Lorne Brown

By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose.

Welcome to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, and today I have Dr. Nichola Conlon on, and I’m very excited to have this conversation with her because I think the most common question we’ve been getting in the last couple of years at my clinic at Acubalance is about NAD and supporting NAD. And should I do it this way or that way? Which one should I use? And I think I got the expert on today, and we’re going to talk about NAD and we’re going to talk about how to boost that and why you may want to boost that. Nichola, I want to give people a little bit of background of who you are because in researching you and getting ready for our podcast, your company shared so much information and research, which was fun. I love this stuff. And now I want to get inside your brain, but I always love when I get to talk to somebody brilliant. And so you guys should know that she’s a molecular biologist specializing in the study of cellular aging. And with our demographic, those trying to conceive or perimenopause, menopause, we’re always wanting to be as biologically young as possible. So look who we got on guys, somebody who’s done research in this area, the anti-aging area, and she worked in a drug development company, which also is quite interesting because now she’s in the supplement industry. But she has that background in drug development and she founded Nuchido Laboratories to deliver what we call disruptive innovation in the field of aging, rejuvenation, and health span, which I think, again, people that listen to this podcast are quite interested in. She has a passion for sharing the latest science and is an accomplished speaker with a skill for translating advanced science to help educate and support the wider population, encouraging people to age well and achieve their optimal life experience. When I’ve gone through some of your podcasts and the literature that you’ve shared, you really do take this complex science and distill it down. So thank you for doing that, and welcome to the Conscious Fertility Podcast.

Nichola Conlon 

No, thank you so much for having me. Yeah, as you say, I am a science geek at heart. That is my background. I’m a scientist, but I do have a passion for teaching people about it and trying to take this pretty complex world and allow people to understand it so that maybe they can take some of the latest science and use that knowledge and understand that knowledge and be able to implement it into their own lives to improve the health and whatever journey that they may be on.

Lorne Brown 

Well then let’s dig into it. And the thing that we always post on our social media, Hey, we have this guest on, what kind of questions do you have? And as I shared with you off camera, the audience that I see in my own clinical practice are those trying to conceive. So most of them are in their late thirties, mid forties. And then having been in practice since 2000, a lot of the people I’ve seen are now perimenopause or menopausal, and they’re looking to slow down that aging process. And I would say the other areas that people come in with looking for help are extreme fatigue and brain fog. And so these are some of the topics I want us to focus on because a lot of our listeners are either trying to conceive, manage this perimenopausal menopausal stage of their life and dealing with fatigue and brain fog. So can you just start with, because some of our listeners may be, okay, what is NAD and why is it important?

Nichola Conlon 

Yeah, absolutely. Because you are right, NAD is something that is important in all of those different factors that you’ve mentioned, and it is also something that has suddenly become a buzzword in these spaces as well. And a lot of people are a little bit confused as to what it is. Should they be listening about it? Should they be doing something about it? So yeah, hopefully we can break it all down today and help people to really understand, because essentially, NAD is something that is naturally found within our bodies. It’s found in every single cell in our body, and it’s involved in hundreds of different processes. So in our cells, we’ve constantly got all sorts of little pathways and reactions and things that have taken place to keep our bodies ticking over from the inside. And NAD is involved in hundreds of these different reactions.

So it’s very, very important inside our bodies, but we’re not going to go into all 300 different pathways. It’s involved in a day. So I always say that the two things that it’s most important for and what people should really pay attention to and understand is firstly, that NAD is a very important part of the process in ourselves that creates energy. So we know that our bodies need energy to function. We know that this energy somehow comes from our food, it comes from the glucose, the fats in foods, and NAD is part of the process that literally takes the nutrients out of our food and converts it into the energy form that our bodies can actually use.

Lorne Brown

A lot of our listeners are familiar with mitochondria. Can you tie NAD and its relationship with mitochondria? Since you’re talking about the energy of the cell, I’m assuming there’s a very close relationship to NAD.

Nichola Conlon 

Absolutely. That. Yeah. So in our mitochondria, they are the energy powerhouses of our cells. They are the part of our cell that creates this energy. And within the mitochondria, we have a pathway which is called the Creb cycle. And this is a pathway that literally takes the glucose from the food that you eat and converts it into ATP, the form of energy currency of the cell. And NAD is a very important part of that pathway. So within this pathway, going into a little bit more complex science, what NAD does is it acts as a redox molecule. So when we are creating energy, we have things called electrons in our cells that constantly flip to different states to allow the energy to be generated. And NAD basically acts as this electron donor and acceptor. And I always say it’s kind of like a bus picking up and dropping off passengers.

It accepts the electrons, it becomes full, and then it takes them to another part of the cycle and drops ’em off, and then the bus is empty again. And this is also why you see NAD called different things. So anyone that’s ever done a bit of research on it will sometimes see that it’s called NAD plus, and sometimes they will see it called NADH, and this is dependent on whether it’s in its form that has electrons or its form that doesn’t have electrons. So we call the NAD plus the oxidized form, and the NADH, the reduced form. By the way, you should probably know that NAD does stand for something. It stands for nicotinamide, adenine dinucleotide, which is another really common question that I get asked. What does it actually stand for?

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, and that’s a mouthful. That’s why we call it NAD.

Nichola Conlon 

Exactly that.

Lorne Brown 

So going back to the, just I want to touch on the mitochondria here. So NAD is an important role for this mitochondrial function. And again, for a lot of our listeners that are trying to conceive, many of them have heard on our podcast the mitochondria through the female line that goes to the embryo, that’s what’s going to give the embryo energy to divide in the fallopian tube or in the IVF lab when they grow to a blast of stay five. And that’s the energy that’s important for implantation. We need that energy. And so for those that are looking to try to conceive, we want good mitochondria health, and now we’re learning why NAD is an important part of that.

Nichola Conlon 

Yeah, absolutely. NAD is critically important in our mitochondrial function. And we know that as NAD declines, our mitochondria simply don’t function as well. And that not only means that your cells, whether that be any cell in your body or a reproductive cell, it means that they will not be functioning as well as they could be because they are not able to produce the energy that they potentially can. And not only the energy side of it, but when mitochondria become dysfunctional, they also start to give off a lot of harmful toxic substances called reactive oxygen species. So as your mitochondria start functioning as well, not only are they not producing as much energy, but they are also creating damaging molecules. And again, I always sort of refer to an analogy of the mitochondria being like these powerhouses in the cells creating a coal fuel power station that when it was brand new and it worked amazing, it was very efficient. But as it’s become older and it’s not functioning as well because of things like NAD declining, not only is it becoming efficient, so it’s not producing as much energy, but also it’s actually giving off toxic waste and it really should be getting decommissioned.

Lorne Brown 

And you talked about as it declines, how does it decline? I’m wondering how it works with aging? Because one thing that when we support the people that come into our practice at Acubalance, we work on their biological age, but we can never change their chronological age. I mean, that’s your age, but biological age is important as well. When it comes to NAD, how does aging impact it? And how about those other things that they can control? So you can’t control your birthdays, but there are things you can control. So I’m curious, how much does NAD decline in our aging process?

Nichola Conlon 

Yeah, so one of the leading causes of NAD decline, and one of the reasons why people became so interested in it in the first place, aside from its role in energy metabolism, was the fact that it does decline with age. And this decline seems to be fairly significant. It’s estimated that our NAD levels are half every 20 years, so this is from birth. So even by the time we’re 20, we’ve lost half our NAD levels by the time we’re 40, halved again, and so on and so forth. So considering how important this is in our bodies, it’s quite alarming that it actually declines at such a race because we’ve spoken about NAD being important in energy metabolism, but it’s also critically important for repair as well.

