NAD+, the immortality supplement?

[Yae]

I didn't notice a dedicated post about this in the past few years so thought I would have at it. I think it's been on social media a lot, that's where I saw it.

 

David Sinclair Harvard Aging Scientist -> him and his fellow aging scientists discovered NAD+ when investigating the body's aging-related pathways

 

NAD+ is the key molecule for triggering the DNA repair chemical pathway and apparently/allegedly has been since basically the evolutionary beginning of the existence of DNA.

 

Also it happens to be the case that DNA damage is basically the foundational cause of all cancer. DNA is damaged -> cells replicate incorrectly = cancer

 

In youth, we have sufficient NAD+. I forget the age, but 20 something or so the level starts to drop.

 

DNA is literally the code that every cell is reading in order to do everything else. Damage the code, and everything else will go haywire.

 

Important to note, David Sinclair says that the cell keeps a backup copy of perfect DNA, from which NAD+'s pathway is able to tell how to repair the DNA I guess. I don't know the details of that.

 

Using this "Information Theory of Aging", they have accelerated the age of a mouse by increasing the rate of DNA damage, causing its hair to turn grey, and other signs of aging, and then reversed it successfully. This mouse had a twin used as a control, they are shown below.

 

David Sinclair supplements the precursor to NAD+, NMN. He takes and advises 1 gram per day with fat since it is fat soluble and without it will likely greatly reduce absorption. I take it with my vegan essential fatty acids, it dissolves instantly. He also takes Metformin and Resveratrol, I haven't gotten into those yet personally.

 

The former is a diabetes drug that I think basically slows down the release of sugar into the bloodstream and was found to reduce death by all causes in diabetics to an extent even surpassing non diabetics or something? He says an alternative is Berberine from the berry Barberry.

 

The latter, Resveratrol, is how he initially got famous because he discovered it, or rediscovered it in modern times, or something. He's that guy lol. Hopefully he didn't Zuckerberg someone else. I think Resveratrol is considered the cause of the French paradox. "The French paradox is an apparently paradoxical epidemiological observation that French people have a relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD), while having a diet relatively rich in saturated fats, in apparent contradiction to the widely held belief that the high consumption of such fats is a risk factor for CHD" (wikipedia). This is because the French drink a lot of red wine. Grapes are one of the best sources of it, but Sinclair thinks that no food contains the ideal levels of it so supplements .5g-1g instead. They tested it on mice with good and bad diets then dissected their organs, the fatty one had like a huge unhealthy and unhealthy colored and textured liver, the normal one looked nice, the bad diet + resveratrol one had the same size liver as the healthy one, with some interesting color and texture, but good health readings apparently.

 

So basically Sinclair says that the body has no innate program for death.

 

He says NAD+ levels naturally increase from exercise, fasting, foods with NMN, I forget what else. He doesn't seem to state the actual amounts that each one increases it by. The Hunza are a famous people who supposedly live an average of 120 years, they fast on apricot tea for part of the year until their crops are back in season.

 

Sinclair is 54 or 55. His biological age shows as 30 and I think still decreasing as it has been. It used to be over his actual age. They use the Horvath clock test to measure age, it is highly accurate and can even tell when you will die. He says his organs are as healthy as a 20 year old's. In a video from 10 years ago he pretty clearly looks older than he does now.

 

They are also working on a method of resetting the age of a cell using gene editing, and have successfully reversed age-related blindness in mice and monkeys, even regrowing ocular nerves. But apparently some labs doing this have seen growth of benign tumors so it's still in testing. A Japanese scientist discovered 4 genes that if switched on or off or whatever, revert a cell to the state of a pluripotent stem cell. But if you only switch 3 of them, it keeps its form as whatever type of cell it is, bone, skin, etc. but its age is reset. That's the basis of the method.

 

People do other things for aging like supplement collagen, but our bodies already produce collagen out of 3 amino acids (proteins). The issue is that with age the mechanism in our skin and organ cells for producing it breaks down and is not repaired. "...UV rays cause DNA damage to the cells that make collagen..." so I think NAD+ repairing those cells basically mitigates the need for collagen supplementation and a lot of other things, and gets to the root of the problem.

 

I plan to do another post about supplements/nutrition.

 

David Sinclair suggests eating like 1 meal per day then fasting for 24 hours daily WHILE also getting sufficient nutrients. So basically ideally you would eat a meal that provides all of the nutrients you will need for the entire day or whatever period chosen. And then before your blood sugar drops below like 70 and your brain and muscles stop working, you rinse and repeat, fill up the tank again.

 

This way you have sufficiently put the body into a state of stress as Sinclair explains it which triggers NAD+ production by the body itself. But again, we do have the option of just supplementing it. But I find that when I carefully take every nutrient needed in suggested amounts, I don't actually have much trouble fasting at all for 24 hours. More on that in my near future supplement post.

 

Also I'm not sure how much you can load the body on carbs and how long you can last without the blood sugar getting dangerously low, would be nice to test, I might have to start pricking my fingers. That is to say, if you could fast for 48 hours it should be better according to Sinclair, just the more the better. He says in a fasted state the body starts doing the things it basically didn't have the time to do before lol, like clearing out dead proteins etc., which has a great effect on the body's ability to function, and of course NAD+ production.

 

He also considers it to be the root of telomere shortening etc. I think, other previously thought causes of aging.

 

Supposedly the army is testing it and created a stable form that doesn't degrate remotely as fast, although the current form is not bad.

 

Also mice tested with it can run like 50% longer or something.

 

Also a woman messaged Sinclair saying after 2 years on his supplement protocol her 83 year old husband's hair is regaining color, this was commented on his Instagram.

 

There are different sources you can buy it from, some more affordable. The key is they need to show proof that it has been lab tested for quality. I get it from Renue in the powder form, comes out to about $1 per day. But NOW supplements has it cheaper and I think they do have quality tests available to view so I may switch to that.

 

Anyway since the main source of info on this has been Sinclair speaking in interviews, there are questions he hasn't brought up yet such as, what is the upper limit of life extension possible from this? Does the body just repair itself infinitely? Mice have a shorter lifespan, so they must have found some answers on this. Are mice just spontaneously dying at the human equivalent age of 120 years regardless of NMN supplementation? If so it could simply be that some things are more difficult for NAD+ to repair for some reason and eventually entropy wins over, or could it be that the innate yuanqi battery runs out? There is Ming the clam who lived for 507 years until the scientists killed it without knowing its age. Did it have a larger yuanqi battery, or maybe it fasted or did something else that allowed it to constantly maintain DNA repair?

 

By the way, NAD+ affects all animals, even yeast. There is a supplement for dogs now called Leap Years that contains NMN.

 

Edited March 15 by Yae