Should we be injecting intravenous NAD for anti-aging?
Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com. And this is
Chris Masterjohn Lite, where the name of the game is
"Details? Shmeetails. Just tell me what works!"
And today we're talking about
intravenous NAD for anti-aging.
NAD is a form of niacin, or vitamin B3.
NAD is foundational to every aspect of
energy metabolism. And outside of energy
metabolism, it also helps in critical
repair processes. For example NAD helps
us repair our DNA when it's been damaged,
and NAD helps us lengthen our telomeres.
Lengthening our telomeres, which are the
ends of our chromosomes, is thought to
allow ourselves to keep on dividing
healthily in perpetuity. And lengthening
telomeres and repairing DNA are thought
to be two foundational processes that we
need to keep up at a high rate in order
to live a long healthy life. So, people in
the anti-aging community are very
interested in how to enhance those
processes, and because NAD is so
important to them, people in the anti-aging
community are very interested in how to
boost NAD levels. And you can either do
that by consuming niacin, which is--
it exists in the diet or supplements
in various forms all of which are
precursors to NAD, but you can't eat NAD
itself, and so another approach is to
just inject the NAD on the basis that if
you bypass your digestive system, you can
get the preformed NAD right into your
blood where your cells can take it up.
And many people believe that that's the
best way to increase cellular NAD levels.
Let's take a look at a clip of
Ben Greenfield talking about injecting NAD
on Joe Rogan. "You can you can do it
orally. There's a, there's a capsule,
there's companies like Elysium and
Niagen that sell NR, that's nicotinamide riboside.
It's a precursor to NAD, but it doesn't
hold a candle to just mainlining it into
your bloodstream. How do you get it, where
do you get it from? So, one way to do it is
in a medical clinic, you can get a six- to
eight-hour IV. Bring a laptop and
work away. And some people do this on a
monthly basis. Six to eight hours of
NAD? It's a long drip.
You know, they have some of the guys
down at Onnit do it, and they'll have a nurse come in and
push it a little more quickly. That's like an hour long IV.
Is it just as beneficial to do it short like that?
It's way more uncomfortable. The shorter
you get, the more uncomfortable it gets
because you're pushing this stuff into
your bloodstream more quickly, and it
feels like your whole body is on fire.
I mean, you have that box, breathe, and close
your eyes, and meditate. Is it painful?
It's like, have you ever done DMT? mm-hmm.
It's like DMT, but you're on fire and getting
punched in the gut at the same time and
you feel like your heart's going to explode.
Really? And then you finish, and you feel
like Superman. You feel like you have
more energy on less sleep. Your workouts
are better. I mean, it's one of the, it's
like fish oil where when you take a
bunch of fish oil, you just kind of keep
your fingers crossed that it's working.
It's not like you can feel fish oil and
you want to go destroy the world. It's
even better than black ant extract.
Where are you getting this? So, you can
get it, too, so I get it shipped to my house, and I do a
self-administered push IV. I do the same
thing with Myers' cocktail. So I just, I shove
a butterfly needle into my vein,
and then I push this NAD in very, very
slowly. And you can even chase it with a
Myers' cocktail, which enhances the
effectiveness of it, meaning you can do
like an NAD, and this is a common
protocol in a lot of anti-aging clinics,
or a lot of, you know, like alternative
health clinics. You do the NAD
injection and you follow it up with a
Myers' cocktail, and you feel like Superman.
And Myers' cocktail is again? That's
just vitamins. Just like, you know,
vitamin B. It's an IV infusion?
It's an IV infusion of vitamin B and
sometimes a little nootropics in there
like lithium and stuff like that.
It's too much to remember, man."
So, in looking into this, I've decided on a
couple of things, and I'll link to some of
the important studies in the description
of this episode. I'll also link to a massive
podcast, a two-part podcast series that I
did on niacin with Alex Leaf where we go
into this stuff in a lot more detail. But
this is what I found. So, first of all,
that NAD in the blood can definitely get
taken up into cells. I don't know to what
degree it does, but we definitely have
studies of cells showing that they can
take up NAD. Second, when you consume niacin in food,
when things are operating
physiologically normally, we have to ask
the question, is there any NAD floating
around in your blood, and what is its
purpose there? Well, what we know is that
when you eat niacin, the
physiologically normal way of
transporting it in your blood is in the
form of nicotinamide, not in the form
of NAD, not in the form of anything else,
just nicotinamide. What happens is that
every form of niacin goes into your
liver, and then your liver turns it into
NAD and keeps a reserve of NAD, and your
liver decides on the rate at which it
will take that NAD and drip nicotinamide
derived from breaking it down into the
bloodstream at just the right rate to
nourish other tissues so that they can
take it up and make NAD from it themselves.
Does that mean that you don't
find any NAD extracellularly in the blood?
You absolutely do. But everything
that we know about where it comes from
is that it's released from dead cells,
dying cells, and perhaps cells that are
trying to communicate something about
their energy status. For example, perhaps
when cells are in a state of energy crisis,
that's when they're releasing the NAD.
The other thing that we know is that
there's an entire class of enzymes in the
blood that specialize in using extracellular
NAD in order to convert it into a signaling
molecule that will activate certain cellular
processes. And everything we know
about what NAD is used to activate suggests
that extracellular NAD is a stress signal.
For example, NAD activates granulocytes,
which are cells in the immune system.
Granulocytes kick in a response of
vasodilation and a general inflammatory response.
That's probably why people who report
injecting NAD are reporting getting such
strongly uncomfortable
on-fire responses from taking it.
Given the fact that we know so little about
exactly what extracellular NAD is communicating
as a signaling molecule,
it seems to me like to inject it now is sort of like
injecting testosterone on the cusp of
when it was first discovered when we
didn't know what it carried out as
signaling, as hormonal signaling inside
the body. Now, it just so happens that had
you injected testosterone when it was
first discovered when you didn't know
what it did, you probably would have
gotten jacked. On the other hand, it might
also have given you breasts, made your
balls shrink, and caused you hair loss.
Similarly we could have injected
histamine on the cusp of discovering
what it was, not really knowing what it
did, and we wouldn't have gotten jacked
and probably would have gotten a lot
more serious side effects to no
particular health benefit. My suspicion
is that injecting NAD activates a sort
of emergency response, and this is at
least responsible for the side effects
that people are reporting and why they
have to drip it so slowly in order to be
able to tolerate the injection. And maybe
that does something good. Maybe it's
activating the immune system to clean up
some messes that wouldn't otherwise be
cleaned up, but it's kind of hard to say.
I think it probably is delivering NAD
into those cells, but at this point, while
I'm grateful for Ben Greenfield who I
consider a friend and colleague and for
the guys at Onnit and whoever else are
injecting NAD, while I'm I'm certainly
grateful to have people out there
putting themselves forward in this way
and while I certainly look forward to
research on what this is actually doing,
I'm not going to be doing this anytime
soon because I think that it's better to try
to boost your NAD levels through ways
that work with the body's normal
physiology by nourishing the niacin
as a nutrient rather than trying to
override that process and activate
something else, the extracellular
signaling effects of NAD that we know
almost nothing about. I'll talk more
about other ways of NAD-boosting that
I feel more comfortable with in future episodes.
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn
of chrismasterjohnphd.com.
This has been Chris Masterjohn Lite.