This is why you should be careful with
niacin and nicotinamide riboside
supplements and what you should do to
protect yourself if you need to use them.
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 niacin. So, niacin is vitamin B3. You
need niacin for certain for your energy
metabolism. The RDA for niacin or the
Daily Value for niacin is around 16 milligrams
a day. The upper limit is around
35 milligrams per day, which means
don't play with doses higher than that
unless you really need to. Now, niacin is
used in medicine as a way to manage
certain blood lipid conditions. And in
those cases, you might have to just do
what your doctor is telling you to do,
but this video might still be relevant
because you can use what I'm talking
about here to manage an important side
effect I want to talk about. But more
popularly now, people are starting to use
something called nicotinamide riboside,
which is a form of niacin that is very
easily converted into NAD, which is a
derivative of niacin that we use
throughout all of our energy metabolism.
And so it's thought that part of what we
experience in aging is a decline in NAD,
especially as a result of cumulative DNA
damage, and that's because NAD is
actually consumed in the DNA repair
process. And it's thought that we can
restore youthful vitality by boosting
NAD levels. Now, the issue is all the
nicotinamide riboside supplements
out there are using doses that are not
only way in excess of the RDA; they're
way in excess of even the upper limit
of 35 milligrams. They're usually 250
milligrams, and they might be even higher.
You might be able to find a supplement
as low as 125 milligrams. You're not
going to find anything that's close to
the RDA or even the upper limit.
So, one reason that's problem is that
niacin, it does not matter what form,
niacin, niacinamide, nicotinamide,
nicotinamide riboside, all forms of
niacin in excess consume methyl groups
in order to be properly
excreted in the urine.
In fact, even on a normal diet of no
supplements, you are excreting methylated
niacin metabolites into your urine.
The absence of methylated niacin metabolites
in your urine is considered a sign of
niacin deficiency. So if you add on top
of that even more niacin from
supplements, you are going to methylate
even more niacin metabolites and pee
them out into the urine. That means
you're losing methyl groups.
Why is that important? Well, methyl groups
are one-carbon units that are used to make
things like creatine, which is important
for your exercise performance and your
muscular function. Methyl groups are used
to synthesize choline, which is important
to prevent fatty liver, something that an
estimated 70 million Americans experience.
Methyl groups are important to controlling your
neurotransmitters to prevent anxiety and
depression. Methyl groups are important
to a lot of things, and when you start
losing methyl groups, you might not feel
as well, you might destabilize your mood,
you might lose your energy, and
these are things that you you don't want
to experience if you don't have to. So as
an example, listen to the story provided
on the screen now on Facebook from
Anke. She says, "Thank you, Chris. I don't
know what to make of this, but I gave
this supplement Niagen a try, and I mean
I tried it for six weeks. The first two
weeks I did three workouts per day with much
more energy to spare, great recovery and
feeling good." Now, this is good. That means
that she's experiencing the benefits of
higher NAD levels, which contribute to
energy metabolism. "Week 3, it started to
look different. I felt somewhat, not much,
just mentally a little more clarity,
but energy went back to baseline." So, now
she's starting to lose the effects.
Well, maybe the effects of the
NAD are wearing off.
Or maybe she's starting to have lower
creatine levels, for example, or maybe
she's altering her neurotransmitters in
a way, including choline. If her
choline synthesis is going down, that's
not only going to affect her liver, but it
could affect her acetylcholine levels,
and acetylcholine is the
neurotransmitter that causes you to
contract your muscles. So maybe she has
more NAD giving her more energy, but
she's got less acetylcholine now. "From
then on it started to feel just horrific.
Emotionally I felt Nirvana, switching
between feeling depressed to
emotionally suppressed, angry, and good.
I had the same energy, but really, I felt
like shit." So maybe now she's losing
methyl groups that are affecting her
neurotransmitter balance. "I stopped
taking that product for a few days, and
my energy tanked so bad. I had zero
energy, and I felt like I had
zero serotonin and dopamine.
So I started up the Niagen again just to feel better,
and I got a bit more energy, but I felt immensely
low emotionally speaking. In my humble
opinion, 250 milligrams of nicotinamide riboside
shut off my methylation to a
point where I felt outright flat and toxic.
My eyesight went worse as well, and
I stopped the product. I got better again.
