Volume 15, Number 2	July 15, 2025

Dietary Supplementation with NR
for the Post-aging Diet: Part 3

Nicotinamide riboside (NR) intake at 1,000 milligrams (mg) per day for six weeks has been accompanied by significant health improvements and no discernible negative side effects in Helen and myself. The most recent in-house measurements of NAD+ levels in our blood plasma failed to show significant increase toward more youthful NAD+ levels. These observations have now prompted an increase in daily intake from 1,000 to 1,500 mg NR.

Table 1 shows the NR supplementation regimen Helen and I have followed to the present time.

Table 1: Daily NR intake.

We take pure NR daily in its chloride form (NR-Cl) with no additives. When we started supplementing, we used commercial capsules, but we switched fairly early on to using bulk, powdered NR. This I dissolve, 50 grams at a time, in 68 ml of distilled water to which has been added 680 microliters of 1 mole per liter HCl (as a preservative) and store in a dropper bottle in the refrigerator. Initially, at lower daily intakes, I was counting drops into ice water (to slow decomposition) for our daily intake. It is now, at the higher daily intakes, easier to weigh the drops into the ice water. This is done at breakfast. Helen tends to drink her whole daily intake at breakfast. I use an insulated water container which I drink from as I am thirsty throughout the morning. It is usually empty by lunch time. This concoction doesn't taste very good.

Health Effects

Both Helen and I feel that the trend has been toward improved health since beginning supplementation with NR. So far, we have not noticed any negative side effects from NR supplementation.

After increasing our daily intake to 1,000 mg NR, we both began to notice specific health improvements. We both felt that we had more endurance, enabling us successfully to take on big tasks under adverse conditions. In addition, for Helen, the most significant change was a new feeling of peacefulness. For me, the most significant change was an undeniable return to a more youthful sexual potency. Increasing loss of sexual potency is a frustrating reality accompanying the aging experience of many men. Improvement in this area seems especially significant for the objective assessment of the efficacy of NR supplementation in post-aging diets because of the autonomic nature of sexual potency.

NAD+ Measurements

The increased daily intake from 500 to 1,000 mg NR for six weeks did not significantly increase our blood plasma NAD+ levels. Figure 1 shows all five of the in-house measurements made on Helen and myself since we began supplementing with NR at the end of November last year. Three measurements were made during the 1,000-mg-per-day interval: two on me and one on Helen.

Figure 1: In-house measurements of NAD+ concentration in blood plasma from Helen (pink data points) and myself (blue data points). The heavy black line represents normal NAD+ levels versus age for individuals supplementing their diets with neither NR nor Dr. Aardsma's Anti-Aging Vitamins. It is the same black trend line as was shown last issue in Figure 1. The vertical bars shown with the data points are not error bars. They show relative (unfiltered) background to isotope standard signal ratios for the individual LC-MS-MS measurements, arbitrarily normalized to fit the graph. Data points having large background to signal ratios are much less certain than measurements with small background to signal ratios. This source of uncertainty is not the only one present with these measurements, which result from a multi-step protocol having numerous opportunities for things to go wrong, but this ratio seems the best indicator of the quality of the overall measurement at this stage. For the final (pink) data point, the bars extend from -2.3 to 6.5.

The first new measurement on me was made two weeks after I began taking 1,000 mg NR per day. It came out at 1.1, the same as my previous measurement.

Helen's 2.1 measurement was taken another two weeks later. Unfortunately, this measurement turned out to be highly uncertain, making it of limited value for the present purpose. The poor quality of this measurement resulted from high ambient lab temperature (85°F) due to an air conditioning failure during a heat wave. This significantly increased the background to signal ratio in the MS-MS mass spectrometer. However, a return to youthful NAD+ levels would have yielded a result near 4 on the Y axis of the graph, and it seems likely that this would have shown up if it had been the case, even under the adverse experimental conditions which pertained for that particular measurement.

The final measurement on me (1.4) may indicate some increase, but it is clearly substantially below youthful levels near 4.

Conclusion

NR-Cl supplementation at 1,000 mg per day for six weeks seems to have produced significant health improvements, but it has failed to restore youthful blood plasma levels of NAD+. According to present theory, this indicates that at least some cells of the body are benefiting from NR supplementation, but the NAD+ body reservoir has not yet been fully replenished. We have now increased our daily NR intake to 1,500 mg. The goal is to obtain full replenishment of NAD+, as indicated by blood plasma levels near 4. ◇

The Biblical Chronologist is written and edited by Gerald E. Aardsma, a Ph.D. scientist (nuclear physics) with special background in radioisotopic dating methods such as radiocarbon. The Biblical Chronologist has a fourfold purpose: to encourage, enrich, and strengthen the faith of conservative Christians through instruction in biblical chronology and its many implications, to foster informed, up-to-date, scholarly research in this vital field, to communicate current developments and discoveries stemming from biblical chronology in an easily understood manner, and to advance the growth of knowledge via a proper integration of ancient biblical and modern scientific data and principles. The Biblical Chronologist (ISSN 1081-762X) is published by: Aardsma Research & Publishing 301 E. Jefferson St. Loda, IL 60948 Web address: www.biblicalchronologist.org. Copyright © 2025 by Aardsma Research & Publishing.