Lorne Brown

That’s your second point of importance.

Nichola Conlon

That’s the second one.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, before I interrupted you

Nichola Conlon

No, absolutely not. It’s very important for repair. So in this capacity, what NAD does is it seems to act as a fuel to drive many repair processes in the cells. So in our cells, damage is actually happening all the time, but our cells have an army of DNA repair proteins and enzymes and pathways that are going round looking for any damage and making sure it’s fixed before we even know it’s an issue. And it turns out that many of these cellular pathways and processes are actually highly dependent on NAD, for example, DNA damage. It’s a huge driver of the age process, and your DNA is incredibly important for cellular function and cellular health, but it’s constantly being damaged. So we have DNA repair enzymes that will detect any damage and then fueled by NAD, they will come along and fix it and get rid of the issue before we even realize it’s a problem.

So the link that we see here with something like biological age is that as our NAD is declining, our cellular health is also declining because our cells are producing energy like they used to and mitochondria are dysfunctioning, we are not getting the repair that we used to. We’re starting to get higher levels of things like chronic inflammation. In fact, there are 12 key things that are known to drive cellular aging, and these are actually known as the hallmarks of aging. Things like mitochondrial dysfunction and DNA damage there, some of them. But there are 12 other factors that also have a key role in driving the aging process. And it turns out NAD as it declines impacts all of them. All 12, all 12 are impacted by NAD. As NAD goes down, they get worse. And as NAD goes up, they get better. So as NAD goes down, it impacts our cellular health. And we know that the link between that and biological age is that if our cells aren’t healthy, our biological age will increase.

Lorne Brown 

Now, I have a lot of questions around this, but I want to bring up a point early into our discussion because some people may be listening to this and go, okay, great, I’m going to go buy NAD supplement now I’m going to go buy an NAD precursor that’s out on their market, or I want IV therapy. And again, diving into the literature that you have shared, it’s not that simple.

When you supplement, I guess I’ll put it this way, many of our patients come in with a supplement like the precursor NR and NNM, but NR is one of the more common ones. And my naturopaths in our practice don’t usually recommend that they have found that people will feel good at the beginning and then it’s like there’s a roadblock and then it’s going to make them feel worse. So good at the beginning, but not good long-term because of something happening in the pathway. I think you can share with me and our audience, explain what the heck my naturopaths are talking about. I kind of know what they’re talking about, but I’d love for you to explain why you can’t just take a supplement. Why not just take NAD and just on IV therapy, we don’t do it yet in our practice. And I say yet one reason is it’s very costly. So we want to make sure the research is helpful because it’s very costly, it’s very uncomfortable for a lot of people. And then the same reason my naturopathic physicians in my clinic say, we may not be helping them as much as we think if they have pathway issues

Nichola Conlon 

Exactly that. So when scientists realized that NAD was this thing that declines, and this causes a lot of issues with cellular health, the first thought was, well, why don’t we just restore NAD levels? Or why don’t we stop them from declining in the first place? And obviously the easiest way to do that is just take pure NAD. But unfortunately, it was realized very quickly that it wasn’t as simple as that. And that’s because NAD itself, it’s the structure of it. So firstly, it’s a very unstable molecule, which means trying to take it orally means it just gets degraded in the gut. And aside from the fact that it’s unstable, it’s also a very large and charged molecule. And that type of molecule does not pass freely into our cells. We say it’s not very bioavailable because our cells are where NAD has its function. NAD has to get inside of the cells, and cells don’t just let anything pass in and out.

They’re actually highly controlled as to what they do let in and out. And because NAD is such a large and charged molecule, it actually needs special channels, which are almost like little doors that open up to let it into the cell. The majority of our cells, and indeed our ger doesn’t actually have these channels to let it in. The first thought was, well, if we can’t already take NAD because it’s degraded, then can we inject it? Or can we give IV infusions of NAD? And a lot of people have been doing this for a very long time now, but the issue that we still have is that an IV NAD gets the NAD only so far it gets it into the blood. But we know that NAD actually doesn’t do anything in the blood. Like I said, it needs to be inside of the cells because that is where the DNA is.

That is where the mitochondria are. That is where all the 300 pathways that NAD interacts with are. So there’s not very much evidence to demonstrate that this NAD that you’re putting in the blood is actually then going and getting inside of the cells. There are some cells that have channels big enough to let the NAD in, but the current consensus amongst the scientific community is that the NAD doesn’t actually get into the cells. It kind of gets stuck in the blood. And there’s been one human clinical study that shows that a lot of this NAD gets rapidly broken down into smaller precursors. So some of the ones that you mentioned earlier, like NR and NMN, and then these may be taken up and turned into NAD. But again, there’s a big black box here of what’s going on with a real lack of clinical data despite the amount of people actually doing them.

And I was recently at a conference in December where some data was presented from a trial with NAD IV, which actually showed that it drives inflammation, which is exactly what we don’t want to be happening. So from my perspective as a scientist and looking at what the evidence shows, I think probably an IV or the injections that are also becoming popular, it’s certainly not something I would be recommending until there’s definitely more research done on this area. So moving on from that, the other way to do it is supplements, but supplements that do not contain pure NAD, they contain the precursors. So these are your NMN, your nicotinamide riboside, and also your NMN, your nicotinamide mono nucleotides, and essentially all these are the smaller building blocks that our body actually uses to make NAD. Because what a lot of people don’t realize is that we don’t get any NAD from the outside.

We don’t get it from our diet, we can’t absorb it, it doesn’t exist like that. Our bodies actually have to make all of the NAD that they need. So they have a pathway in the cells that literally takes the precursor, so it takes the raw materials and it converts them inside the cell into the large NAD molecule. So the thought process behind things like NMN and NR is, oh, well, let’s just give the body more of the raw materials that it needs to make NAD and hopefully we’ll get more NAD out the other end. Now, from clinical studies, which there are many now with things like nr, it seems that it does boost NAD to a certain extent. So we see that this precursor gets turned into NAD, but then as your doctors and practitioners have been mentioning, we seem to get this barrier where it helps a little bit at the start, but then you just don’t seem to continue to get benefits.

And what further research has now shown is that the reason why our NAD goes down in the first place is because this pathway in our cells that actually makes the NAD from these precursors stops working. So there’s a key enzyme in that pathway that converts the raw material into NAD, and it continuously makes and recycles it, but that enzyme declines with age. So essentially you can put in as much raw material in your cells as you want, but if you don’t have that enzyme that is actually going to convert it into something, then the raw material just starts to build up. So I always use, again, an analogy of a factory. It’s like if you went into a factory and you saw that NAD production had gone down and you saw it was because the machines were broken, the pipes were leaking, there was no way you would just say, oh, well let’s just ignore all that and we’ll just order more raw material and hope we get more NAD out. At the other end, you would say, no, hang on a minute. We need to fix the problem here. We need to fix the machines. So this is where there’s starting to be a whole new approach to NAD booster, which is actually, let’s look at why NAD is declining in the first place because our body was very good at producing it when we were young. But actually let’s fix that rather than ignore it.

Lorne Brown 

And if I understand this correctly, first of all, we’re so aligned on this root cause idea because you’re addressing the root cause in your analogy, if the machine’s broken, adding more raw materials into the assembly line is not going to get you more of the finished product. You’re just going to get a big buildup of stuff on the assembly line. So I got to fix the machine. Exactly. Go after the root cause. We often share that when people are rushing into say, an IVF cycle or medicated cycle, but they have inflammation, poor nutrition, poor blood flow, hormonal imbalances, pushing those ovaries into an IVF cycle may not be ideal until we correct these root causes imbalances that are maybe leading to the infertility or the miscarriages.

