When he turned 40, Dr Jimmy Gutman felt that he should break free from the ER and being a professor of emergency medicine at McGill University Medical School in Canada.
Now in his late 50s, the Canadian physician has established himself as a glutathione expert with his research on this essential antioxidant compiled in the book, Glutathione Your Key To Health.
"Emergency medicine is like professional sport. When you're over 40, you need to find something else to do," he said of his turning point in life. "I realised that instead of running around fixing broken things in the ER, it infinitely made more sense to prevent them from being broken in the first place."
Dr Gutman was recently in Bangkok for a round of lectures, and he was struck by the fact that the antioxidant is used in this part of the world as a skin-whitening agent.
"In North America people don't want their skin to be whiter than it is," he said. "It's kind of disappointing to see people here trying to use glutathione to whiten their skin. Besides the fact that taking it orally as a pill or powder doesn't work - it's a waste of your money."
He also questions the safety of injecting the substance for the sake of vanity.
"In the ER, we inject a drug that raises glutathione level as an antidote to paracetamol overdose," he said. "If you use it as an injected whitening agent, it's not very physiologically effective because cells have an innate intelligence to limit the amount of glutathione produced. So there's no point raising it to a high level and moreover we don't know about the long-term safety."
Paracetamol poisoning can lead to liver failure because of the depletion of glutathione which plays an important role in detoxification of drug metabolites, pollutants and carcinogens.
The liver is the body's major detoxifying organ with the highest concentration of glutathione, and it has been shown that a low level of the compound leads to poor liver function.
Besides clearing toxins, this substance fuels the immune system to neutralise pathogens and foreign antigens. Most importantly, glutathione is what Dr Gutman hails 'the master antioxidant".
"Advances in the study of antioxidants have grown to the point where a whole new branch of medicine has developed called Free Radical Biology, which focuses on oxidant/antioxidant balance," he explained. "We know of over 4,000 antioxidants and none of them can work properly without the master antioxidant, which is responsible for recharging and recycling them. They are like a series of gears in a clock, which have to have a spring, that is glutathione, to drive the whole process."
The body actually produces its own glutathione, which is a peptide, a very small type of protein. You can't replenish it in the same way that you can take vitamin A,C and E supplements because when eaten it is quickly broken down in the digestive system and eliminated from the body.
"However, you can give the body the building blocks to make its own glutathione and this can be with the use of drugs such as N-acetyl-cysteine," he said. "Only recently did we know of a natural option, by taking cysteine and cystine-rich proteins as found in undenatured whey protein isolate."
As a proponent of well-researched supplements, he takes a multivitamin, Omega-3 fish oil and undenatured whey protein to ensure a healthy level of the master antioxidant that will give all the other antioxidants much more miles.
"If we live on a farm, grow our own produce, have our own livestock and the weather is good with no pollution and we don't have stress, we probably wouldn't need supplements," he said. "Unfortunately, our world is not like that. The foods easily available are far from nutritious. The air is toxic, life is toxic, full of stress. So we are almost forced to have to take supplements to keep healthy and to combat the negative environment."