I was standing in my own kitchen, holding the colander, and I could not get to the word

My doctor ran the full panel, told me everything looked normal, and suggested I try to manage my stress. I manage everyone’s stress. That is literally my job.

By Diane R. · Written for Meo Nutrition

Last spring I was making pasta.

I had the thing in my hand. Metal. Holes in it. You put it in the sink. I stood there holding it and I could not get to the word, and here is the part I have never said out loud to anyone:

My first thought was not huh, that’s odd.

My first thought was it’s starting.

My mother started with words. Small ones. She called the fridge “the box that gets cold” and we all laughed and told each other she was tired. That was four years ago. In March we moved her into a place with a garden and a keypad on the door, and now a woman I have never met puts her nightgown on at night. Gently, I’m told. I believe it. I still have to pull over sometimes on the way home.

So no. When the word for colander would not come, I did not think huh.

I drove back from seeing her one Sunday and I sat in the driveway for probably ten minutes without turning the engine off, and what I was thinking about was not my mother. It was my daughter. At forty-something. Sitting in a driveway. And I thought: I will do absolutely anything not to hand her that.

“Everything looks normal”

I did what everybody does. I looked things up at eleven o’clock at night, which is not like me, with the phone tilted away from my husband. Then I did the sensible thing and went to my GP, who was kind, and thorough, and ran a full panel.

Everything looked normal. He said I should try to manage my stress.

That sentence is meant to be a relief and it lands like a door closing. Normal compared to whom? Normal is not the same as fine, and it is nowhere near the same as this is nothing.

I did not want a diagnosis. It took me months to work out what I was actually asking for, which was for somebody to tell me where I was. Is this the ordinary tiredness of a fifty-three-year-old woman with a demanding job, a mother in memory care and a nineteen-year-old in her first year away — or is it the opening frame of a film I have already watched, from the front row, for four years?

Nobody would tell me. Not because they were withholding it. Because nobody can.

That is the actual thing. Not death. Not decline. The inability to tell ordinary tiredness apart from the beginning of something — and having nobody you can ask.

You are not imagining it, is what I would like to have been told. That would have been enough for about a week.

The part I’m most ashamed of is the smallest part

It is not the colander. It is not the driveway. It is this:

I cancelled book club twice last month and told them I had a work thing.

I did not have a work thing. I had a Thursday where I got to about a quarter to three in the afternoon and something went out of me — not sleepiness, I want to be exact, it isn’t sleepiness — it is more like subtraction. My sentences get shorter. The second monitor becomes too much information. I read the same email three times and understand it on the third.

And by seven I knew that sitting in Marian’s living room and being interesting about a novel for two hours was more than I had, so I typed the little lie and put the phone face-down.

Twice. To women I have known for eleven years.

That is the one that stays with me. Not the fear. The small dishonesty. Because the fear is enormous and abstract and you can hold it at arm’s length at two in the afternoon; the lie is four inches wide and it is definitely mine.

And then I wake at 3:10. Every single night. Not 3:05, not 3:30. Ten past three, wide awake, and my mother is right there waiting.

Nobody had told me about the part that turned out to matter

Nine months ago I started HRT and it changed my life — I want to say that clearly, because I’m about to talk about a supplement and I don’t want anyone confusing the two. The heat stopped. The crying in the car stopped. What it did not touch was the quarter-to-three wall and the ten-past-three waking.

So I kept reading, and eventually got past the reels and the IV clinics to something that was genuinely news to me.

You have probably had NAD+ explained at you already, so I’ll be quick. It is a molecule inside every cell — basic plumbing, not a wellness invention — used to turn food into usable energy and involved in the housekeeping cells do overnight. Two things about it are not seriously disputed. NAD+ levels naturally decline as we get older. And you can raise the level measured in the blood by taking a precursor, a raw material the body converts into it.

Note that word. A capsule cannot hand you NAD+ directly — the molecule is too large to survive the trip intact — so anything promising to deliver NAD+ itself in a pill is telling you something about itself. The precursor with the most published human research behind it is nicotinamide riboside, NR.

The study I kept going back to

Conze, Crespo-Barreda and Kruger, published in Scientific Reports in 2019. A hundred and forty adults, eight weeks, randomised and double-blind — so, a real trial with a real control, not a survey. They gave 100 mg, 300 mg or 1,000 mg of NR a day and measured NAD+ in whole blood.

It rose about 22%, 51% and 142% respectively. And here is the detail that convinced me the authors were being straight with me: the 100 mg group drifted back down to about 10% by week eight. The 300 mg group and above held.

Two honest footnotes, both of which cost this page something. One: that is NAD+ measured in the blood. In a separate study (Elhassan, 2019) blood NAD+ more than doubled while the level measured in muscle did not shift to a statistically meaningful degree — so “it refills every cell in your body” is a sentence nobody has earned, and “it raises NAD+ in the blood” is one they have. Two: no trial has ever measured blood NAD+ over time at exactly the 500 mg serving I ended up taking. Interpolating between 300 and 1,000 is arithmetic, not evidence, and I’m not going to do it at you.

