There are a lot of people out there who believe Big Pharma is trying to kill them, or the Elites are, or Bill Gates is. These are people who tend to believe very grandiose claims without much investigation for evidence or nuance. And I'm not making a statement that their premise is wrong, only that it lacks nuance.

NAC is a victim of this. It's a powerful anti-oxidant. So is glutathione. So is Vitamin C (ascorbic acid). So are a dozen other things you would recognize quickly if I listed them. It does what it does. It reduces oxidized species (ie molecules or ions in an oxidized state) of various kinds in the body, and in so doing detoxifies them or resets other biological processes that detoxify them.

Because of that mechanism of action, it has been attributed as a cure for countless diseases which have a component of oxidative stress in their pathophysiology. Usually it's infectious disease or cancer, but it can be a ton of things due to the inherent function of the liver, which is to detoxify, and the fact that so many things go through a fair basic set of metabolic processes to metabolize and eliminate drugs/poisons/toxins/whatever from the body.

Of course, it's more complicated than this, and that's why I talked about nuance. Yes, NAC might help with cancer, but the root cause of the cancer is a series of genetic mutations that causes some cells to reproduce and grow when they're not supposed to. The NAC will help with some of the symptoms of that extra growth, but it won't treat the root cause. You still need to kill the cancer cells. In an infection, it's similar. NAC can help with some of the symptoms when your immune system turns your body into a molecular battlefield, but ultimately NAC doesn't kill the pathogen. Something else does.

There's one other big one if I speak broadly. Chronic metabolic disease from an unhealthy lifestyle: obesity, diabetes, alcoholism, smoking, unhealthy diet, etc are all linked in that they stress the body's metabolic process to take in food, store extra as fat, shuffle the various components around the body, and eliminate toxins in whatever we're putting down our throats. NAC helps, especially if your condition is extreme and the liver's various mechanisms are overwhelmed, but it's not a cure. The cure is to fix the diet and lifestyle.

So, NAC (and anti-oxidants in general) get oversold. If you're reasonably healthy, you don't need NAC. Drinking enough orange juice and ensuring you get your RDA of essential aminos (to make glutathione) is really all you need. If you're unhealthy, NAC is only part of the equation.