Nichola Conlon 

Exactly that. And it’s so important, and I understand why a lot of people have been taking things like NMN and NR because this whole area is relatively new science and science changes. And up until a certain point, we thought that was the best thing we could do was give more NMN and give more nr. But now because we actually know the root causes and we know what is driving it, it’s much better to actually look at targeting those root causes. So how can we actually switch back on that NAD, that NAD production cycle that’s naturally in our cells. And also really interesting that you also just mentioned inflammation there because another key reason that we now know why NAD declines is because of chronic low grade inflammation in our bodies. We know that the higher the background level of inflammation, the more NAD is used up trying to combat this inflammatory process that’s happening in our bodies.

Lorne Brown 

So I want to talk about inflammation, and we always use the term in our clinic inflammaging. I play with the scientific definition, but I always say inflammaging is accelerated biological aging that leads to premature degenerative diseases. And I also say premature infertility. This chronic systemic inflammation leads to so many conditions. So for those that we said at the very beginning, those that have the brain fog, those that have fatigue, those that are experiencing uncomfortable symptoms in perimenopause and those trying to conceive inflammaging accelerate the biological aging, we want to be as young biologically as possible. Not all 40 year olds are equal. You can be chronologically 40, but biologically 48. And those that are wanting to have good brain health, good energy, wanting to conceive or wanting to enjoy their transition into menopause, they want to be biologically 40 when they’re chronologically 40, not biologically 50. So can you talk a little bit about inflammation and explain again, I think in some of the literature that I got to review on your site, the NR and these other precursors is, am I misunderstanding it? But are they sometimes feeding this inflammation? I think one of the enzymes or the inflammatory marks was CD 38. I read a lot about it. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Nichola Conlon 

Yeah, absolutely. So what we know is that as we get older, we do get this low chronic inflammation that’s kind of smolder in a way in the background. So this is where inflammatory processes occur, because inflammation is inherently a good thing if it’s used by the body in the right way, we want inflammation to help fix this and fight infection and things like that when it’s necessary. But as we get older, it seems to not get completely turned off. So you get this little bit burning away in the background. And as you get this chronic inflammation, it seems that it causes certain enzymes in our cells and pathways to remain switched on. And one of these pathways or one of these enzymes, should I say, is something called CD 38. So this is an enzyme that sits on the surface of ourselves and its job is to drive inflammation.

It should drive inflammation when we need inflammation. And the way it drives inflammation is it actually uses NAD as a fuel to power its pathway. So what we see is in older people that, and also people that are even younger but chronically inflamed, we see that they just have this excess expression of this enzyme. So there’s just loads of this CD 38 enzymes sitting there, and CD 38 is a prolific NAD consumer. And so remember how I said that things like our DNA repair enzymes, they use NAD as a fuel. Well, CD 38 also uses NAD as a fuel, but it uses so much more NAD than any of these other beneficial processes. So for example, if for one turn of CD 30 eight’s enzyme cycle, it uses a hundred molecules of NAD, but a DNA repair enzyme, it uses maybe five or seven. So it’s a huge difference.

So what that means is that just a small increase in inflammation can cause a huge increase in levels of NAD that’s actually being used up. But the more worrying thing is that especially in people that are in good faith thinking, oh, I’m going to boost my NAD levels because I’ve heard that it’s good for me. And then they start doing things like NMN or nr, but they’re actually chronically inflamed and have a lot of this CD 38 in their body. We know that CD 38 has what we call a higher affinity for NAD than a lot of the more beneficial pathways. And what that essentially means is that if NAD suddenly becomes available in the body, this CD 38 enzyme will grab onto it like a magnet before any of the repair enzymes or any of the really beneficial pathways that we’re trying to activate even get a look in and this that you think you are boosting NAD and it’s doing a good thing.

But the reality is that it’s going towards driving further chronic inflammation. And again, we see this in some of the studies that have been coming out recently with things like NR precursors or NMN, where inadvertently it’s actually driving inflammation. So again, this takes us back to this whole root cause thing where if you know there’s these underlying issues, you are much better trying to fix them and address them to try and restore NAD levels. And again, research has shown that just by reducing chronic inflammation itself, that will boost your NAD levels by inhibiting CD 38 again doing nothing else that will also increase your NAD levels.

Lorne Brown 

I have a two part follow up on this. One is that this aligns with an approach that so many people have in Chinese medicine, there’s even a research study when it comes to fertility called whole Systems Chinese medicine, which is not just acupuncture. We look at diet, we look at lifestyle. So the study looked at people that did an anti-inflammatory, low glycemic index diet, those that did stress reduction in movement, and they did acupuncture and they did supplements. So whole systems. So to me, we’re addressing this systemic chronic inflammation, which is bad, the accelerated biological aging. At the same time we’re repairing and supporting the body. It sounds like that’s what you’re suggesting as well.

Nichola Conlon 

Absolutely. I’m smiling here because I always talk about the whole system and the whole system approach, even though we’ve come from completely different worlds. And that was one of the main reasons that I left drug development because traditional drug development just does not look at the body as a whole. It looks at very specific enzymes or very specific pathways, and it just ignores the fact that actually biology is very, very complex and there’s often a lot of things going on and that just gets ignored. And for me that was always crazy, and especially when it comes to anything to do with not only biology but aging. Aging is probably the most biologically complex thing that we know. And no one gene or one pathway or one thing or one intervention is ever going to have a major impact. Obviously we’re sitting here today talking about one thing that is NAD, but there’s so many other things going on in our bodies that need to be considered, but yet a whole systems approach is exactly what’s needed. It’s looking at everything that we now know about why NAD is declining, how it’s made, how it’s recycled, what it’s being used for in our body, and looking at all these different parts and going, well, when we were younger, this wasn’t really an issue. So what was going right then? And is there a way that we can restore our body and our cells and the production and recycling and the use of NAD back to the way it was happening when we were younger? It actually worked really well then. So what’s gone wrong?

Lorne Brown

Yeah, we’ve lived all the chemicals and life and stresses we’ve lived, but we can sometimes turn back that biological clock or at least slow down the acceleration of that biological

Nichola Conlon 

Agent.

Lorne Brown 

The second part I wanted clarification with is, so I heard that CD 38 has an affinity to NAD

And I heard that NR and NNM can feed the 38 inadvertently. That’s not the reason why you’re taking it. And so one part is, okay, we got to be whole systems and address this, but the other part is then how does the Nuchido time plus NAD supplement, if we take that and it increases NAD, will it also cause problems with their inflammation? Then how is it different? Or the clarification is do they need to bring in all these other life factors into their life before they take any supplement because they may feed the inflammation through CD 38?

Nichola Conlon 

So for me, I mean obviously I have a supplement company, but I am the first person to always say that you can’t out supplement a bad diet, a bad lifestyle. Anybody considering taking any supplement should always look at their lifestyle, their diet, their exercise, all the things that are within their control to try and improve those factors because they have such a huge impact on our cellular health and our biological age. But when it does come to supplementation, again, I’ve researched NAD for a very long time, and one of the reasons or the main reason why I developed the Nuchido time plus was it became very obvious looking at the research of why NAD declines, that there was no whole systems approach out there. Everything was just ignoring all of these problems and feeding people with NMN or feeding people with nr. So when developing the tutor time plus, what I really wanted to do was to have that supplement that was a whole systems approach.

