Glutathione is the body’s master antioxidant, working within each cell of the body to protect it from stress arising from environmental insults and chronic inflammation. In addition, glutathione is a key detoxifying enzyme in the liver, driving the body’s ability to process daily stressful insults from the environment and from what we eat and drink.
Boosting the body’s glutathione is not as simple as supplementing with glutathione, rather the most effective supplementation comes from providing the necessary building blocks to enable the body to produce glutathione, most notably the amino acid cysteine. Cysteine is also the key building block for taurine synthesis (McPherson and Hardy 2011).
In a nutritional study of the core keratin component of keraGEN-IV®, it was shown that when keratin is supplemented as part of the diet, it is able to “spare” cysteine from the taurine pathway, thereby leaving it to more effectively boost glutathione synthesis, increasing liver glutathione levels and boosting endogenous antioxidant defence (Wolber et. al., 2016).
A major inflammatory mediator produced by cells under inflammatory stress is interleukin-1 (IL-1). IL-1 then stimulates production of many inflammatory molecules, the most significant being prostaglandin E2 (PGE2). High levels of PGE2 are a significant cause of chronic inflammation (Fahmi et al. 2004) and suppression of PGE2 has long been recognised way to minimise inflammation.
keraGEN-IV® contains a form of keratin that reduces the IL-1 stimulated production of PGE2, demonstrating a very significant anti-inflammatory effect.
