It’s not every day I have a recommendation that I believe virtually every single person could benefit from.
This one might not be what you’d expect, yet it is just as important as – and even related to – sun exposure, proper sleep, exercise and reducing seed oils in your diet.
You see, all these strategies work toward the same goal…
Making sure your NAD+ levels are high.
Required for over 500 enzymatic reactions, NAD+, or simply NAD – which stands for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide – is one of the most important molecules in your body.
Nicotinamide is the scientific name for niacinamide. It was changed because many people confused nicotinamide with nicotine. NAD is niacinamide adenine dinucleotide, and niacinamide – not niacin – makes up a large portion of NAD+.
It’s so important, you would literally be dead in less than 30 seconds without it…
Without NAD, the mitochondria in your cells wouldn’t be able to make energy. NAD fuels the process of energy production by converting the energy from the food you eat into ATP, the form of cellular energy currency that your cells use to function and survive.
In fact, the more NAD+ you have, the more ATP your body can create for powering just about everything in your body.
Declining levels of NAD+ – which typically occurs as you age – leads to altered metabolism and an increased susceptibility to a wide variety of health concerns.
It is so vital to your health that if you are suffering from any health challenge, one of the most important, inexpensive and first strategies I recommend to nearly everyone is to start a strategy to increase your NAD+ levels.
You can only be as healthy as the levels of NAD in your body. This is largely due to the strong correlation between your NAD level and how much ATP your body can make.
First, let’s take a closer look at why NAD is so important to health.
Why Your Health – and Life – Depends on NAD+
Essential for your overall cellular health, NAD+ acts as a sensor in your body, allowing your cells to react to changes in how much – or how little – energy is present in your cells.
Researchers have found that NAD+ affects not only cellular energy, health and aging, it also directly influences a number of body functions.* Here are just a few of niacinamide’s long list of potential benefits:
- Supports healthy mitochondrial function*
- Promotes calmness and better-quality sleep*
- Helps support stress management*
- Promotes cell health*
- Supports brain health and cognitive function*
- Promotes eye and vision health*
- Supports immune function*
- Promotes skin health*
- Supports healthy glucose metabolism*
- Helps maintain healthy nitric oxide formation*
- Supports joint health and flexible, comfortable movement*
- Helps maintain healthy, normal testosterone levels in men and women*
Imagine what might happen to your health and well-being – and your ability to resist threats – if there was a way to help restore youthful levels of NAD+…
The Secret to Raising Your NAD Levels
NAD starts declining from the day you are born. Every 20 years, your NAD levels drop about 50%. So, by the time you reach 20, your NAD level is half of what it was at birth. By age 40, it reduces by half again. And so on throughout life.
Shockingly, when researchers looked at the tissues of most elderly people, they found little to no NAD left.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. If you implement strategies to increase NAD+, you can easily increase them back to youthful levels.
So, what causes NAD levels to decline so dramatically as you age?
There are many factors that contribute to declining NAD+ levels as you age, but two of the most important ones are a lack of movement and exercise, which then fails to activate the rate limiting enzyme in making NAD+, which is NAMPT.
Additionally, an increase in seed oils or linoleic acid (LA) in the diet will contribute to reductive and secondary oxidative stress which radically increases the consumption of NAD+.
So, the first step you can take is to make sure you are moving regularly as much of the day as you can and reduce seed oils and processed foods from your diet.
After you have these two steps dialed in, you will want to give your body the raw material that NAMPT needs to make more NAD+, which would be niacinamide.
Niacinamide: The Best Way to Increase Your NAD Levels
Based on everything I’ve studied, I believe niacinamide is the absolute best NAD+ precursor – and the most effective way to improve your NAD+ levels.
As you can see in the diagram below, when your body uses up NAD+, it breaks down into niacinamide. The niacinamide is then recycled, first into NMN, and then into NAD+.
NAMPT is your body’s NAD rate limiting enzyme in the salvage recycling pathway. This key enzyme is the rate-limiting enzyme in the pathway to restore niacinamide back to NAD+ and controls how much NAD your body makes.
So, the trick is to provide your body with the right fuel for the NAMPT enzyme so it can create NAD+.
Some individuals use expensive precursors like NMN or NR to accomplish this, but I don’t recommend either supplement as both are inefficient and expensive.
Niacin isn’t the best option for increasing NAD+ either. Although niacinamide is a form of niacin, or vitamin B3, niacin does not activate the NAMPT enzyme like niacinamide.
Instead, I recommend low doses of niacinamide. ‘More’ is not better when it comes to niacinamide. You only need a small amount to fuel your NAMPT pathway and boost NAD levels and gain all the potential benefits.
Most all commercially available niacinamide tablets are high doses 300 mg or 500 mg, but this high dose can be counterproductive. Powders are available and will allow you to take a 50 mg dose, but they are far less convenient.
In my opinion, the ideal dose of niacinamide is 2 mg/kg of body weight or about 50 mg three times a day for most. If you are larger and exercise frequently, you may increase the dose to 200 mg of 50 mg four times a day.
Lifestyle Strategies to Help Boost and Maintain Youthful NAD Levels
While I believe low dose niacinamide is the best way to help ensure optimal NAD levels, I recommend certain lifestyle strategies as well. By combining these strategies with taking low doses of niacinamide, you can maximize your potential results:
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Exercise – Exercise naturally increases NAMPT through its activation of AMPK, which increases NAD. A three-week study using resistance training raised NAMPT by about 127%, which is much higher than the results you would see if you took a nicotinamide riboside (NR) supplement.
