The Science Behind NAD+ and its Long-Term Implications on our Health

In recent years, increased attention has been given to the research of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD+. It’s been discovered the NAD+ is an important factor as it relates to its impact on our health and longevity.

NAD+ decreases in the body as we grow older, which can compromise the ability of certain cells to perform their proper functions to keep you alive. Many people do not know about NAD+ and the kind of impact it has on their health. Learning more about NAD+ and its long-term implications on our health can help us to make certain lifestyle changes to improve our physical well-being.

What is NAD+? 

NAD+, or nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide was first discovered in 1906, and is an essential coenzyme that is found in all cells in the human body and is involved in dozens of metabolic processes.

NAD+ produce two common reactions in the body, one is helping to convert nutrients into energy a key source in metabolism, and operating as a helper molecule for proteins in regulating other cellular functions.

NAD+ helps the enzymes in your body work more efficiently by activating chemical reactions in your cells. This in turn, supports key processes like digestion, metabolism and immune system function.

While there are health nutraceuticals to tackle metabolic imbalances, perhaps maintaining healthy NAD+ levels will minimize the need for such products.

What are the benefits of NAD+ for our health?

NAD+ plays a crucial role in keeping your cells strong and impacts your health in a number of ways. Here are a few ways NAD+ impacts your health:

1. Helps Convert Food to Energy

NAD+ is needed to convert the foods we eat into cellular fuel/energy that our body needs. We need energy for our muscles to work and for our brains to function. NAD+ picks up electrons from glucose, becoming NADH (coenzyme in making ATP), transporting the electrons to the mitochondria for cells to extract the stored energy and use it to perform their function and also repair themselves and stay alive.

2. Promotes Healthy Aging

NAD+ is needed by the cells of the body to activate sirtuin proteins that regulate biological pathways and protect them from age-associated decline. Sirtuin proteins are essential in maintaining the length of telomeres (DNA strand end caps) and prevent them from fraying.

Scientists have shown an association with long telomeres and longevity and believe that telomeres matter as predictors of early disease and death. NAD+ is needed to maintain the health of telomeres, which is keeping them long. 

3. Helps Stress Resistance & Brain Protection

NAD+ has the ability to build cell resistance to stress, offering cell protection. Higher NAD+ levels provide better cell protection and survival against stress. Sirtuin protein keeps oxidative stress at bay, and as established earlier, NAD+ helps sirtuins function properly.

Adequate levels of NAD+ in the body will help to maintain strong and resilient cells that can withstand stress. Depletion of NAD+ contributes to neuronal death, removing NAD+ protective capacity, which can compromise brain energy metabolism that can contribute to the development of certain neurological diseases, like Alzheimer’s disease. 

How to Increase NAD+

There are a number of natural ways you can increase your body’s NAD+ production. Exercise and fasting are two methods.

While fasting has been shown to increase natural levels of NAD+ and other proteins that slow the aging process, it should be done with the guidance of a doctor, nutritionist or health specialist. If you'd like to learn more about fasting, try to ease yourself into it with intermittent fasting.

Certain foods also boost NAD levels in the body. These foods include:

• Milk
• Fish
• Mushrooms
• Yeast
• Green vegetables
• Whole grains

Lastly, you can take an NAD+ precursor like IVITA ICARIA to make it easier for your body to produce NAD. While NAD+ in its complete form can’t be ingested orally, you can use NMN to increase production of NAD+ inside the human body.

ICARIA, our NAD+ precursor, includes essential and novel ingredients such as Pterostilbene and Resveratrol, which are powerful antioxidants and have been proven to activate longevity genes such as Sirtuins. It also contains collagen peptides and hyaluronic acid to maintain skin and joint health and integrity.

This powerful mix of ingredients makes ICARIA a powerful NAD+/Longevity Nutraceutical.

While the health nutraceutical NAD+ still appears to be a mystery, scientists are making headway understanding its role in the body and its long-term implication on health.

NAD+ is essential to helping the body to function properly, and in particular, promotes healthy aging and longevity, protects the brain and helps with the conversion of food to the energy needed to keep the body going.