So actually all of the different ingredients in a supplement are designed to address each of the things that we now know is a root cause of NAD decline. So first of all, we do have a precursor in there. Importantly, we don’t actually use NR or NMN because although they are the sort of buzz supplements for NAD, they are not actually that well absorbed by the body. Whereas nicotinamide, which is another version of vitamin B three, is actually freely bioavailable to every cell in the body. So it diffuses very easily into all of the cells. And it’s actually the body’s preferred precursor for making NAD, not NMN or nr. They’ve just become popularized because certain people have popularized them and also patented them so they could profit up them. But actually nicotinamide is a really good precursor. We then have, so we’ve got the building block in there that the body needs, but then each of the other ingredients is actually fixing some of those issues that we’ve just spoken about.

So for example, we have ingredients in there such as rutin and also alpha lipoic acid, which are both activators of the key enzyme in that NAD production pathway that actually declines with age. So the enzyme is called NAMPT, and both of these ingredients work to actually switch that enzyme back on so that when our body does have precursors in the factory, it can actually turn them into something. We then, to address your question about the inflammation, we then actually have specific ingredients in there too, which are designed to inhibit CD 38. So EPIGENIC is a known CD 38 inhibitor. So again, we’re actually proactively making sure that when you are boosting your NAD, that CD 38 enzyme and that inflammation is being inhibited so that NADUR Macon goes to where we actually want it to go. And I guess the other thing that we haven’t mentioned, which is also a major problem within the NAD space, is the effect of people supplementing with precursors on methylation.

So this is a very common area that if you start doing a little bit of research on NMN or nr, people will all start saying, oh, well you have to be really careful because you may cause methylation issues. So you might want to be taking something like Trimethylglycine to combat these issues. And the sort of science behind that is, again, going back to the factory analogy, if you are ruining loads of raw material in, but the machines are broken, there becomes a point where it starts to build up and the factory gets full of all these waste products that it’s like, what can we do with it? And this is exactly what happens in the cells. So you are given loads of precursors, but if your body doesn’t have that capacity, that enzyme to actually turn it into NAD, what we see is it starts building up in the cells.

So the precursors build up and our cells don’t like it when things build up. They like to have a state of homeostasis and keep everything equal. So what they do is they go, oh my goodness, we need to get rid of some of this raw material. And the way that our cells do this is by switching on another enzyme called NNMT. And this is a methylating enzyme. And essentially what it does is it sticks a methyl group onto the precursor and tells it to be chucked out of the cell to be recycled. It gets passed out in our urine, and this is the body’s response to try and protect the cells. And methyl groups are like little tags where they’re signaling for something to be put somewhere or moved somewhere, but our methyl groups should be used for much more important processes, things like DNA repair, things like gene expression and turning different genes on and off. So all of a sudden, all of these important methyl groups that were many doing repair and helpful things are now getting diverted to getting rid of this buildup or precursors. So you start to see people become methyl donor depleted, and then that causes a whole host of other issues, which is why people start feeling rubbish even though they think they’re doing something good for their body. So again, we have ingredients in there essentially EGCG, which is a component out of green tea,

Which actually helps to inhibit this methylation process to make sure that the precursors are going to where they need to be and actually getting recycled back into NAD. So that is exactly what we mean by a whole system approach and how we’ve interpreted that into an actual supplement that somebody can actually use to benefit from.

Lorne Brown 

I want to repeat some of this to see if I’m understanding this correctly then. So we don’t get NAD from the outside, so we can’t eat it. It’s not normally supplemented. We make NAD in our cells. And a lot of the problem is we have done things through diet, through movement, through stress, whatever we’ve done, aging has inhibited or broken down this process that makes the NAD in our body. And a big part of it is to be able to recycle it.

Nichola Conlon 

Exactly.

Lorne Brown 

And most of the supplement companies out there are giving you NAD, which you’re not, or giving you a precursor, common precursors, which people will feel good at the beginning, but if they have a recycling problem, they will plateau or maybe even feel worse. Your supplement, how I’m understanding it’s different is going, it’s a whole system and going after the root cause. So rather than trying to give people more raw materials, although I think there is at least one raw material in there, you are giving the body or the cells ways to repair the recycling process so you can continue to make your own NAD. Did I get that correctly?

Nichola Conlon 

Exactly that. Yes, exactly that.

Lorne Brown 

I want to talk about the ingredients. There’s a few things I want to highlight in your ingredients and ask some questions about. First of all, when I first looked at them, I was like, when my naturopath brought it up to me a while ago, I was like, eh, I don’t get it until I read the research that you’ve done. And I read it. I was like, aha. So much so that now I have some for myself and my wife who’s in her menopausal stage perimenopause right now. So the first thing is your first ingredient, which I probably won’t pronounce it right, Styphnolobium japonicum, you want to say it?

Nichola Conlon 

Yes. Styphnolobium japonicum, yeah.

Lorne Brown

Now you talked about Rutin being part of that. It was in there and in quercetin, and I learned from you, first of all, I want to let our audience know, one of the reasons I was excited to have Nichola on here is because of her background, right? Biochemistry and working in a drug company. She talks in my language about bioavailability. It doesn’t matter what you take, it matters what you absorb. And so it’s quite common in our practice. We would tell people things that contain quercetin, go for it. But I learned from you that quercetin possibly is not as easily absorbed and this is why you have this as one of your ingredients.

Nichola Conlon 

Yeah, exactly that. And again, this is something in science that can be quite frustrating in particular in anything to do with drug development because often when we research molecules or compounds or drugs or whatever they may be, the first step is we look at them in cells. So we grow some cells up in addition, we test them and go, oh, wonderful, we put it on the cells and it works. And then you’ve got this pure molecule that you’ve put onto some cells and it does something. But the reality is that often these pure molecules that are being isolated down and down by chemistry actually do not exist like that in the world. They don’t exist like that in nature. And also, we are not single cells, we are complex humans where this molecule has to actually get through a lot of barriers to then get into the cell where it has its effect.

So for example, cetin in a lot of cell studies is being shown to be marvelous for a lot of different things. But then when they started doing studies looking at taking this quercetin molecule and as an oral capsule, you just don’t get the result. And that’s because quercetin doesn’t exist like that in nature. It exists very extensively in multiple different foods, things like apples, onions, but it doesn’t exist in that isolated form. It exists as something called a Quentin Glycoside. So it’s got another sugar kind of molecule attached to it. And what you see is that this actually protects it as it goes through the gut, it’s absorbed in this way, and then once it’s in the body and this other bit’s cleaved off, then the quercetin can then get in the cells and do what it’s meant to do. So this is exactly why we have never used pure quercetin in the product because it’s not very good.

Whereas you use something like Rutin out as Styphnolobium japonicum, which is this quercetin glycoside, it’s a much more natural form that the body is actually familiar with being able to absorb and get it to where you want it to be in the body. And another example of this is people look at the back of our ingredients and go, oh, parsley powder, this is, why don’t I just going to need a load of parsley? Why is parsley in here? And it’s exactly the same thing. The reason parsley is in there is because it contains epigenic. It’s one of the highest sources, natural sources of epigenetic. And again, lots of people selling pure epigenetic like this pure label is a good thing. But the reality is it’s not because our bodies can’t absorb it like that because you’ll never go out in nature and find pure. It just doesn’t exist.

Lorne Brown 

We’re going to continue going through these ingredients, but you make me think from my herbalist Chinese herbalist background, it’s very rare we give an individual herb. So like ginseng and ephedra, which are our Chinese herbs, they’re never given alone. And we see a lot of ginseng syndromes or ephedra syndromes because they’re used with a western mind. Let’s give a whole bunch of this one herb where they’re usually with other herbs and some of these other herbs are balancing and protecting from their side effects as well as we’re giving you an herb which has many ingredients, rather than just taking that ingredient that we think is the most active in the west and isolating and giving it to creating a drug out of it. We’re missing some of the other things that are meant. I think with the B vitamins it is common that I think you need pretty much all the B vitamins together for them to be absorbed properly versus one B vitamin, for example. So I am speaking your language. I like how you came from the drug company and saw what they were doing and how it didn’t work that way in nature, and you found ways to make it bioavailable how nature has made it for us. So it’s available. So the green parsley leaf, that helps with the inflammation. So you can start adding parsley, but you probably need a little bit of a supplement help because you’re probably not going to eat that much parsley, but

Nichola Conlon 

It’s a lot of parsley.