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Time-restricted eating or fasting – Time-restricted eating (TRE) and fasting naturally increase NAMPT by activating AMPK, which in turn increases NAD. Because both TRE and fasting can lead to a rise in cortisol if used to excess, I recommend using moderation with both strategies.
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Get enough good quality sleep – Optimize your circadian rhythm by going to bed at sunset and getting up at sunrise and avoid blue light (especially from electronics) after sunset. These measures all help increase NAMPT.
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Avoid radiation exposure as much as possible – By avoiding EMFs from your cell phone and Wi-Fi, as well as unnecessary medical x-rays and CT scans, you help protect your NAD by preventing its consumption by destructive PARPs enzymes.
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Sauna use – The regular use of a low-EMF sauna can help boost NAD levels, through the process of raising your body temperature and heart rate slightly.
So how will you know your efforts – following these recommended lifestyle strategies and taking a low-dose niacinamide supplement – are working?
Unfortunately, you will not be able to measure your levels appropriately, as there are no commercial laboratory that tests for it.
This is because NAD+ is near impossible to accurately measure as it is unstable and continuously flips between different states. If you do happen to isolate NAD outside your body to measure it, it immediately changes form and starts to break down into its precursors.
Instead, you need to rely on how you feel. People report feeling more energetic and motivated, and often notice an improvement in focus and mental clarity. And finally, they find they sleep better when boosting their NAD+ levels.
Could Niacinamide Help You Take Control of Your Metabolic Health and Waistline?
Surprisingly, recent evidence suggests that lack of exercise and increased caloric intake are not the cause of weight issues for most men and women.
Rather, for the last century, the human basal metabolic rate (BMR) has been in a steady decline. Your BMR accounts for 60% to 75% of your total daily energy expenditure.
What this means is, for some reason, we’re burning fewer calories today while resting or sleeping than people did 100 years ago. In fact, our BMR today is likely half of what it was back then.
And with the BMR declining so dramatically, the standard recommendations of reducing one’s calories and getting plenty of exercise may actually make the situation worse, as these measures lower your BMR even more.
So, what’s going on to cause this seismic shift in metabolism?
As the BMR curve has declined over the last 100 years the consumption of polyunsaturated fats (PUFA) has risen. The two curves almost perfectly mirror each other…
Many experts who have studied this believe the increase in the consumption of these unhealthy fats – especially linoleic acid (LA) – is the real cause of weight and other metabolic problems.
And releasing – or dumping – these fats from your adipose cells too quickly can be hazardous for health. When released, LA metabolizes into highly inflammatory molecules.
By raising your NAD+ levels, niacinamide helps slow down the release of these inflammatory PUFAs from your fat cells. This is what you want – a gradual release.
The technical term for this is that niacinamide inhibits lipolysis from your fat cells. At the same time, niacinamide reprograms cellular metabolism and increases mitochondrial biogenesis, which can lead to a loss of fat from adipose or fat tissue.
Interestingly, low levels of NAD+ have been found in the fat tissue, liver and muscles of individuals who are overweight. This makes niacinamide – the best precursor for your body to create NAD+ – especially important for weight management.
How Niacinamide May Promote Your Brain Health
There have been many studies over the past decades showing a link between brain and neurological issues and low levels of NAD+.
And there are studies demonstrating how raising NAD+ levels through the use of precursors like niacinamide helps support healthy brain function.
Your brain uses a house-cleaning process known as autophagy where your cells get rid of cellular waste when you sleep. This clearing out allows them to generate energy for their survival.
Unfortunately, autophagy declines as you age, along with NAD+ levels in your cells and tissues.
Here’s the connection… With autophagy dysfunction, your levels of NAD+ fall. And that leads to undesirable electrical changes in your mitochondria, resulting in them not functioning properly.
This can lead to energy-starved brain cells, or neurons, and the breakdown of brain tissue and cell death.
The good news is, niacinamide supports healthy brain function by promoting higher energy levels through increasing energy metabolism in your mitochondria. And this leads to higher NAD+ levels in your neurons.
An Industry-First: Niacinamide Vitamin B3 in Convenient 50 mg Mini Tabs
I’ve been taking niacinamide in powder form for several years now, simply because 50 mg tablets didn’t exist. Make no mistake, this is a tedious process.
To get the ideal dose of 50 mg, you must use a 1/64 measuring spoon, something most people don’t have on hand.
Because of how excited I am about the potential of niacinamide for just about everyone, we’re making a 50 mg mini tab available – and we are the very first company to do so.
Our Niacinamide Vitamin B3 contains the highest quality niacinamide on the market, and they’re easy-to-swallow mini tablets.
As I mentioned earlier, I recommend taking one 50 mg mini tab three times a day, upon rising and at bedtime, and in the middle of the day.
Please avoid combining doses. If you take too much niacinamide, it will not work as well. Please be sure to split the doses as recommended.
This is the same dosage level recent studies have used for the benefits we’ve talked about.
Order Niacinamide Vitamin B3 Today, and Help Your Body and Brain Get the Energy They Need
There’s no question that NAD levels fall as you age, and even an otherwise healthy 20-year-old has only half the amount of NAD, compared to a newborn.
Unfortunately, by the time an older adult reaches his or her “golden years,” his or her remaining NAD+ levels can be shockingly low.
And now, through recent research, we know the reality of low levels of NAD+ on the cells in our body and brain. With low levels, we are much more vulnerable to threats and mishaps, and our bodies just don’t function as well as they should.
But, at the same time, research is providing answers – and the solution may lie in a simple mini tab.
I invite you to take control of your health and order Niacinamide today, and experience for yourself the many potential benefits this extraordinary B vitamin offers.