Ben Greenfield explores how to boost NAD, a molecule that declines with age. Low NAD drives inflammation and oxidative stress. Calorie restriction, carotenoid-rich vegetables, exercise, and vitamin B3 help preserve it. The conversation also covers infrared light and hyperbaric oxygen as potential adjuncts.
Therapy, hyperbaric oxygen chambers. What are, what are some of the best ways to actually raise NAD levels naturally? With other food strategies or other lifestyle strategies or other biohacks, for example?
Yeah, look, I'm happy to jump in there with some of the lifestyle elements which I think are particularly important if you want to turn over your NAD fast. In other words, if you want to drop your nad, which is not what we want to do, but I'm just using that, then you're going to have any condition which has an increase in inflammation and what we call oxidative stress or free radical damage. Both of those, not only does it signal through to increased CD38 activity, but it also increases PARP activity, which is the DNA repair. So inflammation free radical damage, both of those are going to decrease your nad, which is what you don't want. So fairly simply, any of the lifestyle behaviours that are going to improve that is going to increase your NAD naturally and this includes taking in less calories. We know that using whole foods and some of the work in the brain that we've done, which is interesting, showing that the carotenoids particularly. So these are the molecules that are coming from the red, yellow and green leafy sort of veggies. These are particularly high in carotenoids and these can actually help preserve, particularly in the brain, NAD levels. Exercising, eating whole grains, I mean, these are going to be able to provide things like your nicotinic acid and vitamin B3, et cetera, on their own. But all of these, essentially doing those things that you'd be fairly most people would recognize were healthy for them, is going to help to increase their NAD and maintain high NAD levels and therefore high sirtuin activity, et cetera.
Okay, gotcha. What about light therapy? You hear a lot about like infrared light, near infrared, intranasal light, things along those lines. How about light, does it play a role here?
Look, nobody's done any work on that directly, as far as I'm aware, not specifically with nad, but there is work that's been done on light therapy of different wavelengths, even through to the blue wavelength, just decreasing inflammation within certain parts of the body, particularly in people with pain. So where there's benefit, that's there. And I guess there's still a lot of work still going on there, that photomodulation, that if it's going to decrease pain, which is associated with cytokine signalling and increase in inflammatory cytokines drive or increase your pain, then there is going to be benefits with nad, and that probably works both ways. So the higher nad.
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