How unhealthy habits can hit your NAD+? And one tip to overcome its effects on your health

NAD+ is a vital biochemical for cellular health. Without it you simply cannot live. With reduced quantities of it in your cells, they are more prone to ageing, more exposed to toxins, more likely to die off, more likely to turn cancerous. NAD+ naturally drops off as we get older, but there are things we do in our everyday lives that accelerate this decline. Unhealthy habits make for unhealthy cells, and, in turn, an unhealthy body.

Stress, from top to bottom

We tend to think that stress arrives from the outside, from our work, or from our personal relations. However, stress doesn’t just go skin-deep. It affects all the organs of our bodies, right down to the biochemical balance of our cells.

Stress evolved as a response to dangerous situations, and forms part of our “fight-or-flight” mechanism. In human evolution, those humans that were able to suddenly muster extra energy to either fight a bear, or flee the scene, lived to tell the tale, and to reproduce and pass on their genetics. The problem is that, in modern life, many sources of stress are constant, and not episodic.

Therefore, while evolution has prepared us to deal with sudden dangers, and temporary biochemical imbalances that give us an advantage in a fight, we are not biologically prepared for chronic stress. Or constant biochemical imbalance in our cells.

A biochemical imbalance in a cell can allow the cell to work harder and faster. Though the process creates toxins and by-products. Luckily, NAD+ and its cohort of enzymes are there to clean up the mess. In doing so they become out of kilter and depleted. Indeed, the balance of NAD+ to its cousins NADH, NADP and NADPH is tipped in favor of its cousins. And the cycle of salvaging NAD+ is broken.

In turn, a lower ratio of NAD+ leads to oxidative and toxic stress that can interfere with mitochondrial function, damage DNA, or kill the cell. Over the long-term, such damage can lead to the development of any number of pathologies, from accelerated ageing to cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes, and organ failure.

Yes, you are what you eat, and drink

Just as above, NAD+ and its enzymes have got your back when you eat or drink something you shouldn’t, or rather too much of something. They are there to remove toxins, oxidative stress, deal with bad lipids, and overabundance of glucose.

However, once again, on a rather temporary basis. One hot-dog, dalgona coffee or whisky shot, every now and again, certainly isn’t going to kill you. But having a regularly bad diet causes regular cellular stress, as enzymes struggle to keep up with the constant demand for action.

Also, if you don’t get enough B vitamins, B3 in particular, the body doesn’t have anything to make NAD+ with, since these are the building blocks of new NAD+ and other coenzymes, and there’s a limit to how much and for how long NAD+ can be recycled.

The right balance of exercise

Not exercising enough has a general effect on overall health. Through underuse of the heart and lungs, the transport system of the entire body is undermined. The heart, lungs and blood vessels become smaller and weaker, and gradually less blood, with less oxygen, is less easily pumped around the body. Then, the blood starts dropping deliveries of all the biochemicals cells need to work, and fails to whisk away those they don’t need any more.

However, it is not only a question of heart and lungs. Less muscle mass leads to a lower metabolic rate, and less need for the metabolic interactions of enzymes and cofactors, such as NAD+, which gradually diminishes. As cells do less work, there is less NAD+ there to clean up toxins and stress factors, such as reactive oxygen species. And more glucose flows around the blood, potentially leading to diabetes and other problems in organs such as the liver and pancreas.

Avoiding stress isn’t always easy, but supplementing is

Mental and emotional stress, malnutrition, inadequate sleep, and too little or even too much exercise puts too much stress on the metabolic and enzymatic reactions going on in our cells, depleting NAD+ and related cell-protecting enzymes.

If this occurs occasionally, no problem, the body recovers. It’s designed that way. Just don’t make a (bad) habit of it. It’s not designed to cope chronically, or rather constantly, with poor lifestyle. In the end, the way to maintain high levels of NAD+, as we age, is a little of what we all already know about living better and more healthily.

But avoiding stress nowadays isn’t always easy. And as we know NAD+ levels decrease after only 25. So, if healthy habits are a must-go, NAD-boosting is one of the most promising avenues of scientific research into lengthening human health span.

From the latest studies, NMN appears to be the best way to supplement and boost NAD+. At the Eleven Eleven Wellness Center, we recommend Elevant. This brand has come up with a very special form of NMN, which it has called NMN-C®. Well, inactual fact, NMN-C is totally indistinguishable from natural NMN. The C is there to denotethe sophisticated series of processes, like no other, that Elevant has developed in order toguarantee an extremely high degree of quality, purity andstandardization to strictpharmaceutical-grade requirements.