, I think that’s a important thing to remember, even with water. We see that with literally everything. There can always be too much of a good thing. So, how do we know what that threshold is? And is there a way to consume glutathione in a bioavailable way, that does not bypass that process?

Dr. Morris: There is. And, you know, let’s see, it’s been a little over a year ago, I started looking into, you know, there’s got to be a way, you know, to get a cysteine donor, that key element, that is basically the fuel driving the production of glutathione. There’s gotta be a way to get that to, you know, to the body orally, at higher than 10%. You know, without bypassing these innate mechanisms that we have that are very important. And, came across a molecule we abbreviate as NACET. And it stands for N-acetylcysteine, which is NAC, but it has two other chemical groups attached to it, an ethyl and an ester group. And those are very important groups. What those do is they allow the molecule of NAC to become bioavailable up to 68%. So, it’s the highest amount of any other supplementation out there. It also allows the molecule to readily cross what’s called the blood-brain barrier. That’s the barrier that protects our brain from toxins. No other cysteine donor supplement on the market does that. So, it readily crosses, and it’s able to do its job in the brain as well, to help reduce oxidation in the brain. And, in utilizing NACET, you’re not, like I said, you’re not bypassing that, you know, natural feedback inhibitory mechanism, and you’re, in essence, you know, boosting your availability of cysteine by, you know, six times or more.

Katie: Wow. And I know there’s been some controversy with NAC recently, and it was even pulled from the market in that form, and now it’s hard to find. So, this formula with adding those other groups, since it’s handled differently in the body, I’m assuming that’s still available.

Dr. Morris: Yes. Yeah. And, I, you know, and this is my personal opinion. I think that’ll probably be overturned with time. It’s…a lot of that is politically motivated, unfortunately. Yeah. Like I said, we use it in the hospital. Really, when it constitutes a drug, and that’s the problem, is how it’s delivered. If it’s delivered intravenously, or it’s aerosolized, it is then a drug. So…

Katie: Got it. Okay. That makes sense. And, like, I’ve seen some of this as well. And I know, like, for a while, it seemed like there was a lot of marketing that the liposomal form was good. And I saw a lot of companies that were marketing the liposomal form, but you’re saying that one, especially, in large amounts, can actually create that process that’s more…it can be dangerous as well, if you’re just, that bypassing the body’s natural system?

Dr. Morris: Yes, that’s right. Yeah. I…myself, and several of my colleagues that are experts in this area, they’ve tried to get that out there, saying, “Hey, you know, this is not necessarily a good thing, that it’s that available to the body, because you’re bypassing things that are there to protect you.”

Katie: Gotcha. Okay. Well, when consumed correctly, and being an antioxidant, I would assume there’s also an anti-aging component with glutathione. Is that correct? And if so, does that exhibit even on, like, a cellular level, in the skin, or do we see positive aging benefits from consuming glutathione correctly?

Dr. Morris: Yeah. You know, glutathione is found in, virtually throughout the entire body. And, you know, like, we’ve…you stated, and with, you know, your background and knowledge of oxidation, you know, the older we get, the less efficient we are at ridding ourselves of free radicals. We also accumulate more damage to our DNA. By increasing glutathione, you know, we’re able to not necessarily turn back the clock, but slow the progression, if you will, of aging and development of a lot of the chronic diseases we see today. The truth is is the three big, you know, killers, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, the root of all of those is inflammation or oxidation. All three of them. And if we can slow that down, if we can mitigate that to some degree, we can, you know… I can’t say, you know, “cure,” or “fix,” or anything like that, but it certainly helps in those areas. So…

Katie: Yeah, and the role of inflammation and chronic disease has certainly been a recurring theme in the literature I’ve seen recently and also, in previous podcast guests, like, we know there’s that inflammatory connection with chronic disease, we’ve seen the inflammatory connection with even certain acute responses in the body. We’re starting to understand so much more that role of inflammation. And so, you’re saying by acting on the free radical response, glutathione also has the mechanism of reducing inflammation in the body?

