The Crucial Role of NAD+ in Optimal Health Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola
April 10, 2022
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
> NAD+ (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) is one of the most important biomolecules in your body. It’s involved in the conversion of food to energy, maintaining DNA integrity and ensuring proper cell function. Together, these functions help protect against or delay aging and disease
> NAD also acts as fuel for longevity proteins called sirtuins NAD levels dramatically decline with age, contributing to aging and chronic disease states. NAD is also used up by DNA repair enzymes and enzymes involved in inflammation and immunity, such that chronic inflammation, or acute illness in old age, can rapidly result in depletion
> To restore NAD, you need to fix the root cause for NAD depletion, which primarily involves addressing the decline in the NAD salvage pathway. By increasing enzymes in that pathway, which decline with age, your body can recycle NAD like it did naturally when it was younger
In this interview, Nichola Conlon, Ph.D., a molecular biologist, antiaging specialist and founder of a nutraceutical company that produces an NAD+ boosting supplement.
NAD+ (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) is one of the most important biomolecules in your body. It's involved in the conversion of food to energy, maintaining DNA integrity and ensuring proper cell function. Together, these functions help protect against or delay aging and disease. As explained by Conlon:
"NAD is actually something I ended up working on in the drug development industry. I was fortunate enough to work for a company that was forward thinking. It actually started looking at developing molecules that would improve our health span, which is the proportion of the life that we live in good health.
So, rather than just focusing on individual diseases, we were actually looking at underlying mechanisms of cellular aging and looking at slowing cellular aging to improve healthy lifespan.
This is when I came across NAD, which is an incredibly important molecule in the body. Going back to molecular biology roots, NAD is important for two critical things in the body.
The first is energy production. The process that takes the energy out of the food we eat and converts it into ATP, which is the form of energy currency that our cells can use to survive and do all the functions that they need to do, absolutely requires NAD.
Without it, we simply wouldn't be alive because our bodies wouldn't be able to make any energy. It's estimated that if we didn't have any NAD in our body, we'd literally be dead in 30 seconds, which shows how critical it is to our cells.
The second thing that it's really important for is cellular maintenance and repair. NAD almost acts as a sensor in the body. It enables the cell to react to changes in energetic stress, which is basically how much energy or lack of energy the cell has ... These are the two major things that NAD is known for, and because of these roles, it's absolutely fundamental to overall cellular health."
As an example, if you were to exercise or fast, that uses up cellular energy. NAD will sense this raised energy demand and increase its levels. Elevated NAD is actually a signal that the cell is in a state of stress. In response, cellular maintenance and repair processes are switched on to preserve the cell and help it survive the stress.
Some History
NAD plays a large role in the Krebs citric acid cycle as it helps to pass the electrons along in the mitochondria in the electron transport chain to facilitate oxidative phosphorylation and generate cellular ATP. While discovered in 1905, well over a century ago, few scientists have paid much attention to it.
In the late 1990s, David Sinclair, Ph.D., while working in Leonard Guarente's lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), realized that NAD is the fuel for longevity proteins called sirtuins. That's when it started coming into prominence as an anti-aging agent.
"It was around 2014 that I started getting involved in the aging field," Conlon says. "This was a time when a lot of scientists were talking about this idea that we could slow cellular aging ... [Today], there isn't a single scientist that works in the field of biogerontology — the study of aging — who doesn't say that you can slow biological."
Testing NAD Levels Is Complicated
Oftentimes, before you start supplementing something, you'll want to find out what your level is. Unfortunately, that's extremely difficult to do with NAD. We do know that NAD levels decrease with age, which is one of the reasons why people want to boost their NAD back to youthful levels.
"In scientific laboratories, we use some fairly sophisticated techniques to measure NAD," Conlon says, "But now there's been an emergence of companies saying, 'Send your blood and we'll measure it for you.' The reality is, unfortunately, that as good as that would be, it just doesn't work that way.
If you think of what NAD does, NAD is described as a redox molecule. What that means is, that it is continually flipping states. It carries electrons in the electron transport chain and [is involved in] the mitochondrial reactions. This means that by its very nature, NAD is designed to flip between different states, so it's really, really unstable.
Literally, as soon as NAD is taken out of the body, it starts to break down into its precursors. It starts to change form. Therefore, if you don't do something to stop those reactions very, very quickly, what you end up measuring is not a correct reflection of what is actually in the body and in the cell.
When we measure NAD in the laboratory, we have to make sure that as soon as it is taken out of the person, it's put straight on ice to stop any reactions and then immediately prepped to take out the cells that we want to measure the NAD from. They're then cryogenically frozen to stop any changes or any reactions until we measure the NAD. You've got around a 30-minute window to get this done.
After that, to work out how much NAD is in the sample, you can then use techniques such as mass spectrometry, which compares the amount of NAD in the sample to standards, which are known amounts of NAD.
These are not simple techniques. They are quite advanced laboratory techniques. So, when companies that say they can provide this as a postal service, at the moment, I'm quite skeptical of what they are actually measuring."
How NAD Is Made and Regenerated
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