Nicotinamide riboside. Nicotinamide mononucleotide.
Which form of niacin is best 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 going to talk about
which form of niacin is best for anti-aging.
In the last episode, I talked
about why I don't think injecting NAD
intravenously is ready for primetime.
So now let's talk about the different
supplements that we could take. Well, it's
certainly the case that nicotinamide riboside
and nicotinamide mononucleotide
are more likely to be beneficial than
nicotinic acid or nicotinamide, also
known as niacinamide, which are the
forms of niacin that have been on the market
the longest and are consumed the most.
But then the question is, should you take
NR, nicotinamide riboside,
or NMN, nicotinamide mononucleotide?
I would go with NR for the
following reasons. There are no human studies of
nicotinamide mononucleotide clearly
showing how it's metabolized, unlike the
fact that there are a couple of fairly
short human studies with nicotinamide riboside.
So, we know a little bit more about it from
that perspective. Then the second thing
is, we have some very elegant tracer
labeling studies that are done in mice
where the molecules are labeled in a way that the
scientists can detect exactly where
they're going, and in what amount, and
what they're doing. And we have very nice
studies informing us of how nicotinamide riboside
is metabolized, and we don't have the
same degree of evidence for
nicotinamide mononucleotide.
Then the third thing is that I believe that the
likelihood that NMN is absorbed intact
as NMN is almost zero, whereas I believe
that NR, nicotinamide riboside, is almost
certainly absorbed intact, and it
definitely is absorbed intact in the
mouse studies that I was just referring to.
The human studies also
strongly suggest that it is absorbed
intact if not show it outright.
The reason that I don't believe the NMN
is going to be absorbed intact is
because NMN has a charged phosphate on it.
And in general things with charged
phosphates don't cross cellular
membranes very easily. In theory there
could be a special transporter for NMN
in the intestines, but it wouldn't matter
for the following reasons. Because most
things with charged phosphates don't
cross cellular membranes very well, our
intestines produce an overwhelming
abundance of enzymes that have
overlapping function that are not
specific to any particular type of
molecule and just cleave the charged
phosphates off of everything in our diet.
Why do they do it? Because it's way more
efficient to have a handful of enzymes
that are produced in very large
abundance that will cleave the
charged phosphates off of everything in
our diet and then allow what's
left over to be absorbed. It's way more
efficient to do that than to have a
specific transporter for transporting
each of the hundreds or thousands of
different specific molecules that all
have their own charged phosphates on them.
So, the end result is that anything
with a charged phosphate is going to
have the charged phosphate cut off in
the small intestine before it's absorbed.
What happens when you cut off the
charged phosphate on NMN? What do you get?
Nicotinamide riboside, NR. So, probably
it doesn't matter whether you take NMN
or you take NR because both of them will
be absorbed as NR. On the other hand, we
don't have studies showing that with
NMN, and I also think it's possible that
some people with a lot of intestinal
damage might not be able to cut off the
charged phosphates, and if they can't,
they're probably just not going to
absorb the NMN at all. So, for most
people, it probably doesn't make a
difference. For people with serious
damage to their small intestine, it's probably
better to take the NR. At the end of the
day, we have more data, more studies on NR,
we have more knowledge of how it's
metabolized both in mice and in humans,
so I'm going to go with the NR.
Nicotinamide riboside is patented by
ChromaDex and sold as Tru Niagen.
This is the form that has
all of the research on it, so it's the
form that I would use. In the next
episode I'm going to talk about how to
take it because I do have concerns both
about efficacy and safety for the way
that you dose it and what you take it with.
So I'll cover that in the next episode.
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com.
This has been Chris Masterjohn Lite.