Topic
NAD+
Everything we've written on NAD+ — 13 articles covering the mechanism, the evidence, comparisons, and practical considerations.
13 articles
Cognitive supportA brain that's slower than it used to be — the processing speed shiftIt's not that you can't remember things. You remember them. But the word that should be immediate has a half-second delay before it arrives — you can feel the gap, the small embarrassing pause while the noun catches up with the thought. A conversation that used to be effortless now requires more tracking. You're still following it, but you're working to follow it in a way you didn't used to notice. The work you could drop into and sustain for three hours now requires setup, and the flow state that used to arrive within minutes takes twenty, sometimes longer, sometimes doesn't fully arrive at all. You're producing the same output but it's costing more. You know you used to think faster, because you remember what it felt like when the thinking just ran.8 min readCompounding and complianceCycling peptides — when to come off, when to stay onSomewhere in the online conversation about peptides, "cycle" became a universal instruction. Take it for twelve weeks, take four weeks off. Or five weeks on, two weeks off. The specific numbers vary, but the underlying assumption doesn't: everything needs to be cycled, and cycling is what keeps it working. If you believe that, you'll apply it uniformly, which means you'll cycle things that don't need cycling and fail to cycle things that do. The rule sounds responsible. It's actually a blunt instrument applied to a situation that requires precision.8 min readOrigins and discoveryThe David Sinclair NAD+ story — hype, evidence, honest assessmentIn the late 1990s, a graduate student named David Sinclair was working in Lenny Guarente's lab at MIT, trying to understand why yeast cells age. The answer his experiments pointed toward involved a protein called Sir2 — Silent Information Regulator 2. In yeast, Sir2 controlled whether certain genomic regions were transcriptionally active or silenced, and its activity appeared to be linked to lifespan. When you increased Sir2 expression in yeast, the cells lived longer. When you inhibited it, they lived less long. Sinclair went on to characterize Sir2 and its mammalian cousins, the sirtuins, as what he would eventually describe as a master regulatory system of aging — a set of molecular sensors that respond to cellular stress and energy status and govern whether cells survive, repair themselves, or succumb to aging-associated dysfunction.9 min readMitochondrial healthNAD+ vs MOTS-c vs SS-31 vs Humanin — the mitochondrial peptide stack, decodedYou got your labs back and your biological age came out higher than your chronological age. Or the fatigue is real — not the kind that coffee fixes, not the kind that a good night's sleep fully resolves — a deeper, structural tiredness that has started to feel like a baseline rather than a symptom. Or you've been researching longevity seriously and you've arrived at the mitochondria, because the research keeps pointing there: cellular energy, oxidative stress, the gradual degradation of the organelles that power everything else. You've encountered four names being discussed — NAD+, MOTS-c, SS-31, Humanin — and you want to understand what each actually does, why they're being discussed together, and whether the combination logic holds up.7 min readMitochondrial healthMOTS-c in longevity stacks — what's being exploredThe longevity protocol world has a stacking problem. Not a problem in the sense that stacking is necessarily wrong — combining compounds that address different mechanisms is conceptually sound in medicine — but a problem in the sense that the reasoning often runs backward. The aspiration comes first. The compounds follow. The mechanism gets retrofitted to justify what was already going to happen. When you're dealing with compounds that have thin human evidence and strong preclinical data, this pattern matters enormously, because it's the difference between a rationally assembled protocol and an expensive bet dressed up in biological language.7 min readMitochondrial healthNAD+ and CD38 — why supplementing alone might not be enoughYou start taking NMN. Your NAD+ levels come up, at least on a blood test. Three months later, maybe six, the effect seems to blunt. You're still taking it, the dose hasn't changed, but something about the initial lift has flattened. Maybe you increase the dose. Maybe it helps. Maybe it doesn't. You've entered a conversation that the supplement marketing doesn't prepare you for: that raising NAD+ levels is not just a question of what you put in, but of what's consuming it on the other end — and that