At this point I'm so scared adding
niacin in my supplement regimen to
preserve tryptophan. I started—I stopped
Niagen a week ago and now feel
my own self again. I'm telling you this
because I'm afraid that while it might
work for some, it could make people with
MTHFR worse. Have you ever
encountered this?" Well, I don't believe
that this is limited to a specific MTHFR polymorphism
or anything like that. This is just a
basic fact that when you take too much
niacin, you start to lose methyl groups,
and that can cause a problem. Yes, some
people with some genetics will be more
likely to experience that problem, but
that problem could happen to anyone.
So here's what I would do about this.
First of all, this is one
reason why it's always better to get
your nutrients from foods. Not only are
you going to get them at levels that are
more approximate to what's reasonable
from food that aren't overwhelming your
system, but you're also going to get a
better balance because you're going to get
other things in those foods that help
you deal with the niacin that's in them.
If you need to take the supplement, it
would be best if you could take a low
dose that is around 30 milligrams or so,
25, 30 milligrams or so. And unfortunately
there—I don't know of any Niagen
or nicotinamide riboside supplement—
Niagen is the brand name, product name.
I don't know of any Niagen or nicotinamide riboside
supplements out there that are that
low-dose. However, I want to
direct your attention to one that I'm
showing on the screen. This is a website
hpnsupplements.com, High Performance
Nutrition. If you go to this website, and
you go to "Products" and the "Niagen
Collection," you will see that on the
bottom left there is a Niagen powder.
Now, this powder, if you look at the
nutrition facts, you can see that there
is some fiber in it that's used as a
bulking agent, and then there's the
nicotinamide riboside, 125 milligrams
for every scoop. The scoop is 1.5 grams.
Now, because it is a bulk powder, you can
take a smaller dose. If you have a scale
at home that can measure 0.3 milligrams,
that's what I would start out with. That's 25—
excuse me, 0.3 grams of this
powder is 25 milligrams of nicotinamide riboside.
If you have a scale that can
measure 0.3 grams, then I would use that.
My food scale at my home only goes to
the gram, and so I wouldn't be able to do that,
but you could eyeball a fifth of a
scoop, and yeah, it might not be exactly a
fifth of the scoop, but it should be
somewhere around 25 milligrams give or
take, and that's a lot better than
hitting 125 milligrams as your
basic dose. So use a powder like this, or
if you have a 250-milligram capsule, you
could do—you're going to do the same thing
by opening up the capsule, emptying out
the powder, and dividing it up. You just
want to make sure that you have a means
of keeping it fresh.
You're not leaving it out exposed to the light,
et cetera. So keep it in a dark, cool
place and as close to airtight as
you can. And start with a dose that
is this low and see if you get the
benefits of the niacin without the side
effects of having to methylate all of
the extra. Now, if you have to take a
larger dose because you're just getting
some benefit that is so compelling to
you from taking 125, or 250, or more
milligrams, then I would recommend as a
precaution that you take a one-to-one ratio
of trimethylglycine. In this particular
case, I would recommend Jarrow TMG
shown on the screen. This comes in 500
milligrams. This is actually more than
what you need to handle 125 or 250
milligrams of nicotinamide riboside.
This would be enough to balance up to
500 milligrams of nicotinamide riboside,
and I would take—just follow the label,
but take one of these for every dose of
anything up to 500 milligrams of
nicotinamide riboside that you might
have to take. Again, this is not the first
choice. This is the last choice when you
find that, yes, you need the nicotinamide riboside,
yes, you need the higher dose.
Similarly, if you're taking niacin for
medical reasons, then you have to follow
the dose that your doctor is telling you
to take, but you can do the same thing by
balancing a milligram of TMG for every
milligram of niacin. What this is doing
is it's supplying the extra methyl groups
that would be needed to metabolize the
extra niacin that spill out into your
urine, making sure that what's left over
is the methyl groups that you would have
had anyway, thereby presumably preventing
the risk of these undermethylation-related side effects.
I'm going to put two links in the
description of this video.
One is to the bulk Niagen powder.
The other is to the Jarrow TMG.
The first link is not an
affiliate link. The second one is. If
you'd like to support my work at no
extra cost to you, and you are going to
buy that supplement anyway, using my
affiliate link will kick back a little
bit of funding to support the free
content that I produce. The Niagen powder,
you can find at hpnnutrition.com, and
the TMG, you can find at
chrismasterjohnphd.com/TMG.
The audio of this episode
was enhanced and post-processed
by Bob Davodian of Taurean Mixing.
You can find more of his work at
taureanonlinemixing.com.
This episode is brought to you by
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All right. I hope you found this useful.
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com, and this has been
Chris Masterjohn Lite, and
I will see you in the next episode.