Dr. Morris: Yeah. To a degree, yes. Yeah. I did a study… It’s been 20 years ago, I think. I can’t believe it’s been that long. But, you know, we did it on atrial fibrillation, which a lot of, a large component of the population have, which is basically, you know, the heart, instead of beating, you know, the way it’s supposed to, it quivers. And so, you develop blood clots, you have to be on blood thinners, you can have a stroke. And we linked several inflammatory markers to that disease, even. And so, yeah, glutathione is very…and I need to say, too, glutathione doesn’t just donate an electron or a hydrogen and render a free radical inert. It also helps other antioxidants, both exogenous and endogenous antioxidants, function better. So, it’s…that’s…hence why it’s called the master.

Katie: Got it. And I’ve also seen research related to the inflammatory response in the brain, and how that expresses in a whole variety of different conditions. Is glutathione something that’s capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier and working with inflammation in the brain as well, or how does it work there?

Dr. Morris: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, so, that’s the big thing with NACET, the, you know, the discovery of this, N-acetylcysteine ethyl ester. It is the only molecule that we know that readily crosses the blood-brain barrier, so it’s able to go in there, into the brain, provide that cysteine fuel, to make glutathione in the brain. And yeah, so it, yeah, it definitely, more than anything else out there in the market can help mitigate inflammation and oxidation in the brain.

Katie: And just extrapolating from what we’ve talked about, I would guess that anybody who knows that they’re dealing with some kind of inflammatory response would benefit, especially from getting their body’s glutathione levels up. But are there studies or things where they’ve looked at it in specific conditions or responses?

Dr. Morris: There are. And they’re usually, you know, smaller pilot studies. But, you know, and then, of course, there’s anecdotal evidence, which is not scientific. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not true or real. I would always tell patients, and still do, you know, there is such a thing called the placebo effect, right? But the brain is a very powerful tool. And you can take a medication all day that we know works, but if you don’t believe that it’s gonna work… I’ve seen people that it doesn’t work. So, I tell people, you know, as long as you’re not getting ripped off or scammed, or you’re taking something that’s completely off the wall and bad for you, if you feel it’s helping you and you’re feeling better, who am I to tell you that it’s not working? You know what I mean?

Katie: Yeah, exactly.

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I’m curious from the anecdotal side. I know that you guys have worked to release to get this product out to people. Who are you finding is most often taking it, and what kind of results are they seeing?

Dr. Morris: Yeah, so we see it, you know, a wide variety. So, from very healthy athletes. And they’re seeing, you know, increased focus, energy, sense of well-being, just a general health, they just feel better, to people that are, you know, overweight to a degree. And they’re actually seeing some weight loss with this. And then, you know, to people that have, you know, autoimmune inflammatory disorders. For instance, we do have one person in particular that has interstitial cystitis, which is a really tough condition to treat because… and it’s basically an inflammatory disorder of the bladder. And we have lots of ways we can help, you know, mitigate the symptoms. But this particular patient, it’s mostly in women, started taking this, and was not taking it with the intent that it would help with interstitial cystitis. She’s, you know, taking it because she thought, hey, you know, I’ll give it a run. Once she started taking the supplement, you know, she noticed that her symptoms were getting less and less, and eventually started to go away. Now, once again, I’m not saying that it cures it. That’s not it. But it certainly, in an anecdotal way, for her, has helped tremendously.

Katie: And I’m curious… I know, like, there’s the sulfur component here. And certain people have genes that don’t respond well to certain sulfur-related compounds. I’m curious how this comes into play with that, and if this form is able to be safely absorbed by those people?

Dr. Morris: So, let’s talk about that. Yeah, so, people often say, “Oh, I have a…”, they’ll say “…a sulfur allergy.” What they’ve been told is they have, usually, from their doctor, a sulfa allergy. That is a completely separate thing from sulfur. So, trimethoprim, sulfamethoxazole, is a common drug. It’s a antibiotic, given to people, that people are allergic to. It’s the drug they’re allergic to, not sulfur. Then there’s the whole thing of, you know, you’ll see on a lot of shampoo bottles now, or personal care products, because I formulate those as well, you know, sulfate or sulfite-free. Those, once again, are completely different. It’s not the atom sulfur that you’re allergic to. If you were, you’d be dead, because sulfur is everywhere in your body. It’s the drug. It’s the molecule itself that you’re allergic to.

