Robert Fried Says Niagen Bioscience Has the Key to Better Aging, and He Has the Science to Prove It
Fried clarifies a common misconception: NAD itself is not bioavailable when taken orally. Instead, he highlights the importance of a precursor molecule, nicotinamide riboside, which is readily absorbed by cells and converted into NAD. Niagen Bioscience's flagship product, Niagen, is a patented and extensively researched form of nicotinamide riboside.
A significant concern for Fried is the lack of integrity in the broader dietary supplement market. He cites a study where less than 1% of competing NAD-boosting products met their label claims, with 40% containing none of the active ingredient. He contrasts this with Niagen Bioscience's commitment to rigorous scientific research, evidenced by 38 peer-reviewed human clinical studies and over 100 preclinical studies.
Fried emphasizes that Niagen Bioscience is not just another supplement company. They are singularly focused on NAD and its potential therapeutic benefits. A major four-and-a-half-year study on Parkinson's disease, involving 400 participants, is nearing completion and is expected to provide further evidence of Niagen's potential to address serious age-related diseases.
The company's mission, according to Fried, is to educate the public about the importance of NAD and to establish Niagen as the 'gold standard' in the NAD space. He stresses that Niagen is the only patented, legal, and trusted form of nicotinamide riboside, backed by unparalleled scientific research.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Vox
2 days ago
- Vox
The brain tech revolution is here — and it isn't all Black Mirror
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. When you hear the word 'neurotechnology,' you may picture Black Mirror headsets prying open the last private place we have — our own skulls — or the cyber-samurai of William Gibson's Neuromancer. That dread is natural, but it can blind us to the real potential being realized in neurotech to address the long intractable medical challenges found in our brains. In just the past 18 months, brain tech has cleared three hurdles at once: smarter algorithms, shrunken hardware, and — most important — proof that people can feel the difference in their bodies and their moods. A pacemaker for the brain Keith Krehbiel has battled Parkinson's disease for nearly a quarter-century. By 2020, as Nature recently reported, the tremors were winning — until neurosurgeons slipped Medtronic's Percept device into his head. Unlike older deep-brain stimulators that carpet-bomb movement control regions in the brain with steady current, the Percept listens first. It hunts the beta-wave 'bursts' in the brain that mark a Parkinson's flare and then fires back millisecond by millisecond, an adaptive approach that mimics the way a cardiac pacemaker paces an arrhythmic heart. In the ADAPT-PD study, patients like Krehbiel moved more smoothly, took fewer pills, and overwhelmingly preferred the adaptive mode to the regular one. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic agreed: The system now has US and EU clearance. Because the electrodes spark only when symptoms do, total energy use is reduced, increasing battery life and delaying the next skull-opening surgery. Better yet, because every Percept shipped since 2020 already has the sensing chip, the adaptive mode can be activated with a simple firmware push, the way you'd update your iPhone. Waking quiet muscles Scientists applied the same listen-then-zap logic farther down the spinal cord this year. In a Nature Medicine pilot, researchers in Pittsburgh laid two slender electrode strips over the sensory roots of the lumbar spine in three adults with spinal muscular atrophy. Gentle pulses 'reawakened' half-dormant motor neurons: Every participant walked farther, tired less, and — astonishingly — one person strode from home to the lab without resting. Half a world away, surgeons at Nankai University threaded a 50-micron-thick 'stent-electrode' through a patient's jugular vein, fanned it against the motor cortex, and paired it with a sleeve that twitched his arm muscles. No craniotomy, no ICU — just a quick catheter procedure that let a stroke survivor lift objects and move a cursor. High-tech rehab is inching toward outpatient care. Mental-health care on your couch The brain isn't only wires and muscles; mood lives there, too. In March, the Food and Drug Administration tagged a visor-like headset from Pulvinar Neuro as a Breakthrough Device for major-depressive disorder. The unit drips alternating and direct currents while an onboard algorithm reads brain rhythms on the fly, and clinicians can tweak the recipe over the cloud. The technology offers a ray of hope for patients whose depression has resisted conventional treatments like drugs. Thought cursors and synthetic voices Cochlear implants for people with hearing loss once sounded like sci-fi; today more than 1 million people hear through them. That proof-of-scale has emboldened a new wave of brain-computer interfaces, including from Elon