Nicotinamide riboside. Here's the
safest way to take it 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 the
safest way to take nicotinamide riboside
for anti-aging. I've done a couple of previous
episodes that are relevant, and I'll link
to them in the description of this one.
In the last two episodes, I talked about
why at the present time I would not use
injectable NAD for this purpose, and I
talked about why I think nicotinamide riboside
is the best supplement to
take as a precursor to NAD. In a long ago
episode, I talked about some safety
concerns about taking nicotinamide riboside,
and I'll summarize them here so I
can use that as a lead-in to talk about
how to avoid the safety problems and how
to maximize the efficacy of the nicotinamide riboside.
So, here's the main safety
problem. When you take nicotinamide riboside
or any other form of niacin, your
body has a choice. Either it's going to
make NAD with it, which is what we want,
or it's going to methylate it and pee it
into the urine. If you don't know what
methylation is, see
chrismasterjohnphd.com/methylation
for some background. So, every time
we methylate it, we lose it
and we also lose the methyl group.
We're losing methyl groups that we could be
putting towards other important purposes.
Chief among them are the synthesis of
creatine, which is needed for athletic
performance and for muscular power, but
it's also needed for many other things
including digestion and mental health.
We also, after we lose control of our
creatine synthesis, the next most
sensitive thing is we're going to lose
control over our dopamine levels. When we
can't properly regulate dopamine, we run
the risk of becoming too mentally rigid,
and that can lead us to ruminate for
example on anxiety or
depression-producing thoughts, and that
can lead to its own set of mental
problems alongside the sapping of the
creatine supply. And we know from the
studies published on nicotinamide riboside
that it absolutely saps methyl
groups because it causes a very large
increase in the methylated niacin
metabolites detected in the blood and
the urine. So, in the way that it's being
dosed, it's absolutely sapping the methyl
supply. Word on the street is that ChromaDex
will at some point soon publish
a study showing it doesn't effect
homocysteine in the blood and it doesn't
effect levels of S-adenosylmethionine in
the blood either. But I'm not too
concerned about those. I'm concerned
about decreasing creatine synthesis, and
I'm concerned about losing control over
dopamine. And if you were to
assume that most of a dose of
nicotinamide riboside is actually
going to be sapped into the methylation
pathway and peed out in the urine, then
what you would expect
from that is that for every 1,000 milligrams
of nicotinamide riboside
you take, you're decreasing your creatine
synthesis by 25%. So if you take 2,000
milligrams of nicotinamide riboside, if
most of that is methylated and peed out
in the urine, you're cutting your
creatine synthesis in half. And if you
cut your creatine synthesis in half, that
can cause negative responses in your
muscular power, in your digestion, in your
mental health, and so on. So how do we
make sure that the nicotinamide riboside
is number one, not methylated and
instead goes into making NAD, which is
the positive response we're looking for,
and then number two, to the degree it is
methylated, how can we make up for that
and make sure that it's not hurting
our creatine synthesis or
our regulation of dopamine? This is what
I would do. Number one, always take it
with meals. Why? Because even though you
can absorb niacin in any form fine
without a meal, your meal is going to
boost your energy levels, and your energy
levels in the form of ATP are going to
help drive that niicotinamide riboside
into synthesizing NAD.
The better you do that, the less you're
going to methylate out. The second thing
that I would do is spread it evenly
across meals. And the reason is that with
any given dose at one meal, there's
only a limited amount that you're going
to be able to retain as NAD. And we don't
know exactly what that amount is, but we know from
the studies that publish, that have been
published using the dosing regimens that
have been published, we know that we are
losing a lot of it as methylated
metabolites, so our best defense against
that is to divide it evenly across meals.
Finally the third thing is we're going
to assume that there's going to be some
portion that we're going to lose in the
urine as methylated metabolites, and
there's nothing we can do about that, but
we can replace the methyl groups. So I
would take trimethylglycine, or TMG, in a
dose that is 100 milligrams of TMG
for every 200 milligrams of nicotinamide riboside.
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com.
This has been Chris Masterjohn Lite.