Katie: Gotcha. That is helpful to understand, because I have a couple of those genes, and I’ve reacted poorly to certain supplements before, so, really helpful to understand.

Dr. Morris: Yep, exactly. Like, for instance, so, you know, one of the big… So, soap, initially, it didn’t foam, you know, several hundred years ago, when they created soap. It was made from, rendered from fat. It didn’t foam. Soap only started to foam when we came up with surfactants, and specific surfactants that are used in…less now, but were heavily used, and I guess still are, SLS, SLES it’s abbreviated sometimes, sodium lauryl sulfate, it’s that “sulfate.” And, you know, some people are allergic to those. They’ll get, you know, dry scalp with these, the shampoo, they’ll break out in a rash. I know it’s used in a lot of toothpaste. And I know, for instance, myself, if toothpaste has it in there, I end up getting a film in my mouth, and it’s the skin sloughing off. I’m allergic to that in my mouth, in the mucosa. So, once again, it has nothing to do with the actual atom.

Katie: Okay, so, let’s talk briefly about the specific formula that you have created and formulated, and I know you’ve explained kind of the process of it, but how does this work specifically in the body in a different way? And is it a risk to that threshold problem? Or does the body…is the body able to modulate how much it needs with that form?

Dr. Morris: Very good question. So, yeah. So, stumbling across in, you know, researching and spending a lot of time, you know, in books and on PubMed coming across this NACET, I, you know, from medical training, knew that cysteine is the, you know, the key driver in this process, and, you know, we have a hard time getting enough of it in our bodies. And so, I thought, let’s combine and make, you know, basically a super glutathione product. So, not only providing that cysteine donor component, which is an acid, but also putting in this formula the other two building blocks we talked about.

Glycine and glutamine are both in there, as well as several other ingredients, milk thistle, quercetin, things that I kind of mentioned earlier. Alpha-lipoic acid, resveratrol. We even have a broccoli extract in there as well, that’s standardized, that has sulforaphane, that I mentioned. Elderberry, blueberry extracts are in there as well. And the whole point of this supplement is to help boost and support glutathione production, as well as the recycling of glutathione, and the recycling of other antioxidants. So, if you would drink a glass of orange juice, vitamin C is a great antioxidant, but once it’s spent, it’s done, and it can’t be recycled. Glutathione recycles it. Can make it useful again.

Milk thistle, for instance, that’s in our formula, just by itself has been shown to increase glutathione by up to 35%. It also increases that other molecule that I talked about, SOD, superoxide dismutase. It’s been used for centuries, by multiple populations. Quercetin is another one as well, that’s been used for a very long time. It’s a key component, or helps with what’s called phase one and phase two detoxification. And those are two key pathways in the liver to help detoxify the things that we ingest. Everything we ingest goes through the liver, essentially, and the liver filters it. And that’s why when we ingest things, we end up not getting a lot of what we ingest, because the liver filters it out, breaks it down, the stomach acid, things like that. It’s called the first-pass effect.

Katie: Got it. And I know glutathione is very supportive of the liver, which is the master organ, if we’re talking about master oxidants. So, impaired liver function has wide-ranging consequences throughout the body, so any way we can support the liver essentially supports every reaction in the body, in a profound way. And I’m glad you brought up the sulforaphane component as well, because I’ve written about sulforaphane and talked about it on this podcast. I know there are people like Dr. Rhonda Patrick, who talk extensively about it, and its role that we’re understanding more and more in the research. And it seems like for a long time, we knew it was available in food, and things like broccoli sprouts, which I’ve grown in my kitchen. But it seems like it’s more recent that we’re able to stabilize it and get it into a supplement form that’s beneficial to the body. Is this a new thing, or am I just seeing this recently?

Dr. Morris: No, its…you’re right. It’s… I think it’s probably… I mean, it’s been around for a decade or two, but it’s becoming more mainstream now. And what you’re…yeah, exactly what you’re talking about is a standardization, basically. So, instead of just taking broccoli powder, or eating broccoli, which is good for you, there’s a lot of other things in broccoli that are good for you, this is standardized, meaning that it has, like, you know, a percentage of that powder is guaranteed to have X amount of sulforaphane in there.