consumption is running faster as you age.8 min readMitochondrial healthNAD+ in cognitive function and neuroprotectionYou notice it around mid-morning, maybe an hour or two after waking. The thoughts aren't quite connecting the way they used to. Words that were automatic are now effortful, just slightly — not the dramatic forgetting of a medical event, just a very quiet dimming. You'd dismiss it as tiredness or age if it weren't so consistent, if it weren't there even on the days when you slept well and ate well and did everything right. The cognitive baseline has shifted and the shift happened so gradually that you can't point to when it started. You just know it doesn't feel like before.8 min readMitochondrial healthWhat people are reporting about NAD+ infusionsThis article summarizes experiences reported in public online communities including Reddit, longevity forums, and discussion boards. We are not advocating human use of any compound discussed here. Many of the peptides discussed are not FDA-approved for the uses described, and some are explicitly not approved for human or veterinary use. What follows is a synthesis of what people have reported, presented to give readers context on the public conversation — not as guidance, not as evidence of safety or efficacy, and not as a recommendation. Decisions about any compound should be made with a qualified prescribing provider after a full medical evaluation.8 min readMitochondrial healthNAD+ IV vs subcutaneous vs oral — what bioavailability research suggestsYou've read the research, or at least enough of it. You understand that NAD+ declines with age, that sirtuins need it, that mitochondrial energy metabolism depends on it. You've decided the conversation is worth having with your prescribing provider. And then you hit the question that the popular articles tend to gloss over: take it how, exactly? A capsule? A drip? A weekly injection? The delivery route for NAD+ is not a minor implementation detail. For this particular molecule, it might be the most consequential decision in the entire protocol.8 min readMitochondrial healthNAD+ vs NMN vs NR — the precursor conversationYou're standing in the supplement aisle — or the online equivalent of it, scrolling through a longevity stack that someone recommended on a podcast — and there are three things that look related: NAD+, NMN, and NR. They're all described as "NAD+ support." They're all priced somewhere between expensive and extremely expensive. They're all backed by citations to researchers whose names you half-recognize. And the differences between them are explained, in every product description you've read, in a way that somehow makes it less clear what you should actually be taking, not more.9 min readMetabolic healthPeptides for hangover and alcohol recovery — what research has exploredYou drink less than you used to, and you still feel worse the next day than you ever did at twenty-five. The math stopped working in your favor somewhere around your mid-thirties — one glass of wine with dinner now sometimes means a foggy morning, a dull headache that arrives around 6 a.m., and a digestion that spends the better part of the day quietly complaining. You're not a heavy drinker. You're just someone who has noticed that the biological cost of even moderate alcohol has shifted, and you'd like to understand why — and whether anything in the research landscape speaks to recovery.9 min readMetabolic healthPeptides for hangover recovery — the honest landscapeYou wake up and the first thing you notice is that your mouth tastes like a parking garage. Then the head comes online — not pain yet, just a thickness, a pressure behind the eyes that promises more. Then the nausea, sitting in the middle of your chest, not quite threatening but present. You swing your legs over the side of the bed and sit there for a moment, doing the math on how much you had and whether you have to be anywhere today and whether the combination of those two variables is going to be a problem.9 min readAnti-aging and cellular healthSirtuins — the longevity proteins and what they actually doIn the late 1990s, a yeast cell in Leonard Guarente's lab at MIT quietly upended the assumption that lifespan was a fixed parameter. The gene in question was Sir2 — Silent Information Regulator 2 — and when researchers added extra copies of it to yeast, the cells lived longer. When they deleted it, the cells died sooner. Nobody had expected a single gene to move the lifespan needle in either direction. The question the experiment opened wasn't just "what does Sir2 do" but something more unsettling: if a gene could regulate how long a cell lives, what exactly is the machinery of aging, and how close to the surface is it?12 min read