Vitamin C is the most crucial and available water soluable antioxidant within the human body . Its water solubility means that it can scavenge free radicals before they reach the cellular shell. The relationship between Ascorbic Acid and glutathione- the body’s master antioxidant is unique. Vitamin C reduces glutathione back to the active form. Once reduced, glutathione will revitalize vitamin C from its DHAA or oxidized state. This why Vitamin C is an ingredient in Cellgevity Vitamin C is essential for the manufacturing of collagen. It is also needed in the development of norepinephrine and serotonin. Ascorbic Acid may also have some anticlotting and blood flow advancement attributes by stimulating the release within the body of Nitric Oxide, and that’s why Vitamin C is also a key ingredient in the supplement Pro-Argi9-Plus

Vitamin C is held in both the tissues and blood in our bodies. The adrenal and pituitary glands, and lens of the eye comprise the highest concentrations of vitamin C within the body. It is one of the 13 essential vitamins. Despite the fact that the phrase “Essential” is often mis-used. What it really means is that an essential vitamin is one that must be provided by our food since we are not able to manufacture it within the body.

ALA is also used as an abbreviation for Alpha Linolenic Acid which is an omega-3 fatty acid, connected with heart health, but this is a different substance from Alpha lipoic acid – also referred to as Lipoic Acid.

Several studies have indicated that ALA may be able to help reduce levels of blood sugar and combined with it’s antioxidant properties, ALA might be helpful to people suffering from diabetic peripheral neuropathy, relieving some of the discomfort caused by nerve damage.

Researchers are studying alpha lipoic acid to determine its effectiveness against glaucoma although the are yet to collect sufficient data, but because it can pass easilt to the brain, it is possible that ALA might be useful as a protector against brain and nerve tissue damage. it is currently being studied as a possible treatment for stroke and other brain problems with root causes based on free radical damage. Dementia is one such condition.

ALA is one of the ingredients in MaxGXL and it’s also one of the ingredients in Max International’s newest glutathione support product – Cellgevity. It works with your body’s glutathione and as a powerful antioxidant, fights the root causes of premature aging.

If you’ve ever wondered just how much bood your heart will pump in
your life, consider that you’d have to turn your kitchen tap on full blast and leave it running for 45 years. It would fill 200 railroad tanker cars. How hard does your heart work to pump blood? Pick up a tennis ball and give it a tight squeeze, that is how hard your heart needs to work with every beat. I don’t think that the most brilliant human engineer has ever designed anything that comes close to the marvel that is your heart.

Unquestionably, your heart is a powerhouse and it’s worth protecting because you can’t live without a beating heart. Did you know that with an average of one person dying every 34 seconds, 40% of all the deaths in the United States are the result of heart disease? The leading cause of heart disease is Coronary Artery Disease (CAD).

Because it’s the hardest working muscle in the body, the heart also needs to produce a lot of energy. It’s this high level of energy production that makes your heart vulnerable to the attack of free radicals. Being vlunerable to free radical damage, the heart therefore has a high demand for antioxidants, the most important of which is Glutathione – Your Body’s Master Antioxidant.

Your Heart’s Energy Engines
Your heart’s incredible energy output is produced within each cell in cellular power plants called Mitochondria. Every cell in your body has these designated energy producing sites. The average cell in an average organ has a few hundred mitochondria, but the cells that make up the endlessly toiling muscles of your heart are estimated to have up to 5,000! Cellular energy comes in the form of a substance called ATP which stands for adenosine triphosphate.

The complicated chemical processes within your cells that support the mitochondria to produce energy from nutrients have some unfortunate by- products. I guess its not all that different from any form of production that creates something from raw materials- there is always a waste product. But in the case of cellular energy production the by-products have a damaging effect.

The by- products are free radicals – damaged oxygen molecules that were not completely and cleanly metabolized in energy production process. With the high concentration of energy producing mitochondria in the heart, there is an equally high concentration of free radicals. Without the intervention of antioxidant activity, free radicals create a chain reaction within the cells that can damage them and their components – including the cellular DNA. Accumulated damage can lead to a host of what are usually thought of as the chronic diseases of aging.

CAD and Heart Disease
Arteriosclerosis – Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) which is generally referred to as a hardening of the arteries or loss of arterial elasticity and is one of the leading causes of Heart disease, has been linked to a substance called lipid peroxidase. This is what happens when the lipids in your heart become free radicals. Lipids, by the way are a large group of molecules which include waxes, sterols, fats and the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E & K. As well as having high levels of free radicals, patients with CAD have also been found with reduced levels of antioxidants like Glutathione.

Without an adequate supply of antioxidants to scavenge free radicals in the heart, this organ and the arteries in the system will be subjected to a condition known as oxidative stress.