Musk's startup Neuralink. The company's first user, 30-year-old quadriplegic Noland Arbaugh, told Wired last year he now 'multitasks constantly' with a thought-controlled cursor, clawing back some of the independence lost to a 2016 spinal-cord injury. Neuralink isn't as far along as Musk often claims — Arbaugh's device experienced some problems, with some threads detaching from the brain — but the promise is there. On the speech front, new systems are decoding neural signals into text on a computer screen, or even synthesized voice. In 2023 researchers from Stanford and the University of California San Francisco installed brain implants in two women who had lost the ability to speak, and managing to hit decoding times of 62 and 78 words per minute, far faster than previous brain tech interfaces. That's still much slower than the 160 words per minute of natural English speech, but more recent advances are getting closer to that rate. Guardrails for gray matter Yes, neurotech has a shadow. Brain signals could reveal a person's mood, maybe even a voting preference. Europe's new AI Act now treats 'neuro-biometric categorization' — technologies that can classify individuals by biometric information, including brain data — as high-risk, demanding transparency and opt-outs, while the US BRAIN Initiative 2.0 is paying for open-source toolkits so anyone can pop the hood on the algorithms. And remember the other risk: doing nothing. Refusing a proven therapy because it feels futuristic is a little like turning down antibiotics in 1925 because a drug that came from mold seemed weird. Twentieth-century medicine tamed the chemistry of the body; 21st-century medicine is learning to tune the electrical symphony inside the skull. When it works, neurotech acts less like a hammer than a tuning fork — nudging each section back on pitch, then stepping aside so the music can play. Real patients are walking farther, talking faster, and, in some cases, simply feeling like themselves again. The challenge now is to keep our fears proportional to the risks — and our imaginations wide enough to see the gains already in hand. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Miami Herald
3 days ago
- Miami Herald
Should Yankees' Max Fried Pickle His Hand?
New York Yankees starting pitcher Max Fried, currently suffering from a blister on his left index finger, might benefit from an old-school baseball remedy. At the halfway point, the Yankees are in need of some pitching talent to make up for losses due to injury. Most recently, with Ryan Yarbrough and Clarke Schmidt down for the count, the organization has turned their eyes to the open market, ideally making a move for a starter and/or reliever at the coming trade deadline. Enter Fried's blister, currently residing on his pitching hand. The blister caused Fried to leave the Yankees' last game in a recent series with the Chicago Cubs, a game that ultimately ended in a Yankees loss just before All-Star Week. The blister also caused him to miss the All-Star Game on Tuesday night, with Yankees teammate Carlos Rodón stepping in for him, but we won't blame the AL's loss on it. Writing for the New York Post, New York sports reporter Mike Vaccaro told the story of an old remedy for toughening up skin and alleviating blisters, and proposed it for Fried's problem. The solution - literal pickle brine - was used by New York Mets trainer Gus Mauch, who picked up the tip from the boxing world. "Ryan would occasionally beg off the magic solution - "I can't keep pickles down, and the brine smells twice as bad," he said - but inevitably, when the blister returned, Mauch would plunk down another dime at Katz's Korner Deli and deliver his odoriferous elixir to [Mets pitcher Nolan] Ryan, who played long enough to win 324 games and strike out 5,714 hitters once the skin on his fingers grew permanently tough," Vaccaro said. "There are other remedies now. But inevitably, whenever someone in baseball begins to suffer from a blister, two kids who were enormous Mets fans in '68 - Howie Rose and Gary Cohen - quickly tell a new generation of fans about Gus Mauch and his pickle brine." As Vaccaro pointed out, the remedy was immortalized by Life Magazine in their May 31, 1968 issue (page 77, not for the faint of heart). Ideally Fried, who is surely receiving top-notch medical care for the minor injury, won't have to resort to all that. But if it gets him back in action sooner, it may come to pass that Fried pickles. Make sure to bookmark Yankees On SI to get all your daily New York Yankees news, interviews, breakdowns and more! Yankees Signing Top MLB Draft PickYankees Announce Bullpen Moves Before Second Half of SeasonYankees Could Pull Off Blockbuster Bullpen MoveGame-Changing Trade Target Drawing Comparisons to Yankees LegendYankees May Win Red Sox Trade After All This article was originally published on as Should Yankees' Max Fried Pickle His Hand?. Copyright ABG-SI LLC. SPORTS ILLUSTRATED is a registered trademark of ABG-SI LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
Can you hack aging with NAD supplements?
