CD38 Inhibitors can boost NAD+ levels and help you to look and feel younger longer.
Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide (NAD+) is a coenzyme essential for life. Next to water, NAD is the most abundant molecule in the body. NAD+ facilitates all of the processes that allow your cells to produce the energy you need to survive. Without NAD+, you would quickly die. In fact, modern aging research has discovered that the level of NAD+ in your body steadily decreases as you age. By the time we are 50 years old, for most of us, our NAD+ levels are about half of what they were when we were 20.
CD38, more specifically, NAD+ nucleosidase (NADase), is an enzyme that breaks down NAD+. It is the presence of this enzyme that causes the depletion of NAD+ that is linked to systemic inflammation and aging. Not only does CD38 reduce NAD+ levels, but too much CD38 can cause chronic inflammation, and a vicious circle occurs because too much inflammation triggers more CD38.
Dr. Michael Lustgarten, Ph.D., is a research scientist with the Nutrition, Exercise Physiology, and Sarcopenia (NEPS) Team at the HNRCA. His research currently focuses on the role of the gut microbiome and serum metabolome on muscle mass and function in older adults.
Dr. Lustgarten recently posted a very interesting and informative YouTube video that discusses how naturally occurring CD38 Inhibitors in certain foods can help to slow NAD+ loss. It also suggests that supplements that contain CD38 inhibitors can be very helpful in reducing your “biological age.”
In the video, Lustgarten says, “CD38 inhibitors, including apigenin, quercetin, luteolin kuromanin, and others can inhibit CD38, raise NAD or slow the age-related decline for NAD. Now note that one doesn’t have to only supplement with these inhibitors to potentially gain this effect. These metabolites are found in food. And with that in mind, by eating an abundance of foods that contain CD38 inhibitors, can you maximize NAD levels and thereby keep looking and feeling youthful for longer?”
After a detailed explanation and analysis of his methodologies based on his own dietary consumption of foods rich in these four critical CD38 inhibitors and regular blood testing for biomarkers of biological aging, Lustgarten concludes that it is unlikely that you could get enough of these inhibitors in food alone to seriously reduce biological age.
He draws that conclusion on the fact that in sum total, he eats nearly 400 mg of these CD38 inhibitors per day, and that was not enough to “impact biomarker-based metrics of biological age. There were some potential effects on its component biomarkers, such as a reduction in serum glucose, but those weren’t enough to impact the overall biological age score.”
However, that is not to say that these plant flavonoids – apigenin, quercetin, luteolin kuromanin, and others – do not have powerful anti-inflammatory and antioxidative properties that can lower biological age. They do. Lustgarten’s research only reinforces the case for supplementation with dietary supplements that contain these and other NAD+ boosters since he has clearly shown that even eating large daily amounts of foods that contain them is not enough to really leverage their antiaging effects.
Anyone who is committed to an “antiaging lifestyle” should add supplements containing flavonoids such as apigenin, quercetin, luteolin, and kuromanin to their health and fitness routine. Such supplementation will only enhance the benefits you get from working out and eating right.
If you are already eating a healthy diet and exercising to stay young and strong, flavonoid-rich dietary supplements can help you get the most out of working out and eating right.
