Health Library / Hormones
This content is for education only and is not medical advice. I'm a fitness coach, not a physician. Talk to your doctor before starting any medication, hormone, supplement, or new exercise program, especially if you have a medical condition or take prescriptions.
If you've heard of one longevity molecule, it's this one. NAD+ has been the centerpiece of the anti-aging conversation for a decade, it's on every clinic menu in Austin, and it's the subject of a genuinely interesting scientific story that got flattened into marketing somewhere along the way.
Let me give you the real version, because it's better than the pitch.
Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. It's a coenzyme — a helper molecule — and it's in every cell you have. Two jobs matter here.
Energy. NAD+ is central to how your cells turn food into usable fuel. It shuttles electrons through the reactions that produce ATP. Without it, metabolism stops. This is not a supplement-industry claim, it's textbook biochemistry.
Repair and signalling. NAD+ is consumed by a family of enzymes involved in DNA repair, and by proteins called sirtuins that respond to cellular stress and nutrient availability. Those sirtuins are where the aging interest started — they were the subject of a major research thread out of MIT and Harvard, and they're the reason resveratrol had its moment before the attention shifted here.
And the key observation: NAD+ levels decline with age across tissues. If the molecule that runs your cellular energy and repair is dropping, topping it up sounds like it ought to help.
That's the whole thesis. It's a good one.
NAD+ itself doesn't survive being eaten intact, so the supplement world sells precursors — molecules your body converts into it.
NR (nicotinamide riboside) is the more established one, sold under the Niagen brand and the subject of most of the human trials. Restore's Austin locations offer it both as a drip and an IM shot.
NMN (nicotinamide mononucleotide) is one step closer to NAD+ in the pathway and became the darling of the biohacking world, largely off the back of mouse studies and a prominent Harvard researcher's advocacy.
Plain niacin and nicotinamide — old, cheap B3 vitamins — also raise NAD+, which is a fact the premium end of this market doesn't dwell on.
IV NAD+ delivers the molecule directly. Covered in the infusion module.
Here's where I'll be precise, because this is a case where the animal and human literatures point different directions and the marketing only quotes one.
In animals, the results are genuinely impressive. Mice given NAD+ precursors show improved metabolic measures, better muscle function, improvements in vascular health, and in some studies extended healthspan. Worms and flies too. If you read only the mouse literature you'd be excited, and the researchers doing it are not cranks.
In humans, the supplements do raise NAD+. That's been shown repeatedly and it's a real result — swallow NR and blood NAD+ goes up, dose-dependently. The delivery works.
What hasn't followed is the payoff. Human trials looking for the outcomes people actually care about — insulin sensitivity, strength, physical function, metabolic health in older adults — have come back modest and inconsistent. Some show a small signal, several show nothing beyond the biochemistry. There is no human trial demonstrating that any of this slows aging, and there can't be one yet, because that study takes decades and nobody has finished one.
So: the mechanism is real, the delivery works, and the clinical benefit is unproven. That's an honest summary of an active field, not a dismissal.
Worth knowing because it explains why NMN keeps appearing and disappearing from shelves.
The FDA has taken the position that NMN can't be sold as a dietary supplement because it was investigated as a drug first — a provision that excludes such substances from the supplement category. That's been contested by the industry and the situation has stayed unsettled for a while.
It tells you nothing about whether NMN works. It tells you this category is less settled than the packaging implies, and that a product can be widely sold and still be in regulatory limbo.
The longevity research crowd — including some of the scientists who built this field, who take it and say openly that they're ahead of their own evidence. I respect that framing more than the marketing.
The biohacking scene, where NMN is a staple of morning stacks alongside resveratrol, and where the reasoning is usually "the mechanism is sound, the risk looks low, I'm not waiting thirty years for the trial." That's a defensible bet as long as you know it's a bet.
Clinics, selling IV and IM versions at a substantial premium.
A lot of ordinary people in their fifties who read an article and want the energy back.
What people report is mostly energy and mental clarity. I take that seriously, and I'd note that it's also exactly what you'd expect from expectation alone, and nobody has run the blinded trial that separates them.
It's not proven to slow aging. Anyone using that phrase is describing research that doesn't exist.
It won't build muscle, and it won't substitute for sleep — the irony being that the thing people take it for is usually fatigue, and the fix for fatigue is nearly always upstream of any supplement.
If you're curious and the money is genuinely spare, an oral precursor is unlikely to hurt you, might do something modest, and buys you a lottery ticket on a plausible mechanism. Buy third-party tested, tell your doctor, and don't build a plan around it.
If you're spending hundreds a month on IV versions, I'd want you to name something specific that's changed — your training numbers, your sleep, a lab value. Not "I think I feel better." If nothing's moved in a few months, that's real information.
And if this is the health budget you have, the unglamorous comparison: a barbell, enough protein, and a fixed bedtime have decades of human evidence for a fraction of the cost. They're just harder to schedule, and nobody hands you a warm blanket while you do them.
Last updated September 30, 2026