Walk down the supplement aisle at your local drugstore and you'll likely spot bottles of NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) pills, powders, or liquids that promise to slow down aging. The global market for these products hit $535.53 million in 2022. But do NAD supplements really work? 'I get asked about NAD supplements occasionally by patients,' says Dr. Nicholas Dragolea, a London-based GP with an interest in longevity and functional health at My Longevity Centre in the United Kingdom. 'My answer usually is that there isn't enough medical evidence to support taking it.' [ Related: Does drinking collagen actually do anything? ] What is NAD and why the hype? NAD is a molecule your body makes from nutrients in your diet like tryptophan and niacin. It's involved in hundreds of different processes in the body—from metabolism, to brain health, to DNA repair—making it critical for overall human health, explains Daniel Craighead, an assistant professor in the School of Kinesiology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. 'NAD levels tend to go down as we get older,' he says. 'Therefore, the thought is that if we can restore NAD through dietary supplements, we may be able to reverse a lot of the signs and symptoms of aging.' [ Related: Is there any truth to anti-aging schemes? ] What do studies show? In 2023, Craighead and his colleagues reviewed research on oral NAD precursors and their effects on healthy aging and age-related chronic diseases. (Rather than NAD itself, many supplements contain NAD precursors like nicotinamide riboside and nicotinamide mononucleotide, which are more stable and are converted to NAD by the body). Lab studies in cells and mice showed promising results, supporting the theory that NAD promotes healthy aging and helps with DNA repair. But human studies paint a more mixed picture. 'So far, most of the studies in people are relatively short, lasting weeks to months, and done in small groups of only a couple dozen people,' says Craighead. 'These human studies have shown that NAD+ precursors are safe and boost NAD+ levels, but significant improvements in health generally haven't been observed.' The best evidence we have is that these NAD precursors may decrease inflammation, adds Craighead. For example, a study published in 2019 found that three weeks of nicotinamide riboside supplementation reduced blood markers of inflammation by 50% to 70% in older men. Chronic inflammation is a hallmark of aging and age-related diseases, making this a promising result. Another review, published in 2024, noted potential benefits for age-related and neurological conditions like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease, but cautioned that further clinical trials must be performed. One of the studies included in the review showed that oral nicotinamide riboside supplements increased brain NAD levels and altered brain metabolism in individuals with Parkinson's disease. The supplements also reduced inflammatory cytokines—proteins that act as messengers in the immune system—in the blood and cerebrospinal fluid (a fluid that surrounds and protects the brain and spinal cord) of participants. In another 2004 study, patients with Alzheimer's disease who took NAD supplements showed improvements in cognitive functions, such as verbal fluency and abstract reasoning. What do doctors say? Some clinicians report anecdotal benefits. 'My patients see huge improvements in energy when I start them on injections of daily low dose NAD,' says Dr. Heather Hinshelwood, the co-owner and chief of medicine of Fraum Health, a provider of restorative medicine, chiropractic, and proactive wellness care on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. 'I have dementia patients who start having better cognition than their spouses,' she adds. But many experts remain cautious.'There is no high-quality evidence that NAD supplementation has any health benefit,' says Dr. David S. Seres, a professor of medicine at the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. 'Without strong evidence from well-done randomized trials, we recommend against taking any dietary supplements.' Are they safe? So far, human studies indicate that NAD supplements are generally safe. But Dr. Seres warns that safety assumptions based on weak evidence can be dangerous. Take vitamin E and selenium: Early research showed that men with prostate cancer had low levels of vitamin E and selenium. But a clinical trial involving 35,000 men later found that men who took vitamin E were more likely to develop prostate cancer compared to men on placebo. 'You cannot assume that supplements are effective or safe based on the kind of evidence used to make claims such as 'supports energy' or 'supports healthy aging,'' says Seres. [ Related: 7 things you can do to actually prevent wrinkles ] Bottom line For now, NAD supplements are not a proven tool for healthy aging. 'Longer studies with more participants are needed,' says Craighead. If you still want to try taking NAD, just note that not all supplements contain what their labels claim. A 2024 analysis found that many nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN) products contained far less of the active ingredient than advertised, Craighead says, 'so consumers may be wasting money on supplements that contain no NMN.' This story is part of Popular Science's Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you've always wanted to know? Ask us.