While our bodies have originally been designed to clean up the free radicals created by normal processes, most of us are now dealing with extra stresses that were not part of the original plan. These stresses include environmental poisons (and especially cigarette smoke!), nutritionally inadequate diets, the pressures and emotional stress of everyday living and poor conditioning of the muscles from a lack of exercise. These added pressures of living place our antioxidant reserves at a distinct disadvantage.

The Benefits of Boosting our Glutathione and Antioxidant Reserves
As we get older our systems naturally begin to slow down. The mitochondria in our heart muscles are gradually producing less energy and our glutathione production is falling. It drops off by about 10% for every decade past our twenties.

Glutathione is vital for a healthy heart. Boosting glutathione levels will not make you live forever, but given how hard your heart is working for you, it only makes sense to improve your diet, live a healthier lifestyle and take concrete steps to increase the natural production of glutathione.

The free radical theory of aging explains many of the ways our various organ systems are degraded over time by oxidative stress and demonstrates very clearly that boosting antioxidant levels can help to increase our absolute life span and certainly improve the quality of our life and health as senior citizens.

Your brain is highly vulnerable to damage from free radicals because although it only represents 2% of your body mass , about 20% of your oxygen is metabolized in your brain. Free or Oxy-radicals – electron challenged oxygen molecules are created by by a variety of things , but one source is a natural and unavoidable by-product of oxygen metabolization . Since twenty percent of your oxygen intake is used by your brain, it stands to reason that the cells in your brain will be subjected to many free radicals.

Within your brain is a large concentration of naturally occurring molecules called Lipids. Lipids include sterols, waxes, fats and a seletion of fat soluble vitamins like E, A, D and K. Lipids store energy, they are signaling molecules and thy’re structural components of your cell membranes. Lipid peroxidation is the name for free radical damage to Lipids and a reason for the importance of antioxidant supplements .

Your defense against Lipid peroxidation within your brain is from antioxidants and at best from a group referred to as the antioxidant network or network antioxidants , made up of Vitamins C, E, CoEnzymeQ10, Glutathione and Lipolic acid . Network Antioxidants help each other to clear out free radicals from you brain and are also uniquely capable of repairing each other . Among the Network Antioxidants, the most important is Glutathione laso known as The Master Antioxidant. It is naturally manufactured in your body and are present in each and every cell.

Sadly , your brain maintains lower levels of Glutathione than do other organs and with aging , the average supply is further depleted since our ability to make Glutathione declines by around ten percent for each decade past our twenties . But the brain needs Glutathione to stay healthy. Look at the part that Antioxidants play in connection with Alzheimer’s Disease – or senile dementia.

There is a strong link between aluminum and Alzheimer’s disease . In an August 2009 study conducted on rats , two equal groups were deliberately given aluminum toxins, but one of those groups was also supplemented with antioxidant oxyradicals scavengers. The first group had a significant increase in lipid peroxidation and a condition known as oxidative stress – that’s the result of unchecked free radical damage. Reduced Glutathione and other network antioxidants were also noted . For the rats that were provided with the toxins along with the free radical scavengers, none of these changes were measured .

With it’s vulnerability to the formation of free radicals an abundant supply of antioxidants ( especially Network Antioxidants and most importantly , Glutathione) is key to sustaining a healthy and functioning brain. While oral glutathione supplements are not considered to be effective, you can take a glutathione precursor like Max One .

Chronic pain – by definition – is long lasting and/or recurrent. It can persist for months or- as is often the case – for years. Chronic pain is not the immediate result of a traceable injury. The simple truth is that if you severely twist an ankle when you’re out running, it is supposed to hurt the next day. Pain is your body’s way of telling you that something is physically wrong. For many injuries and strains, the pain you fell the next day is a result of the inflammation caused in the cells.

In that sense, the immediate pain and one of the recurring themes is chronic pain is the same and that theme is inflammation. Inflammation is itself a frequent chronic condition that many of us suffer from even if we aren’t aware of it. But when the symptom of the inflammation is pain, it gets our attention.

Inflammation is often caused by the unchecked action of free radical damage within our cells. One reason that the damage can continue is that there are not enough antioxidants available to clear out the free radicals. There are many types of free radicals and many types of antioxidants that will defend against them, but not all antioxidants are created equal and on the most important is an antioxidant called glutathione.

Glutathione is often referred to as the body’s Master Antioxidant for the simple reason that it’s present in every cell of the body. Because it is meant to always be at the scene of the crime, glutathione is uniquely suited to support the removal of free radicals. Unfortunately, as we age we produce less glutathione.

So getting to the point, one tactic you can try – and something that has worked for people who have suffered from chronic pain is to increase the level of antioxidants in your body in order to clear the free radicals and treat the inflammation. You can increase your intake of Vitamins C and E. Eat more fresh fruits and vegetables and to boost glutathione you can try MaxGXL or MaxONE.