Katie: Got it. And I know, I will make sure I put links to the specific supplements. People can find it in the show notes. Those are at wellnessmama.fm for you guys are listening. I know there’s a special offer as well we’ll mention at the very, very end. But as we get close towards the end of our time, a few questions I love to ask, the first being, from your own perspective and your own health on a daily level, what are some of the things that you consider most important, kind of the 80/20 of things you do regularly for your own health?

Dr. Morris: Oh, boy. For my own health. Yeah, I, you know, I try. That’s a tough one to answer. I can…you should do what you say, right. So, I do try to do what I say. But clearly, exercise is a very key component. And by that, I don’t mean going to the gym and, you know, sweating it out every single day. I used to do that, and, you know, it wore me down. And everybody’s different. Some people are made to do that. Others are not. But getting in at least 30 minutes of some form of aerobic exercise. Going for a walk is enough, okay, for some people. I know with COVID, it’s been difficult. We’ve been locked indoors. But, you know, and we’re starting to see a little bit of resurgence of that, but people are getting out more. Exercise…I don’t even need go into that as to why it’s good for you.

Like I said earlier, moderation in all things. It’s…yes, we need to eat fruits, vegetables. We need to be, you know, drinking plenty of water. I think that’s a big component as well. But, you know, moderation. It’s okay to have, now and then, vices, okay. And that’s where this boosting glutathione is helpful to a degree. So, you know, staying happy. I think the brain is probably, not probably, it is the most powerful tool. It certainly utilizes more energy than any other organ in the human body. And it also consumes more blood than any other organ in the human body. Which tells you something. I mean, that’s… it’s a very, very powerful tool. So keeping, staying healthy up here. And whether that’s through meditation, doing yoga, whatever works for you, to be present in the moment. I think us as humans, and in particular Americans, we have a hard time in life focusing and being present in the moment. I know, myself, I’m always worried about the past and the future. I have been. And so, for me, I try to engage in activities that keep me present.

Katie: That’s great advice. And especially the brain side, I’ve learned more and more… We know from the data, meditation, for instance, people who meditate regularly, their brains are seven and a half years younger than people who don’t, and I think when we’re young, we get more opportunities, hopefully in a good way, even in a school environment, to exercise our minds and to learn and to grow and to see patterns. And that gets more difficult, or at least we have to be more intentional about it, as we get older, because I feel like we get more routined, and have fewer opportunities naturally for that. But, to your point, we can make time for meditation, or yeah, like cool cognitive games and puzzles, and there’s always gonna be learning experiences. We just have to prioritize them as we get older.

Dr. Morris: Yeah, and I wanna emphasize something. In life in general, and here’s my counseling component to this, from a counselor standpoint, the moment you find yourself utterly and completely comfortable, there’s something wrong. And that doesn’t mean you need to be just miserable all the time. But there needs to be some level of discomfort in your life all the time, otherwise, you’re not growing. You’re not changing, and, you’re standing… You’ve heard the term, “if you’re standing still, you’re not standing still, you’re going backwards.” And that is the truth. So, always finding things to change up, move, stimulate your mind, those are all good things. And then the last thing I would say for good health, and this is another big problem today, especially with sleep apnea, is quality sleep. So, make sure you get plenty of rest.

Katie: Yeah, and that’s certainly being threatened in the modern world. I would say, the only commonality across every expert I’ve ever had on this podcast is the importance of sleep and quality sleep. I’ve never had anyone say sleep is not important or sleep doesn’t matter, or you can get too little sleep and be okay. That is an absolute constant, and one that we don’t, certainly, to your point, prioritize enough often in today’s world. So, very sound advice. Another question I love to ask toward the end. Are there any other areas that are commonly misunderstood or not understood about your area of expertise that we haven’t already touched on? And if so, what are they?

