Health Wanted: Zombies

The Episode

A term for a mindless person. A tiki drink that will make you wish you were dead if you have too many. An iconic dance break in a Michael Jackson video. Laurel’s favorite Cranberries song. What do these have in common? 

This week on Health Wanted Laurel investigates the medical origins, and possible explanations, for zombies, and interviews Dr. Roger Byard about real-life cases of people consuming a zombie’s favorite treat: human flesh.

Plus, Laurel answers questions about if Tylenol depletes glutathione, if acupuncture is the new Botox, if a nasal spray can reduce the risk of COVID, and more!

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The Listener Questions

What does Jenny McCarthy mean when she says that giving Tylenol to kids around their vaccines can also cause medical problems due to depleted glutathione?

Jenny McCarthy is a TV host who has been around since the 90's. She also has a son who was diagnosed with autism, and she has been very vocal about her belief that vaccines caused his diagnosis and has been a very prominent voice in amplifying pseudoscience and creating doubt in the safety of vaccines.

She recently made a video “explaining” the link between autism and Tylenol use and vaccines. She said that using Tylenol depletes your body’s glutathione, which is a compound that helps your body’s detoxification process. She also said that if you take Tylenol around the time you get a vaccine with an aluminum adjuvant, your body won’t be able to process and remove that aluminum, so it stays in your body and binds to your guts and brain and whatever else, causing problems.

If you’re someone who never gave their kids Tylenol around the time they got a vaccine, but your kids still got an ASD diagnosis–don’t worry, she has an explanation for that too. She goes on to say that some people who never use Tylenol still have kids diagnosed with autism because, like her, they have low glutathione levels. She states that they should have their levels checked to see if they need IV infusion of glutathione–something she gets done weekly.

That's a lot of misinformation, so let’s start with what’s true: Too much Tylenol can deplete your glutathione levels. That’s part of what happens with a Tylenol overdose, but it doesn’t happen with regular therapeutic doses. Tylenol in the body is converted to NAPQI, a toxic metabolite. When we take a regular dose of Tylenol, there’s a bit of NAPQI produced, but we have enough glutathione in the liver to bind to it, neutralize it, and excrete it out of the body. If someone takes too much Tylenol, they produce too much NAPQI, and it uses up all the glutathione with non-neutralized NAPQI left over, which can cause damage to the liver.

But again, that’s what an overdose is, and it’s well above the recommended amount.

The main issue with her argument is that, unlike other environmental toxins, aluminum does not need to bind to glutathione to be excreted. It will pass through your kidneys and out your body regardless of your glutathione levels. So, even if the regular dose of Tylenol did deplete your glutathione (which it doesn’t), that would also not have an impact on your body’s ability to metabolize and clear aluminum.

It's also worth noting that aluminum is the third most abundant element. It’s in our water and food. Babies get more aluminum from breast feeding or formula than they do from vaccines.

We already talked about it, but a study from Denmark of over a million kids found that the use of aluminum adjuvanted vaccines did not increase the risk of autism.

As for if you should get your glutathione levels tested: That’s another scam.

Glutathione exists in your cells, so you can’t tell how much glutathione is in your liver tissues from your blood. IV glutathione is not approved by the FDA, which means it has no evidence of safety or efficacy. You can also only get it through compounding pharmacies. Some compounding pharmacies are inspected by the FDA, but their products aren’t checked for quality or that they actually contain what they claim, and glutathione infusions in the past have been found to be contaminated with serious toxins.

Glutathione infusions aren’t even used when someone is actually suffering from Tylenol toxicity that has depleted their glutathione. Instead, they use a compound called NAC, which is a precursor to glutathione that helps to replenish the stores of glutathione and prevent cell damage.

Does acupuncture actually help you have a youthful glow and beautiful skin? Is it better than Botox?

As far as I could find, there were no papers comparing the two treatments, and they work in opposite ways. 

Whereas acupuncture is supposed to create tiny wounds with needles that cause your body to rush to repair them through increasing circulation and collagen, Botox works by paralyzing the muscles to relax the skin and decrease the appearance of lines. The only paper I could find was a comparison of people who got cosmetic acupuncture for frown lines to people who got nothing.

It was a really small study that found something was better than nothing. But when it comes to acupuncture being better than Botox, that’s not really something we can claim, because no one has compared them.

I understand it is likely an appealing alternative, especially in this age of “natural” wellness, so if you are interested in getting it, please make sure you are going to a qualified provider. When cosmetic procedures get popular there’s often an influx of unqualified people who are happy to provide the service anyway. Best case is you get someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing so they do nothing at all, and worst case is you get someone sticking needles in your face in a dangerous way.

Botox can be highly effective and has been studied more extensively, but it should also only be done by a qualified provider, and I think a lot of people don’t realize that you can develop antibodies to the toxin which make it not work as well anymore.

Can you explain the study that showed that a nasal spray reduced the risk of getting COVID?

A phase 2 double blind randomized control trial coming from Germany looked at the use of an antihistamine nasal spray three times per day compared to placebo and what impact that had on the risk of becoming positive for COVID.

The study found that the risk was reduced by two-thirds in the antihistamine group compared to the placebo group. The biggest issue is that this is a very small number of incidents. There were only about 20 infections between the two groups, and less if you only include people who were not removed for protocol violations.

When you look at the statistical analysis of this group, the confidence interval for the odds ratio for the risk of getting COVID on the antihistamine vs placebo crosses one. Meaning that the risk could be no different between the group.

There’s some other weirdness with the paper, but the study period was 56 days. I do wonder how reasonable it is for people to use an antihistamine three times a day indefinitely.

Plus, a nasal spray will only protect one part of your respiratory tract and won't neutralize the virus entirely.

Currently, this research is not enough to convince me the benefits exist to outweigh the risks associated with continuous antihistamine nasal spray use.

Catch all the listener questions and Laurel’s answers on the full episode of Health Wanted by:

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