It’s always been felt that when a person can eat a perfect diet, with lots of antioxidants and the “right ” foods, it will meet all your nutritional requirements in the ideal way and be lower cost than consuming natural health products like wellness drinks or glutathione precursors .

I don’t have the stats to prove this, but I am of the mind that this isn’t the case and what our lives have become means:

* The perfect healthy diet is more than we can accomplish (and what a shame that is)
* Hardly any of us can actually afford the supermarket price of enough organic and freshly grown antioxidant abundant fruits and vegetables to fully satisfy our requirements.
* Even if we could find the focus and the money to eat that perfect diet, the stress in our lives and unavoidable toxins and pollution all around us have moved so much from where we started – that our bodies need more help than diet will provide .

It’s time to admit it , the days of fighting everyday toxins based on eating a healthy diet, rich in natural antioxidants are gone !

We have a wealth of outstanding natural supplements made from glutathione precursors to betalains (a type of antioxidant) for fighting inflammation pain. Building them into a healthy lifestyle as well as the healthiest diet we can eat will help us support our internal antioxidant population .

For one thing , pesticides, herbicides , fungicides, chemical fertilizers , artificial hormones and food additives and the unbelievable quantity of everyday toxins we have injected into our lives were not factored into the Grand Design. Our bodies were not designed to deal with this. In addition to that, the emotional pressures and stress in our lives , our poor diets and lack of exercise. The problem can easily be building up , well past the ability of an antioxidant rich diet to cope with .

But there’s more . You’re not infallible ! You probably like the concept of eating a perfect diet, but most of us keep falling short . Even with our best intentions finding fresh fruits, vegetables and protein sources untreated with agricultural chemicals, planted in nutritionally depleted soils or fed with growth hormones, is getting harder to do. And with the pace of our lives, it’s pretty much unavoidable that a few fast food meals will slip in there and we’ll grab some pre-packaged meals from the grocery store.

Both are a double edged swords. First we cut ourselves by missing an opportunity to take in the good , fresh antioxidant rich foods we need to eat . Then we cut ourselves again by consuming more refined, processed and chemically altered pseudo-food , adding more toxins to our bodies that increase the task load that we need antioxidants to deal with .

And what about the cost of good food ?

Some people often ask why pay for antioxidant supplements when we can get those benefits more cheaply in our diet ? Get out your calculator and seriously check out the actual price to include enough of those superfoods in your meals – each and every day . Who knows where these “expose the scam” writers have been buying their food , but it sure isn’t any of the stores near me . Daily additions of enough blueberries, nuts, pineapples and the other antioxidant rich, fresh and organically grown foods can add big dollars to your monthly grocery bill .

So given our hurried lifestyles, the seriously under estimated expense for the right foods and the ubiquitous presence of everyday toxins we were never meant to live with , I believe that we need more antioxidants than in the past and more than we should reasonably expect diet alone will provide. Should you be choosing these excellent antioxidant abundant foods? For sure! We should do everything is possible to strengthen our diets to be as antioxidant rich as possible . But we should also include the wonderful advances that a concentrated source of inflammation fighting Betalains like Nopalea has to offer or the unique attributes of a glutathione precursor like MAXGXL .

The time has come to admit that we should take all the help we can get .

Free Radicals from Normal Metabolism and Our Immune System

Our own white blood cells use oxidants to combat viruses and parasites and bacteria and chronic infections will expose our tissues to free radicals.

Some processes that break down fatty acids and other molecules can result in hydroden peroxide escaping from the antioxidants that should have broken it down, and damaging other cells.

Antioxidants like Glutathione Fight Free Radicals

The final process through which our body produces free radicals – that age us – is the same process that’s also one of our primary defenses against drugs, pesticides and other toxic foreign chemicals. There is an enxyme called cytochrome P450 which our body uses for this job, but in calling up a supply of this enzyme, the body also produces oxidants – more free radicals. You can see what a double whammy drugs, pesticides and external toxic substances are- not only do they damage us in and of themselves, it ages us to fight them.

I had heard good things about many, and I had heard bad things about many. Finally, after doing some of my own research, I decided to give MAXGXL a try. I was interested to see if the product would really give me the type of energy boost that others said it did. As someone who is maybe slightly on the shady side of my prime, I have started to feel my body slowing down, and sometimes it’s just not as easy to get up and get going as it used to be. ‘ve worked out most of my life but lately not been feeling energetic enough to get myself out the door and to the gym.

After about a week on MAX GXL, i actually did feel more energetic and I won’t say I blasted through my workouts with the energy of a twenty year old, but hey – I showed up!

What you need to factor into any of this is the amazing difference a small change for the better can make in your life. More energy fueled my attitude and my motivation and that fed some physical benefits from actually working out again and that made me feel even better still.

I’ll keep taking MAXGXL not only because my research into free radicals, aging, antioxidants and immune system support has convinced me of the importance of maintaining my own levels of glutathione, but even more to the point – I feel great.

Lorraine