[reducesuffering]

They're recommending Nicotinamide Riboside which has been implicated in increasing cancers.

My heuristics researching supplements, nootropics, longevity, are that the lab-created substances are more often than not, new and poorly studied, leading to eventual realization of more harm than they treat. Most recent, to me, was Alpha-GPC causing strokes.

[xk_id]

That’s not very accurate. It wasn’t implicated in actually causing cancers. Tumour cells happen to have a high demand for NAD+, and NR provides them with that. So, if you already have tumours, NR will accelerate their growth. However also if you have had cancer recently and even if there are no more detectable signs, it is still possible for some tumour cells to be present; in that case NR is also risky. But if you are healthy, NR is not a carcinogen and any risk of stimulating the odd tumour cell is probably offset by the benefits NR provides to the immune system.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

I think you're assuming the body doesn't form small tumors and destroy them naturally.

If something else is helping the tumors grow faster than the body can kill them naturally - then it's going to result both more severe tumors AND more tumors in general (as we discover them, since we usually don't know about tumors that form and get destroyed by the body naturally).

[xk_id]

Covered in the last sentence.

[tysam_and]

This is an excellent direct summarization of NR<->Cancer. Thank you for sharing this, I greatly appreciate it. <3 :)

Not everyone needs NR necessarily (or any of the other forms), but it does seem to get more important as we get older and our ability to manufacture NMN goes down (IIRC that's the main target that's limited here?)

[thewataccount]

IIRC isn't NAC similar? It's not carcinogenic itself, but the benefits it provides also extend to the cancer cells?

[garganzol]

NAC is a glutathione precursor. It is both anti- and pro- cancer. It is anti-cancer in a sense that glutathione reduces the risk of getting cancer in the first place. It is pro-cancer in a sense that it reduces the power of immune response due to reduction of the amount of produced ROS, which may theoretically lead to a faster cancer spread.

So yeah, they both are kind of similar in that dimension.

[tysam_and]

I can't speak either way on the cancer effects, but fun fact to all reading, NAC is a great glutamate mop because glutathione is made of 3 amino acids, IIRC, and glutamate is one of them. NAC is literally just glutathione without the glutamate, and it crosses the BBB and such more easily too, I believe?

In any case, it grabs onto free glutamate, and, whammo! less glutamate, instant glutathione. quite the nifty trick.

has some interesting data/studies backing it up, and also has some great psychiatric effects as well. IIRC it's used for schizophrenia among other things.

[tysam_and]

Like all things, it's about balance. In this case, NR was recommended as a cheaper alternative to NMN, I believe, though one can take Nicotinamide and Ribose separately IIRC (ribose is expensive either way, lol. Tastes great though, a very, very fancy sugar indeed).

As far as cancer goes, basically half of the solutions here will cause cancer. That doesn't mean they're bad. Anything involving the body is extraordinarily nonlinear, so extrapolation is extremely hard in a variety of circumstances. You can find a study involving almost everything you consume and take linking it to a variety of things, it's just whether or not it's relevant to people in the doses and in the duration that they take them.

Especially on the cancer side of things, that's just a very delicate matter to be handled. Cleaning things up in theory should reduce the risk of cancer overall, even if ingredients on their own at some dose could cause issues.

A lot of these compounds have been around for or have been studied for 40-50 years or so. Some of the long-term effects are harder to pinpoint, but I'd be careful in seeking too much caution (in the same way I'd encourage someone not to go headlong throwing stuff into their bodies for no good reason). It's really easy to find nonlinear red lights for almost anything in medicine, in my (albeit limited) personal experience.

[reducesuffering]

I think most people would agree that taking carcinogens will more likely reduce your lifespan than the possibility of significantly extending it.

For now, I'd rather bet on very clean air, very clean water, fasting, organic vegetables, green tea, omega 3 fish oil, well monitored sleep, and lots of exercise for longevity.

[tysam_and]

That does feel like an overly simplistic argument. Once again, lots and lots of things feed cancer, it's not as simple as that. There's also a big 'might' clause, which means it's something that's going to take time to understand. For example, IIRC, the role that NR might play in cancers is that it's a very accessible food source for them. However, compared to other factors, this might fade into the woodwork, especially if for example it's used as part of a protocol that lowers the chance of cancer (or at the very least, all-cause mortality) longer term. Ideally, at least.

Maybe an analogy to communicate the concept is that it is like putting a car up on jacks and taking out parts to repair another part. It's possible that it is not where you are long-term, or ideal to do extremely frequently, but it's important to keep the thing maintained and running.

That said, I agree very much on your last sentence as one of the best "simple" routines to get bang for the buck. My thoughts would be weight lifting specifically, chamomile tea at night (apigenin is something else), as well as some broccoli sprouts for NRF2 in there. Other than that I think that's probably the index fund-like strategy to longevity, so we're definitely on the same page there. :D :thumbsup:

[analognoise]

This sounds like the chemical reasoning of homeopathy to me.

[tysam_and]

Not necessarily.

I can give an analogous example.

Lengthening telomeres is a naive strategy some chase for longevity. You can think of telomeres as aglets for DNA -- they shorten as you get older. So inhibiting that shortening is good, right?

Well, that does extend life, in a way, but it also slows down DNA repair and makes that a harder thing to access, because now damaged DNA has longer end-caps on it too.

So of course a few years after the whole "Just take telomere lengtheners!" headline wave, another headline wave of "Telomere lengtheners actually can worsen aging!" is a decent followup to expect (something like this happened IRL IIRC).

You can make a similar analogy with stem cells and a limited stem cell pool (do you deplete the pool early, assuming it no longer regenerates at this point, for a boost of apparent vitality, or ration it over the course of a lifetime?)

Homeopathy on the other hand assumes a bizzare, quantum-like "memory" in molecules that has not been shown to be accurate by science, but excels as being a placebo effect.

These are quite different phenomena. It's another way of saying "the dose makes the poison", though in this case, it's "the dose has varying and highly state-dependent effects within a strongly chaotic dynamical system".

[garganzol]

Cancer thrives on any kind of NAD source, not specifically Nicotinamide Riboside. Even milk poses a risk of increased tumor growth (it contains NAD, a lot of it). But it only applies to those who have the ongoing oncology in the first place, so... blaming NR for causing cancers is probably a misfire.

[nradov]

Many people have small, slow growing tumors which aren't currently causing clinical symptoms and may not even be reliably detectible through the usual screening tests.