The $5 Vitamin That Beats Expensive NAD
In a Nutshell
Expensive NAD supplements and IV drips are mostly a scam; cheap flush niacin raises blood NAD levels 5-8× more effectively than pricier alternatives. NAD levels stay stable in healthy people, so supplements are unnecessary unless you're unhealthy—weight training, liver, and meat raise NAD naturally, while alcohol and gut issues deplete it. The NAD supplement boom was largely driven by David Sinclair's marketing before he tried to monopolize the compound as a drug.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Your $80 NAD supplement is really just a $5 vitamin. The great majority of these fancy expensive pills never ends up in your bloodstream. When you take these pills and they go into your colon, there are microbes that are going to change this into the very inexpensive flesh nascin, the cheap stuff, the stuff that you could literally buy an entire bottle for five bucks. And in a head-to-head study, the cheap flush niacin actually ended up raising NAD in your blood five to eight times compared to the expensive version which only increased it two times.
NAD helps pull energy out of the food to actually create energy as ATP. NAD is also involved in DNA repair. It's involved in longevity proteins and it also helps run the body's clock.
The entire multi-million NAD supplement business is based on this idea that when we get older, our NAD decreases and all we need to do is actually take a supplement to increase it to live longer. But they've done some studies on NAD in healthy people and there was no drop off. In healthy populations, NAD stays level.
Some people even use the IV drip for NAD, which literally cost between $500 and $1,500 per session. They found that it raised NAD levels by 2%. So don't waste your money. Cheap flush nascin will outperform the IV drip. And also the problem with this IV drip, it creates quite a few side effects. Nausea, chest pressure, racing heart.
The entire NAD supplement business got started with a scientist named David Sinclair. David Sinclair got on Joe Rogan and a lot of other podcast talking about the benefits of NMN, increasing your NAD for longevity purposes, and everyone needs to be taking this on a regular basis. Millions of people then started taking it thinking that they're going to live longer. And David Sinclair did some research on this stating that this has a direct transporter. It can go right into the body and you can actually get more of it. And so after a period of time, he really increased the demand for this specific product. While quietly in the background, he was working with the FDA to apply for investigational drug research. And then of course within six months the FDA from some arbitrary opinion flipped and said, "Oh no, this is now a drug." And so David Sinclair has a very specific patent related to this, a crystal form of this. So overnight, all of the producers of this product were selling it illegally. David Sinclair basically promoted the demand and now he wants to create a monopoly on this product.
Now what's even more interesting is David Sinclair's first company Citrus Pharmaceuticals he did a similar thing. He was pushing papers on rveratrol claiming it increased a protein that helped longevity. Glaco Smith Klein very large pharmaceutical company came in and bought his company for $720 million. Now Fizer came along and tried to replicate some of the original research to see if this rveratrol indeed did increase this longevity protein which they could not do. They could not reproduce it. Then we have Glaco Smith Klein like wow what do we just buy? So they quietly tabled the whole operation. I think they fired 60 employees and they shut down the research because if you can't reproduce it it's kind of a waste of money.
The question is, what drains you of NAD the most? Alcohol is at the top of the list. Also, you guessed it, having problems with your gut microbiome. The gut microbiome has a lot to do with converting vitamin B3 into the form that ends up in your blood.
What actually builds or increases NAD the most? It's weight training because what you're doing is you're stimulating the muscles and indirectly you are making a lot of mitochondria to deal with all this extra muscle and more mitochondria more NAD. Do we need to take an NAD supplement? Generally, if you're healthy, you don't have to worry about bolstering or boosting this. But if you are unhealthy, it might not be a bad idea. And so, the question is, what foods increase NAD? At the top of the list, we have beef liver. And then we have animal meat and fish as well. And then last question, which I think I already answered, do you need more NAD? Only if you're not healthy. And of course, if you're watching, you're not going to stay unhealthy and just take NAD. You want to get healthy.
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