Lorne Brown 

It tastes so good, but I think I’ll start adding that to your diet. Going back to the Styphnolobium japonicum, so you had quercetin, rutin. Is that the ingredient that also helped with, and I’m going to say it wrong, but it sounded like the certain longevity genes, the sirtuins.

Nichola Conlon 

Oh yeah, sirtuins, yeah.

Lorne Brown 

It sounded like a Marvel character, but can you tell me a little bit about that? That seems to be important when we look at biological age and is that the ingredient that’s helping with that or is that another ingredient?

Nichola Conlon 

Yeah, so it’s not actually, I am surprised we’ve gotten this far through the interview and not even spoke about the sirtuins and it is actually because they are incredibly important when it comes to NAD. So what the sirtuins are is they are a family of enzymes and they’re often referred to as these longevity proteins, these things that are implicated in people that live long and healthy lives. And the link between the sirtuins and NAD is that NAD, like it powers a lot of other things also powers the sirtuins. So when NAD is high, these sirtuins are switched on, and when the sirtuins are switched on, they basically sit at the top of an umbrella of a cascade of all these different health and health benefits, healthy pathways in our bodies. So when these are switched on, you see things that are switching on mitochondrial production.

You see pathways that are reducing inflammation, pathways that are causing recycling of damaged cellular parts pathways are switching on DNA repair. So literally when they are switched on, all of these healthy pathways are switched on. But the key bit here is that they do not work without NAD. So again, NAD is like the fuel. If there’s no NAD or the NAD is getting directed towards inflammation, these sirtuins will not be getting switched on and they will not be switching on all of these pathways that actually conduct many of the health benefits of NAD. So a lot of people will talk about activating sirtuins, and the particular supplement that people usually use for this is something called resveratrol. But again, unfortunately resveratrol is very poorly absorbed. It is not a good thing to be taking because of the fact that it’s got very poor bioavailability. Yes, there’s some limited evidence that it may activate the sirtuins, but actually there’s no point trying to activate the sirtuins if you don’t have any NAD because you can try and make them be there in the cell as much as possible.

But if you don’t have the NAD to actually switch them on and fuel ’em, then they’re sitting there waiting like, well, what are we going to do? So we don’t actually have any specific ingredients in the product that are directly focused on boosting levels of the sirtuins. We just focus on boosting the NAD, because if you boost the NAD, then the sirtuins will follow. And indeed, this is exactly what we found in our clinical trial, that the product does increase the expression of cert one, which is the key sirtuins in this family that drives a lot of the longevity benefits.

Lorne Brown 

Small tangent, and we’re going back to what you’re talking about. You mentioned resveratrol and not well absorbed, but you also said in theory it can help with the sirtuin to retrieve them. It’s a popular supplement for fertility. I just want to share with our audience, there is literature showing that it helps with egg quality, but there’s also literature showing that it interferes with implantation. So again, if you’re taking that all cycle long, like in your luteal phase, you’re taking that up around your transfer, you may be interfering with implantation side note, talk to your naturopathic doctor or Chinese medicine doctor for more information just because you brought it up, somebody here is bullet may help, they’re going to go buy it. 

Nichola Conlon 

Very interesting. I didn’t know that.

Lorne Brown

Just be cautious on that. So going back to your Nuchido plus, it is again helping the body recycle to make more NAD that way. So we talked about absorption. So not all Quercetin is absorbed well, and so you have an ingredient to help you have an absorbable version of Quercetin. They also, I think you’re a little bit of an alpha lipoic acid snob. I think you also shared that not all alpha lipoic acid is absorbed equally. Again, you’re the one that is big on bioavailability. This is part of your background. Which alpha lipoic do you have and how many versions are out there and why did you choose the one that you have?

Nichola Conlon 

So there are two versions of alpha lipoic acid, well, I guess three technically. One version is called S alpha lipoic acid, which is S written, it’s entirely synthetic, basically, R alpha lipoic acid is a naturally derived version. And then the version that a lot of people use is what we call a 50-50 racemic mix. So it’s half S and it’s half R. Basically, if you look at the studies, S alpha lipoic acid does absolutely nothing in the body. It does not work. R is the version that is actually bioavailable and works. The issue is that R is extremely expensive and it also can be quite unstable. So what a lot of companies will do is, they’ll just put S alpha lipoic acid in, which is completely pointless. Although it’s cheap, it does nothing slightly better. Companies will use the 50 50 mix because the SALA can sometimes help stabilize the RALA, but again, 50% of what you’re putting in there is doing absolutely nothing. The best version is to use the R. And you can get some more stabilized versions like salt versions now, but the R version is the one that is absolutely doing everything in the body, and that is the one that we use in our product. Again, it’s all about bioavailability. It’s pointless putting stuff in there when you know it’s not going to work.

Lorne Brown 

And back to the methylation, which you talked a bit about for myself personally, when I did the DNA you can do now to find out the best diet lifestyle supplements you get your whole DNA read, we offer that at our practice. I’m poor, I don’t know if it was three or four genes, but I had them all poor. So yeah, I got a good deck of cards that way. I used to be a CPA chartered accountant before this, and it was health issues that got me into naturopathy in Chinese medicine. And then you switch careers from being a researcher in a drug company to that. That’s what brought me into this field. It helped me so much personally because of my poor deck of cards that I got from birth.

Nichola Conlon 

And for somebody like you, you are exactly the type of person where you wouldn’t want to be taken NMN or you wouldn’t want to be taken NR because you already have issues dealing with methylation. And this is putting even more pressure on the system. And actually as you found from your research that these methylation issues are actually quite common. It’s not a rare thing. So potentially we’re in a situation where NAD is suddenly becoming very popular and everyone’s saying, oh, let’s take NMN. But it’s definitely not one size fits all. And like you say, it can make some people worse with good intentions. And a lot of people tell ’em to do it is also with good intention, but it’s not what the latest research shows

Lorne Brown 

And if people want to know. So what does it mean if you’re a poor methylator? It means I’m really good at making inflammation in my body, which is what we don’t want. So I got a few more questions if you’re still good with time here, and one of our naturopathic doctors gave me a list of rapid fire questions for you at the end and she says, do not get off that podcast til you ask this question for us.

Nichola Conlon 

Go for it.

Lorne Brown 

But this is still on my side of questions and people that ask us questions. So you talked about CD 38, this inflammation marker is concerned. You talked about NAD levels declining. Can you answer this in two parts? One is can we measure NAD? Can we measure CD 38? So basically, can we measure biological aging? And can you talk about your research? You did do a human trial, and what did you find about biological aging?

Nichola Conlon

Yeah. Okay. So first part of the question is yes, you can measure NAD, yes, you can measure CD 38 in a lab if you know what you are doing as a scientist. But I guess what you’re really asking is could somebody at home go and get a test like you’ve just been referring to and send a sample away and get their NAD levels back and get their CD 38 levels back? The answer to that is unfortunately no. So NAD itself, as we’ve mentioned, is an unstable molecule, which means that if you take a blood sample, which is effectively what you need to do to measure it, and the minute that blood comes out and goes in a tube, it’s already degrading. It just does not survive well outside the body. So there are companies that are kind of popping up saying, oh, send us a blood spot or send us a blood sample and we’ll measure UNAD levels, but I haven’t found a single one yet that can explain to me how they’ve got around this stability issue and how they stabilize the NAD to get an accurate read.

