Before You Spend $60 On NMN, Read This

In 2024, a research team bought eighteen NMN supplements off the shelf and ran them through mass spectrometry. Three of them contained no NMN at all. Not a weak dose — none.

This is an article about how to buy NMN without getting robbed. We sell NMN, so you should read it with that in mind. We are going to try to earn the scepticism you brought with you rather than talk you out of it.

The problem: you cannot see what you bought

NMN is a white powder. So is most of what could be substituted for it. There is no taste test, no colour change, no way for you to know at home whether you paid $60 for β-Nicotinamide Mononucleotide or for rice flour. You are trusting a label. And the labels, it turns out, are frequently wrong.

The most rigorous public look at this was published in GeroScience in 2024. Researchers — including Brian Kennedy and Andrea Maier, two of the more serious names in longevity biology — purchased eighteen NMN supplements and analysed them by high-performance liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry, five aliquots per sample.

3 of 18 NMN supplements contained no detectable NMN whatsoever. The deviation from the label claim across the set ran from +11% to −100%.

Their conclusion, verbatim: “The amount of active ingredient of NMN and UA indicated on the label poorly corresponds to the detected amount.” They also noted something quietly damning — in many products, the capsule contents weighed less than the label claimed before you even measured what was inside them.

The authors declared no competing financial interests. That matters, because the other well-known analysis in this space does have one.

The study everyone quotes — and its conflict

You will often see a statistic cited: 22 top-selling NMN brands tested, 14 of them containing less than 1% of the NMN on the label, three containing none. That analysis came from ChromaDex — a company that sells NR, a competing molecule. They had every commercial reason to make NMN look bad.

We are telling you that because it is true, and because the honest thing to do with an inconvenient fact is say it out loud.

Here is the part that settles it: the two studies tested almost entirely different products, but they overlapped on exactly one. Both found the same result on it — no NMN. An independent academic team with no financial stake reached the same conclusion as the conflicted one. The problem is real.

Why this happens

NMN is genuinely expensive to synthesise at high purity. A supplement is not a drug: nobody checks the bottle before it reaches you. If a manufacturer ships something underdosed, the odds of being caught are close to zero, and the cost saving is enormous. That is the whole mechanism. There is no conspiracy — just an unpoliced gap between the label and the powder.

It is also worth knowing that NMN degrades. Some of the products measuring low may have started closer to their label and lost potency in a warehouse. The industry works around this with “overages” — deliberately adding more than the label says, so that it still meets the claim months later. That is normal, and it is not the problem. Zero is the problem.

The five questions

Ask these of any NMN brand. Including this one.

The checklist

1. Does it name the exact dose of the active, per capsule?Not “per serving.” Per capsule. “500 mg per serving (2 capsules)” means 250 mg per capsule, and brands know exactly how that reads at a glance.

2. Does it list every ingredient — including the boring ones?Almost every capsule contains excipients: bulking agents, anti-caking agents, flow agents. They are how a capsule gets manufactured at all. A brand that claims “zero fillers” is either using a different definition than you are, or hoping you do not read the panel.

3. Is it one active, or a proprietary blend?“Proprietary blend” means they will not tell you how much of each thing is in there. In a category with this much fraud, that is not a trade secret. It is a place to hide.

4. Where is it made, and to what standard?“FDA-registered, GMP-compliant facility” is a real, checkable thing. It is not the same as FDA approval — no supplement is FDA-approved — and any brand implying otherwise is misleading you.

5. Can they show you a third-party assay of the batch you are holding?This is the only question that actually proves the powder. A certificate from the manufacturer is not third-party testing. An independent, accredited lab — ideally ISO 17025 — testing that batch, is.

How we score

We are going to run our own product through the list we just handed you. We pass four. We do not pass the fifth.

The Repeat · NMN Capsules

PASS 1. Dose per capsule500 mg of β-Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, 99.9% purity, per capsule. One capsule a day — not two, not four.

PASS 2. Every ingredient namedFive things, and that is the entire list: β-NMN (500 mg) · HPMC (the vegetable capsule) · microcrystalline cellulose (bulking agent) · silicon dioxide (anti-caking) · magnesium stearate (flow agent). The last three are excipients. They are fillers, definitionally. We are not going to pretend they are not there — you would find them on the panel anyway.

PASS 3. One active, no blendOne active ingredient. No proprietary blend. Nothing to hide behind.

PASS 4. Manufacturing standardMade in an FDA-registered, GMP-compliant facility in the USA. Not FDA-approved — that is not a thing for supplements, and anyone telling you it is, is lying.

NOT YET 5. Third-party batch assayWe cannot show you one today. Our manufacturer provides certificates of analysis on request, and we have requested the assay and the testing lab’s accreditation. Until we can put that document in front of you, this box stays empty — and we are not going to print “third-party tested” on a bottle to fill it. When we have it, it will be published on this page.

We could have written this article without question five. It would have been a better sales page and a worse piece of writing. But a checklist that a brand invents and then conveniently passes is an advertisement, not a checklist — and you would have been right to ignore it.

One more number you can check

Price per gram is the cleanest comparison in this category, and almost nobody publishes it. The GeroScience team found consumer prices ranging from roughly €1 to €17 per gram of NMN — a seventeen-fold spread for the same molecule.

Ours: $38 for 30 capsules at 500 mg each. That is 15 grams of NMN. About $2.53 per gram. Go and calculate that for whatever is in your cabinet. If it comes out dramatically cheaper, ask yourself what got cheaper.

What NMN actually does — and does not

Since we have your attention and we are being straight with you: NMN is a precursor to NAD+, a coenzyme your cells use in energy metabolism and DNA repair. Human trials show supplementation raises circulating NAD+. That part is settled.

What human trials do not show is that NMN reverses ageing or extends human lifespan. The dramatic headlines you have read come largely from mouse studies, and mice are not people. What raised NAD+ does for you over decades is still being studied. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something — and at that point, so are we, so hold us to the same standard.

We are not asking you to trust us.
We are asking you to read the label. Ours, and everyone else’s.

Read our full label

Sources
Sandalova E, Li H, Guan L, et al. Testing the amount of nicotinamide mononucleotide and urolithin A as compared to the label claim. GeroScience (2024). Eighteen NMN supplements analysed by HPLC-QqQ-MS. The authors declare no competing financial interests.
ChromaDex analysis of 22 NMN brands sold on Amazon (2022), as referenced and partially corroborated in the GeroScience paper above. ChromaDex sells nicotinamide riboside, a competing molecule.

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Consult a physician if pregnant, nursing, under 18, or if you have a medical condition.