Cheney on glutathione and Vitamin C

[Guest guest]

I've been skimming through dozens of digests after being gone a week.

There was some discussion of Vitamin C and glutathione. The following is

something I first posted in November of '99, and again in july of '00. The

bottom line is that high dose vitamin C can deplete glutathione, neutralizing

the benefits of the undenatured whey. Take care. Carol

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At my October appointment with Dr. Cheney I asked him about taking vitamin C

with the Immunocal/IMUPlus. There had been a good bit of discussion here on

this list about vitamin C and other antioxidants. He gave permission to share

his comments. It's as close to an exact translation as I could make out from my

fuzzy tape recorder! Anything in parentheses is my own comment.

BEGIN CHENEY QUOTE

Vitamin C, especially high doses, we're talking abut giving grams not milligrams

- 5, 10, 30, 50 grams - huge doses. Vitamin C becomes oxidized and then

converts back to its reduced state [effective state?] by in turn oxidizing

glutathione. And of course any antioxidant ultimately gets oxidized if it's

working. So a ton of it that's oxidized will bring itself back up to its

reduced state by simultaneously oxidizing glutathione. So you end up with a

whole bunch of oxidized glutathione trying to maintain this ton of reduced

Vitamin C.

So you in effect are at risk for what's called coupling action. Which is that

all the antioxidants, with a few exceptions, couple to each other. By that I

mean that when they get oxidized they will look for something to reduce them

(back to their effective state), but when they reduce themselves they oxidize

whatever they couple to, (rendering it ineffective?).

So in effect if your lowest common denominator is glutathione, which of course

it is, you're at risk for wiping it out by giving a very high dose of any

antioxidant that couples.

Which ones don't couple? Lipoic Acid. It doesn't couple. Not only that, but

it will recycle glutathione back to its reduced state - without ever coupling

to it. Lipoic Acid is thought to recycle up to 30% of the body's glutathione.

So I think the very best antioxidant to take, especially if you're taking

Immunocal or IMUPlus, is Lipoic Acid.

And I think high dose vitamin C is not a great idea. Although, if you can get

your vitamin C to couple to something else, like a bioflavonoid, like vitamin C

with rosehips - rosehips is a bioflavonoid - you give a bunch of bioflavonoids

like ginko biloba, pycnogenol, proanthocyanidins - there's a whole bunch of

bioflavonids - the vitamin C will couple to that and leave the glutathione

alone.

In a CFIDS patient I wouldn't give more than 2 grams of vitamin C a day without

some concern. Now that is not to say if some patient told me 'I do really well

at 10 grams a day', well by all means take 10 grams a day. But in general I

don't think we should be giving high doses of vitamin C to CFIDS patients who

are glutathione impaired for fear we might worsen the glutathione impairment.

One day I'd like to prove that, but my guess is that it's going to probably be a

very individualized. There'll be people who can handle higher doses of vitamin

C, and we already know there are people who have trouble with it.

No one understood this until the idea of coupling came along.

I would emphasize a little bit of C, bioflavonoids, and of course lipoic acid.

END OF CHENEY QUOTE

My personal experience with vitamin C bears this out. A local doctor put me on

20 grams of C daily back in early 1998. Within a week or two I crashed. I

didn't understand that the C had probably wiped out my glutathione until I saw

Cheney a couple of months later.