Dr. Morris: Boy, my area of expertise is kind of…it’s broad. So, I initially started out as a family medicine physician. I did virtually everything. I was, like, an old, you know, old-time family doctor, I delivered babies, I worked in the ER, I rounded on patients, did minor surgeries. It burned me out pretty quick, talking about sleep. It was hard. But it gave me a broad view of the human body, versus looking at, you know, each organ individually, instead, looking at the person as a whole. And so, I entered the dietary supplement and personal care arena about 10 years ago with that mindset, the body as a whole, okay. And so, from that standpoint, I’m passionate about, you know, developing novel dietary supplements, personal care products, OTC drugs, that are science-based, that are efficacious, that are safe, and, you know, that actually help the consumer. And so, that’s kind of where I…I don’t know. That’s what drives me.

Katie: I love that. Another question I love to ask for the end is if there’s a book or a number of books that have had a profound impact on your life, and if so, what they are, and why?

Dr. Morris: Oh, wow. Yeah. One of them I can’t say the name, because it’s…this is a PG program. So I’ll end with that book, but any of Brené Brown’s books are very good. She’s a…has a…she’s a PhD in psychology, talks a lot about, you know, guilt and shame, and what that does to the brain and the whole body. All of her books have been great. Another really good book that I have read actually is by a former Holocaust survivor. He was a physician, actually, a psychiatrist, but Viktor E. Frankl, it’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”. And that can be woman’s search for meaning as well. And it’s a very thin book. It’s very short, quick read, but the gems that are inside that book are phenomenal. And then the last one is by Mark Manson, and it is, basically, it’s how to un-F.U. your life, yourself, basically. And, you know, he just goes through, in a very comedic way, how to get yourself out of that rut, if you feel like you’re in a rut physically, emotionally, mentally, or all of the above, you know, the different ways, and everybody is different. Two people can go through the exact same, exact same scenario. Exact same. And interpret it and feel and, in their bodies, react to it completely differently. So, we need to keep that in mind when, and have some compassion for others when we look at maybe the way certain people handle things or do things.

Katie: I second all of those recommendations. I’ll put them in the show notes for you guys, and especially “Man’s Search for Meaning” has been a constant in my life. It’s one of the few books I reread every year. At the beginning of the year, I do a seven-day fast for the spiritual-mental benefits, and I reread that book, just as a mental reset, to be reminded of so many…so much good we have in life, and just mentally.

Dr. Morris: Yeah, no, I… There is another one, too. And, speaking of my time in Brazil, by Paulo Coelho. And he wrote a very famous book. It’s been, boy, I don’t know how many years ago, but it’s called “The Alchemist.” And there are a lot of very, once again, it’s like a Viktor Frankl book. If you haven’t read “The Alchemist,” read it. Excellent book.

Katie: Agreed. And that’s…I’ll put that in the show notes as well. And then, lastly, as we wrap up, we talked a lot about glutathione, and in particular, the formulation you worked on. Where can people find this one? And I think you have a discount code as well.

Dr. Morris: Yes. Yeah, we do. So, for those that, you know, that are interested in this at all, go to…we’ve got, for the actual GSH, the actual capsule, we have two forms. The capsule form is TryGSHplus.com/Mama20. And if you go there, it’ll give you a 20% off for being a part of this today. And then, we are also rolling out a gummy form of this, and when I tell you this tastes phenomenal, it tastes phenomenal. Like, it’s…you’re gonna wanna eat the whole bag at once. And, you know, it’s really good. And that is…you will go to kudogummies, that’s K-U-D-O-G-U-M-M-I-E-S .com/Mama20.

Katie: Sounds good, and I will check it with my team and make sure those links are all in the show notes for you guys. I know a lot of you listen while driving or exercising, so, all of the links, everything we’ve talked about will be at wellnessmama.fm, under this episode’s show notes, so you guys can find it, but this is definitely a topic I had seen a lot of information on, but not ever gotten to go deep on. So I’m really excited we got to delve into the world of glutathione today, and grateful for you, Dr. Morris, and your research. Thanks for being here.

Dr. Morris: No, thank you. Sure appreciate it. It’s always fun. I love teaching and talking about this, so I appreciate you inviting me on your show.

Katie: And thanks as always to you guys for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, energy and attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of “The Wellness Mama Podcast.”

This article was originally published by wellnessmama.com. Read the original article here.