Science of NAD
How are your NAD levels today?
Shelly Albaum
Editor, Science of NAD
Important Disclosures
1. This is my personal website
All opinions are my own. Nobody writes here but me.
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2. Supplements Are Not Medicines
Health Supplements like nicotinamide riboside are not intended to cure or treat any disease, condition, or illness.
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3. No Medical Advice
I am a lawyer and a journalist, not a doctor, and I offer no medical advice. But I do follow the science, and I can bring to your attention
some interesting studies. You can read more about me here. And check with your physician -- your physician can look at this research, too.
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4. Commercial Affiliations
I am a ChromaDex shareholder, and a marketing affiliate for Amazon and Rakuten. As a result, I will sometimes mention or recommend products that I endorse, like Tru Niagen, which I take every day. I may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases if you were referred directly from this site and completed a purchase. [Thank you!] You can read more about our advertising, privacy, and data collection policies here.
Are NAD Injections the best way to replenish NAD, or the worst?
NAD injections and IVs are a big business, but there are important questions about cost, effectiveness, safety, and benefits...
Before spending hundreds of dollars to inject NAD into your veins, consider the costs and benefits of this method of NAD replenishment. Not only is it the most expensive way, it may also be the least effective.
The problem is that it is a wildly expensive approach, with no safety studies that I am aware of. Moreover, there is good reason to believe that injecting NAD may provide fewer benefits than oral supplements. Specifically, at best you may end up directing the exact same NAD precursors to most of your cells, but by bypassing the digestive tract you could miss out on the benefits of replenishing NAD in the gut stem cells and through the gut microbiome.
Putting NAD directly into your blood stream will likely a positive effect to the extent that (1) it gets broken down into NAM and your salvage pathway is not downregulated, or (2) it gets broken down into NR and is absorbed as NR. But it is way, way less expensive and more convenient to just take the NR directly as an oral supplement. Concerns about bioavailability of NR are likely overblown, because (1) some NR gets through to cells as NR, and at the high doses we are talking about it may be enough to make the difference we are looking for, and (2) NR has direct positive effects in the gut even if it is broken down there, and so oral supplements have unique benefits that NAD injections cannot offer. In other words, oral supplements may offer as good or better results at a much lower price.