And by the time it’s being shipped off to wherever the lab is, certainly when we do any clinical trials, all the participants have to come into the facility, wherever the trial’s being run, the blood gets taken and it literally gets processed and frozen immediately. And that’s how quick it has to happen. In terms of CD 38, again, it’s measured in the lab. It’s a fairly tricky procedure to measure it. It’s possible to measure it, but it’s not something you can go to your doctor and ask for biological age much easier to measure. And this is something that we often promote is more of a surrogate marker because as we’ve explained at the start, if your NAD levels are low, if you’ve got chronic inflammation, any of these things will drive up your biological age and they’ll make it higher than what it should be, higher than your chronological age.

So you know that if your biological age ages off, then you really need to be looking at addressing some of these root causes of aging. Now, there are multiple ways that you can measure biological age. I guess the two most popular ones are, first of all, one which looks at your epigenetic age. So this is the idea that basically every cell in our body has a set of genes. It has an identical set of genes, but only some of the genes are switched on and off. And that is why the eye cell becomes an eye cell. And a skin cell is a skin cell, even though there’s an identical set of genes at epigenetics is the pattern of genes that is played in each cell now, as well as that critical process to make cells different. If you were to look at a skin cell from somebody who’s age 20 in a skin cell from somebody who is aged 80, they will also, although they’re both skin cells, they will also have a very different pattern of genes switched on and off.

And we call this epigenetic drift. And it seems that what happens is that throughout the course of our lifetime, a pattern of genes that switched on in our cells changes or it drifts and it goes from this sort of healthy pattern of gene expression that’s got all the good stuff switched on, all the sirtuins and all the repair towards a pattern of gene expression that’s actually not so healthy where repairs turned down and inflammation’s cranked up. And you can actually see this. So you can take a sample of cells or blood and you can literally look at the pattern of genes that switched on and use this to predict the biological age of the person. So that’s how epigenetic biological age testing works. The other one is something called glycan age testing. And this works in a similar way, but it’s a little bit more focused on the inflammatory side of the agent.

And what it does is it looks at the pattern of sugar molecules on your immune cells. So if you were to look at your immune cells under a microscope, you’d see they have lots of little sugar chains, like little wiggly things coming off them. And again, in a young person, they will have a very specific pattern. But as you get older, the pattern changes. So again, you can look at these patterns of glycan expression and use that to predict biological age. And the biological age is a very critical marker of not only cellular health, but your future health. The words your biological age is, or the discrepancy between your chronological age and biological age, the more likely it is that you will age badly and you will have poorer health outcomes in the future.

Lorne Brown 

And there’s that inflammaging accelerated biological aging leading to premature degenerative diseases.

Nichola Conlon

 

Exactly that, yeah.

 

Lorne Brown 

And then your research.

Nichola Conlon 

Yes. So our research, so what we wanted to do was in our clinical trial, the first thing we obviously wanted to measure was NAD. We wanted to show that the product boosts NAD, which it does. We see that after just seven days, we start to see an increase in NAD levels, which continues to rise. But equally, we also are like this is a consumer product. We want people themselves to be able to see that it’s working. So what can we test that is also something that is accessible to consumers. And the obvious thing here is biological age. So we actually had all of the participants do a biological age test, and we for this particular trial, used the Glycan age method of biological age testing. And we found that in just 28 days, we saw an average reduction in biological age of 1.26 years. So this shows that increase in NAD is actually having the desired effect of reversing biological age.

Lorne Brown 

In one month, you brought it back over a year, that’s return.

Nichola Conlon 

And that was on average across all the participants as well. The other things we looked at were levels of the sirtuins. So we saw an increase in the sirtuins. We also looked at inflammation. Your question earlier about would this product be driving inflammation? Well, we actually looked at a panel of inflammatory cytokines and we actually saw a reduction in inflammation again in just 28 days. So this makes us confident that the product having this whole systems approach is doing exactly what it is intended to do. That it’s increasing NAD and it’s powering the beneficial things which are reversed in biological age and also reducing inflammation rather than driving inflammation.

Lorne Brown 

I like this. All right. I am glad I’ve ordered this for myself. Oh, I’m going to put it out there, I didn’t say that at the beginning, but your team, because you’re on the podcast, offered us a coupon for those that want to use the Nuchido time plus supplement. And now people are going to learn how to spell my name. Lorne. Lorne20 L-O-R-N-E. 20. We’ll give you a discount back to science. So as we’re starting to get ready for my colleague, Dr. Kaylee’s, questions for you. I wanted to just review quickly. You often share so many benefits when you have an increase in NAD, and I think you have your top five that I wanted to quickly share and just again, show alignment here. So you talked about the increase in energy production, which we know is important in mitochondrial function, cellular repair.

I mean, if we’re not repairing, we’re breaking down, right? There’s degenerative diseases. Then you talk about improved sleep, regulation, circadian rhythm, brain function, who we all want that, and hair, skin, and nails. The reason I wanted to say when I saw this was so interesting for those that are going that see a Chinese medicine doctor for any hormonal issue, especially when it comes to fertility or perimenopausal, menopausal issues, we always ask about your skin, hair and nails, skin, hair and nails, always ask about it. And we always ask about your sleep. It gives us a sense of what we call shui or translates into blood in Chinese medicine, but it’s not blood like western blood. It incorporates that. But this substance that nourishes the hair, skin, nails that allows you to sleep at night is also what goes and nourishes the cells, including the eggs and the ovaries. So if you have a lot of dry skin or really inflamed skin or your nails break and flake easily have spots, your hair’s, grain thinning, that’s us looking at the branches of a tree to understand what’s going on with the roots.

Lorne Brown 

And so I thought it was interesting when you talked about how this is what it can do. We’re always looking to see if we have issues? And we also look at issues in gut health where the body’s going to take everything and feed the cells, right? So I just thought that it was quite interesting to see five ways that NAD is helpful.

Nichola Conlon 

And always when we talk about the benefits of NAD, not just with our product and the feedback that we get from customers, but also just in general, if you look at all the research out there about the benefits of NAD that is being done, it seems to help with such a diverse range of things that you almost feel like a bit of a fraud when someone’s going, oh, well can it help with this? And you’re like, yeah, it can actually, well, how does it help with this? You’re like, yeah, it helps with that too. But actually physiologically, when you look at what NAD is doing in the body, it’s in every cell. It’s involved in 300 different pathways. It’s so involved in critical processes that it’s not surprising that it has such a big impact both positively and negatively as it goes up or down. So yeah

Lorne Brown 

Because giving the body what it needs, we say in Chinese medicine, nourish the soil before you plant the seed. And we look at the soil as if you have a plant that looks a little withered and brown and ready for compost, but instead you water it, add some fertilizer and pull out some weeds, and the plant regains its figure and gives off fruits and flowers. Well, the plant always had the potential to give off fruits and flowers, but because the soil was suboptimal, the plant couldn’t reach its potential. So we say the egg cell, any cell has the potential, but if the environment is poor, it can’t reach its potential. And so that’s what you’re sharing here on a cell, your health, if you fix the soil, our metaphor here, soil is the cell, your environment, and the plant is the cell. And it’s the same reason from your background. When you worked in the drug company, I remember once a medical doctor was dismissed, I was talking about essential fatty acids and we’re listening to all the things it treats in quotations. And he says, that’s ridiculous. How can this thing treat everything? And I realized he was thinking, looking at it as a drug, and I said, well, it’s in the name essential, essential fatty acid. If your body does not have it, then the cell breaks down because it doesn’t have it. And then depending on where your weakness is, it can show up in so many areas of your health because it’s not treating the disease the branch, it’s treating the root. It’s deficient in the essential fatty acid that your cell membranes, everything needs to function. And if that’s not there, the body breaks down and it can show up differently for different people. And that’s why it treats all these things is because I see, and that’s the same thing with your N ad. Why does it work for everything? So many things. Well, it’s working on a cellular level, and if the cell doesn’t have the ability to function and perform, then things break down and then we develop disease.

