#377 The Dangers of NAD Supplements and NAD in Aging - Nichola Conlon PhD

Nichola Conlon (0:00)

Even if you can boost levels of this enzyme, you can significantly increase NAD levels without any external precursor or anything. You're just fixing your body's natural NAD production pathway.

Siim Land (0:12)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and today our guest is Dr. Nichola Conlon. Nichola is a molecular biologist and NAD specialist. She's also the founder of Nuchido, which is a company that creates an NAD boosting supplement that works through the biggest bottleneck of NAD production, the NAD salvage pathway. As many of you know, NAD levels decline with age, and low NAD levels are a major cause of aging. Activating the NAD salvage pathway is the most important thing you can do to increase NAD levels. Nuchido time is a blend of compounds that directly work on the salvage pathway, and it's been clinically shown to raise NAD levels. You can try out time at nuchido.com and use the code SIIM10 for a 10% discount.

Nichola, welcome back to the show.

Nichola Conlon (0:59)

Hey, Siim, thank you so much for having me back on.

Siim Land (1:02)

Yes, it's been a few years since the last time we had a podcast, and, you know, the NAD world is still very popular, and many people still talk about NAD and the different NAD boosters, and they're still kind of the same misconceptions and like, let's say, misleading ways of thinking about NAD.

So, yeah, I'm glad to have you back on the show and talk about some of these things. But, you know, you started researching NAD way before this trend happened. So like, what got you into NAD in the first place? We can start with that.

Nichola Conlon (1:44)

Yeah, so I've been talking about NAD for a long, long time. So for me, it's really exciting that more people are talking about it. But as you mentioned, it's complicated. It's a complicated area of science. So I think it's important that we, you know, as scientists, discuss what the latest research is. So I appreciate you inviting me on the chat about it. But yeah, so my background and the way I got into NAD is actually because I used to work in drug development.

So as part of my role in that company, I was leading projects to develop drugs that were designed to slow cellular aging, which for a lot of people sounds totally crazy, but actually it's a huge area of interest within the drugs industry, because aging is our biggest risk factor for pretty much every chronic disease that drugs companies are trying to target. So Alzheimer's, dementia, cardiovascular disease, cancer, your age is the biggest risk factor for all of them. So the idea is that if we can slow aging at the cellular level, even just a little bit, we may be able to slow the onset and progression of a lot of different age-related diseases in one go. So that is the sort of world I came from. This is where I first learned about the value of NAD. Part of my role was to look at what cellular targets seem to be, you know, implicated in aging and were the things that we could potentially design drugs against.

Now, the thing that I loved about NAD was it was actually something that you could manipulate quite easily within the cell, and it didn't have to be drugs that were doing this. So it could be lifestyle interventions, it could be natural molecules from foods, that definitely weren't drugs. So obviously drugs companies aren't interested in lifestyle interventions or any natural molecules that can't be patented, which was really frustrating because some of the molecules we were testing that were natural molecules worked way better than the drugs.

So I left that world in 2017, and I set up my own research company, Nuchido Laboratories, which was how can we take all of this latest science in the field of aging research, but actually translated into evidence-based and clinically tested consumer products.

And yeah, that is how I first discovered NAD all of those years back.

Siim Land (4:22)

Yeah, that's very interesting. And yeah, I think you're very right that pharma companies and drug companies want to obviously make a profit. That's why they are companies in the first place, unless they're government funded or something like that. But they're still trying to get a profit. And there's the common conspiracy theory that they make drugs, but the drugs never make you completely healthy, so that you're always forced to keep buying the drugs to manage your sickness and never get fully healthy.

But at the same time, the best thing is if people live longer, then you have a lifetime customer. If the customer lives longer, then they will obviously pay you a lot more over the course of an entire lifetime compared to if they die, let's say, within a year of taking a drug.