Nichola Conlon 

Absolutely that, and you’re so right in that it kind of shows up almost where that person needs it. I think the top things that are probably most commonly reported are an improvement in energy and brain fog. And the groups of people that we get that reported back from are essentially the perimenopausal and menopausal women because they are the people that are actively suffering with mitochondrial dysfunction and lack of energy and brain fog. So that when you are addressing that issue in some way, it’s like the light’s being switched back on. And my goodness, I really noticed a difference. Other people, it’s way more subtle. Maybe they can’t notice a massive change in something, but for them it’s usually after a couple of months where they go, my goodness, do you know what my nails are, they are so strong and they’re growing so much, or my hair is suddenly in my skin. And that for a lot of people is going, right, if it’s doing this on the outside and it must be doing something good on the inside.

Lorne Brown 

So to just repeat that, it improved cellular energy. NAD, we’re not talking the supplement, we’re talking about increasing NAD levels, which is what your supplement is doing to increase NAD levels, improve cellular energy levels, restore muscle function, improve cognitive function, repair of DNA damage, improve insulin sensitivity, which is important in these days for all of us in improved cardiovascular function. So all that seems to be quite beneficial. And not to remind people, you’d said it’s not that you’re taking NAD with your supplement, you’re helping with the recycling. And there’s many ways to cause NAD levels to drop, and there’s many ways to increase it. And you have shared in the research you’ve shared with me and things I’ve got to listen to from you. Diet’s important. So we’re just reminding everybody. You got to do diet, fasting, exercise, stress reduction, these things are all really important in our practice, we use low level laser therapy to support mitochondrial function, acupuncture, herbs, coenzyme Q 10 seems to have a similar antioxidant idea with the NAD because it’s also important with the mitochondria health.

So there’s lots of things that we can do. Glutathione is interesting because of the IVs, and again, our naturopathic doctors, we don’t do the pill form of glutathione. We don’t find it bioavailable. We can’t get that absorption. Even intramuscular they haven’t been as happy with. So they put it with the IV, not in the bag, but they do squirt it in the line at some point at the beginning of the IV therapy. Alright, let’s go to some of the questions that we had here. Rapid fire, and we might’ve talked about all this. This was about six weeks ago. I said, I’m going to be talking. She’s the one that introduced me to your work. I keep saying, I keep getting asked about NAD as in being the clinical director, when are we going to bring NAD IVs  into the clinic? And every time we have our team meeting, they’re like, we don’t see the research is there.

It’s really expensive. It can be dangerous, there can be severe side effects. They’re in the treatment room for four hours and we don’t know if it works. And so we don’t want to do it because of the recycling issue. And then patients are getting NR and we’re like, should we carry that product? They’re like, we don’t know if it’s going to do what we need to do. When patients ask for it often they’ll say, fine. We’ll tell them where to get it. But we haven’t been excited about it. They have been telling people to go to your site to order directly from you. So here are her questions. I haven’t looked at this for six weeks

Nichola Conlon 

 

Go for it.

 

Lorne Brown

Has Nichola observed a reduction in side effects from IV and NAD in patients taking Nuchido time plus?

Nichola Conlon 

Yes. So anecdotal evidence, and this is something we perhaps maybe want to do a trial with clinics doing IVs, is it seems like there is a reduction in side effects. The theory behind this is that if any of that NAD is getting in there by whatever mechanism, whether it’s broken down and absorbed or whatever, at least you are giving the cell the capacity to accept it because you have got the recycling pathway turned on. And also more importantly, you’ve turned down inflammation. So any of that NAD going into the body is not actually driving inflammation. So that’s the theory behind it. And actually that evidence that I saw at that recent conference, which shows that this NAD in the blood is kind of acknowledged by the body as an inflammatory response, and it kind of would make sense because if you’re turning down inflammation, then the body’s not panicking as much when all this NAD suddenly put in it. So anecdotally, yes,

Lorne Brown 

How well does your Nuchido time plus supplement raise NAD levels in comparison to NR or NMN alone?

Nichola Conlon 

So we’ve never done a direct comparison study where we’ve put it in as a control, but what I would say is that we know that it does increase NAD levels, but more importantly, we know and we have the evidence from our trial that it does this by actually switching back on your natural body’s mechanism to make it so you’re like restoring your cells function to make its NAD like it did when it was younger. So we never do a direct comparison because it’s a very different mechanism by what it’s working

Lorne Brown 

Do side effects of NAD therapies, either IV NAD or oral use of NR NMN, indicate a problem with the recycling pathway.

Nichola Conlon 

I think for NAD IVs, it’s probably not, the side effect is not an effect of the recycling pathway, but more of an effect that you’ve put such a huge amount of something into the blood that is not normally there. So the body suddenly is like, oh my goodness, why is all this NAD in the blood? It shouldn’t be here. We need to rapidly switch on metabolism and break down to try and get rid of it, which is why people get the sickness, the nausea, the tightness in the chest, it’s the body reacting and trying to get rid of it. So IVs, I think that is the case for NR and NMNI think actually, yes, the side effects are because you are not getting the recycling, and again, you fill in the factory with all this raw material that it can’t actually do anything with. So in the case of the precursors, I think yes, it is because you’re not actually addressing the issue.

Lorne Brown

 

So what do you think, because many have shared when they’ve done the IV NAD therapy, that it is uncomfortable. What would be causing that?

 

Nichola Conlon 

The breakdown. So we know it’s getting broken down and its precursors, it’s getting turned into methyl nicotinamide, it’s getting broken down, adenosine, all of these different compounds that actually have a physiological effect on the body. One of the only places in the body that can absorb colon NAD, it’s neurons, which is why we do think some people get a neurological benefit from it. And also the heart, and this could be why people experience heart palpitations and suddenly their hearts get really stimulated and often why people have to really slow it down. So that could be why we get some of those effects. So I mean, for me, I just think there’s so many clinics doing these IVs that it would be fairly easy to do a clinical trial to test if it’s actually working. So my big question is why has nobody done the trial? It would kind of put it to bed.

Lorne Brown 

That takes effort, time and money sometimes to do those. For clinicians, not researchers. They need somebody to organize that. So that’s the call out to, Hey, let’s do that. Right, they are doing it.

Nichola Conlon 

Yeah. And that’s it for us, a big part of my ethics was that, yeah, we’re a supplement company. We don’t need to do any clinical trials by law. We don’t need to prove it works, but we did. It costs money and we did it because we want to be ethical and prove it does what we say it does. But for IVs, people are already sat there hooked up for blood, so take a bit of blood, some

Lorne Brown 

Take some blood and look at it

Nichola Conlon 

Measure it.

Lorne Brown 

Do we have any evidence that raising NAD levels improve egg and sperm quality or enhanced fertility outcomes? Or is it just theoretical at this point in time?

Nichola Conlon 

No, there is evidence. So the evidence is more skewed towards animal studies. There are a few human studies that are emerging now, but what we do know is that NAD levels are correlated with fertility outcomes and also USY quality, and that we know that fertility outcomes reduce. NAD goes down. We know that the ovarian aging increases as NAD goes down. So all of these things have been shown, and it’s been shown that if you increase NAD levels and also interestingly inhibit CD 38, it actually improves ovarian function in the quality of the eggs.

Lorne Brown 

So theoretically that makes sense. If you’re going to improve mitochondrial function, which NAD does, then you would have better egg quality and lower ovarian aging. And if you can reduce chronic systemic inflammation, that also slows down that biological aging. And you just shared the theory you shared, there’s some evidence in animal studies and some coming out or in human studies. Thanks for that.

Nichola Conlon 

Yeah.

Lorne Brown 

Do you have any thoughts on NAD patches? Do you think they could be effective at raising NAD levels if they’re less likely to cause side effects and if your product would work well together with them?

Nichola Conlon

I have seen no evidence that any of these NAD patches work. Again, this is our skin, like our cell membrane is a barrier. It’s even more of a barrier than a cell barrier to get things through. So actually absorption is a real, real issue. And again, I just haven’t seen, despite all the products sort of coming out, any evidence that by putting this on a patch, whether that’s some of the people are just sticking the patches on, some are having an electrophoresis type to force it through. I haven’t seen the evidence to show that this is actually getting into a cell, into a skin cell, getting into the body where it is needed to work.

Lorne Brown 

And my understanding is your supplement is vegan and gluten-free. Perfect. And people would take six capsules. So six capsules, so three times, three capsules, twice a day. And I think the directions I saw were taken six hours apart.

Nichola Conlon 

Yeah. Well, we recommend taking the capsules with food. So not on an empty stomach. You can take all the capsules in one go. Yeah. We may be trying to work on a version that isn’t as many capsules, watch this face.

Lorne Brown 

Oh, come on everybody, you know I get that people taking so many capsules, we’re making a baby here we live back. For me, you tell me it takes six capsules and my skin will be this way and I can be clear the person that won’t take six capsules also may be the person that won’t go to the gym and won’t change their diet and all that. So yeah, if you tell me I could take six capsules after all the research and work that you’ve done, and all I have to do is swallow three pills twice a day, holy. But anyways, you’re right. People do complain about that. And I get it. Eat your meals. And you know what the issue is though? I am joking. Half joking is as practitioners, I’m guilty of this. We prescribe so many things. There’s six pills of yours, but they’re on a, I get the luggage that comes in of supplements and there’s a lot of supplements. So they are taking a lot, and I’m guilty of it. Sometimes I’ve asked somebody, bring in your supplements, they just want to review everything again. And then they’ve brought it in and I’m like, I prescribed all that. Holy crap. Right? I’m so sorry. Right. We prescribe, prescribe, but I sometimes say, okay, let’s get rid of this one now let’s do this or that. So I guess my point is don’t reduce the effectiveness of your product so people can take it easier. 

Nichola Conlon 

We would definitely not do that. For me, it’s all about the evidence. So anything we do gets trials to make sure it actually does what we say it does, which is important, especially in women’s space.

Lorne Brown 

I want to go into the perimenopause population, and to be honest, a lot of my patients are trying to conceive that at 43, 44, they’re also in that perimenopause where their hormones are starting to shift. Estrogen can start to fluctuate a lot, even decline, progesterone can decline. You’ve talked a bit about this in some of the literature that you shared with me, and I just thought I’d like to know NA’s role and maybe why are these people experiencing the brain fog, some of this inflammation, maybe what the role estrogen progesterone has and then why NAD can be supportive.

Nichola Conlon 

Yeah, absolutely. So I think the issue that we have is that so many people think of these hormones as purely sex hormones. So they think that it’s only regulating our fertility and it’s only regulating our sex organs. But actually things like estrogen especially are not, they are so critically important in cellular function and cellular health. If we look across the cells in our body, they have little receptors for estrogen. So they’re literally sitting there. A receptor is like when the estrogen binds, the receptor switched on and it sets off various different reactions or cellular pathways. And we know that a lot of cells in our body are dependent upon estrogen. And one of the main cellular functions that’s dependent on estrogen is actually a mitochondrial function. So if we’re to look at the surface of our mitochondria, what we see is that they’re actually covered in estrogen receptors and this estrogen stimulation is required for them to function efficiently.

So all of a sudden we hit perimenopause and it starts to go down, hit full menopause, and it’s plummeting. And all of a sudden you’ve got all of these estrogen receptors sitting there going, where’s my estrogen? And then all of these critical pathways that aren’t getting switched on. And we see our energy production really reduce, and this not only manifests as physical energy, but in particular as brain fog because our brains are critically dependent on energy to function. So we’ve got around 86 billion neurons in our brain. Every neuron has about 2 million mitochondria, and I don’t even know how many estrogen receptors each of those mitochondria have, but that is an awful lot of estrogen receptors that suddenly are not getting activated. As a result, the mitochondrial function in our brain declines. The energy production is reduced. It’s estimated that during menopause, a woman’s capacity for energy production in the brain declines by 25%.

So that’s literally 25% of our brain functions just suddenly being switched off over a very short course of time. Why? And that is why we really suddenly feel that brain fog, and it can be very alarming. So the link here with NAD is that NAD is important in men and women, but in women, not only do we have this point where NAD is plummeting, but also we’ve got our hormones plummet in and they’re both impacting mitochondrial function. So you’ve got this perfect storm for cellular energy chaos, so men only have to deal with half of it, but women have got this other side that’s also impacting it, which is why we seem to get those real issues with energy, with brain fog. So what we see is that even in people that aren’t doing any hormone replacement therapy but are simply just taking measures to boost their ND levels, you’re actually addressing half of the issue. So you’re fixing half of the energy problem. So you do see a real improvement in brain fog, and that is by far one of the most commonly reported benefits of people out of boost in NAD women that say, oh my goodness, my brain fog has just disappeared. I can’t believe that something can have such an impact.

Lorne Brown 

You’ve been awesome. You are awesome. This is Dr. Nichola Conlon, and I want you to know that you can find her product at Nuchido.com. That’s N-U-C-H-I-D-O.com. It’s in our show notes, and also they’ve offered 20% off your first order. So thank you to our podcast listeners, and that coupon code is Lorne20, and my name is spelled Lorne, L-O-R-N-E, and it’s Lorne20. Thank you, Nichola.

Nichola Conlon 

Thank you so much. That was great.

Lorne Brown 

I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Nichola. And a quick summary. So our goal is to improve cellular health, improve mitochondrial function, and raise NAD levels is a way to do that. And I wanted to emphasize diet so you can download, we have the Acubalance, fertility diet, and the longevity diet on Acubalance for free, or contact us if you can’t find it. It’s an anti-inflammatory, low glycemic index diet, which she shares that is beneficial for raising NAD. There is low level laser therapy and acupuncture and other supplements. There is exercise movement. There’s stress reductions through our conscious work. So there’s lots of things that you can also do to support your NAD levels. So I want to remind you of that. And then she talked about her Nuchido plus supplement, which helps with the recycling. And then I think the precursors that some people are taking, talk to your practitioner if you’re going to continue or add it back.

And I’ve heard her talk before that maybe do her product with that. So you have the recycling going. So as you’re not getting the jamming up of the pathway with just the precursor, right? Just as her analogy was, adding the raw materials without fixing the machinery. So I think my style will be, once I have our team meeting with our naturopathic doctors, the Nuchido Plus would be the idea to do that for at least a month and get those and changing diet, changing lifestyle, get that pathway working before we would add any precursors to it and maybe not need any precursors that she shared about. Wishing all the best.

Speaker 3 

If you’re looking for support to grow your family, contact Acubalance Wellness Center at Acubalance. They help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach using low level laser therapy, fertility, acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the Acubalance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to Acubalance.ca. That’s acubalance.ca.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lorne Brown official. That’s Instagram, Lorne Brown official, or you can visit my websites, Lornebrown.com and Acubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.