The only study anyone has run on women like me

Almost everything published on NR was done on men, or on mixed groups where nobody split the results by sex, or on people twenty years older than me — which is its own quiet insult when what you are living through is specifically midlife, specifically female and specifically hormonal.

There is one exception. I’m going to show it to you along with everything that is wrong with it.

This is the exact paragraph where a page like this normally starts shouting, so: that study does not prove the supplement works. Forty women, one week, no placebo — a pilot is a reason to look, not a reason to believe. Anyone who quotes those percentages at you without the four sentences underneath them is not being straight with you.

But it was still the most interesting thing I found in five months of reading, for three reasons. It used NR — the actual ingredient, not a cousin of it. It was run on women at my life stage, which almost nothing else is. And the thing it moved was sleep.

I don’t need to live to a hundred

Let me say what I actually want, because the industry has decided on my behalf that it’s longevity, and it isn’t.

I don’t need to live to a hundred. I would like to still be me at seventy-five. I’d like to reach a Thursday evening with enough left in me to sit in Marian’s living room and have an opinion about a novel without typing a lie first. I’d like a night where 3:10 goes past without me in it. That’s the whole ask — embarrassingly small next to the promises in the ads, and the only one I’ve ever actually made.

Sleep is where it starts, if it starts anywhere. Not because sleep is glamorous. Because when I sleep, the quarter-to-three wall is a slope instead of a cliff; and when it’s a slope I don’t cancel on my friends; and when I don’t cancel on my friends I’m not lying to them, and I am recognisably the woman I was three years ago.

What I made myself check on the label

By then I had a short list of things that would make me put a bottle back down. No proprietary blends — if a label won’t give the dose of each ingredient, the dose is what it’s hiding. No four-figure milligram numbers, which read to me as a scam signal rather than value. And a serving size stated honestly, because “per capsule” on a two-capsule serving is a way of making a number look twice as big as it is.

The one I settled on is called Celluvate, made by Meo Nutrition, who are also the people paying for this page. Here is its whole label.

On the 500 mg. No trial has tracked blood NAD+ over time at exactly this serving, and I said so above. What is on the record: the European Food Safety Authority concluded in 2021 that 500 mg a day of NR chloride is safe for adults; 500 mg is the per-dose unit used in Martens 2018 and in a 400-patient phase III trial; and a dedicated safety study found no moderate or severe adverse events at 3,000 mg a day, which is six times this.

On the other two. The trans-resveratrol and the quercetin are there for their own antioxidant properties, as companions to the NR. I am not going to tell you they multiply each other. In 2024 a trial in Nature Communications tested exactly that — NR alone against NR plus resveratrol — and reported, in its own words, that resveratrol did not add benefit to NR alone. Every stack on the market is sold on synergy. That trial is why I won’t use the word.

On the fenugreek fibre. Ten milligrams. A carrier that helps carry the polyphenols through. Not an active, and I’m not going to dress it up as one.

The one thing I’d tell anyone buying any brand

In February 2025 ChromaDex published an analysis of 39 NR products sold in the US, tested by validated HPLC-UV. Only 13% met their label claim. Nine had no detectable NR in them at all.

The honest reading is not “everyone is lying” — the reputable brands passed. It is that most of this market fails the test, and that a milligram number printed on a bottle is a marketing claim until somebody has measured it. So ask whoever you buy from, this company included, for a third-party certificate of analysis on the batch. If they get defensive about that question, you have your answer.

What this is not

This is the section I’d want if I were you, and it costs the people paying for this page something to leave it in.

Three randomised trials have looked at NR and cognition. All three were null on their primary outcomes. A 2018 trial (Dollerup) put people on 2,000 mg a day for twelve weeks with proper metabolic measurement and found nothing across every endpoint. A blood-pressure result that gets quoted a lot was exploratory, was not statistically significant, and the same researcher failed to reproduce it in 2026.

And — this is the important one — nothing here touches the thing I am actually frightened of. There is no supplement standing between me and my mother’s four years. There is no wall for sale. If you came to this page hoping there was, I’m sorry, and I’d rather you left now than spent forty dollars finding out.

What I decided in that driveway was much less dramatic. I am not trying to turn anything back — nobody turns anything back, and every advertisement that says otherwise reads to me as an insult to the woman in the room with the keypad on the door. What I’m trying to change is the slope. The angle of the line. Sleep, energy through an afternoon, showing up on a Thursday. Boring, unglamorous, entirely mine.

Not reversal. Slope.

You probably won’t notice it starting. You’ll notice it stopping.

The most useful thing I read in five months was not a study. It was a sixty-six-year-old woman on a forum explaining that she never really believed her supplement was doing anything until a postal strike meant she ran out for three weeks. That was when she found out.

I have seen that same story told by so many different people that I’ve come to think it is simply how this works. The effect is subtle and cumulative and it becomes your new normal, which means it becomes invisible, which means the only reliable way to measure it is to take it away. So: take it consistently for six weeks, then stop for two and pay attention. That isn’t a marketing device — it is the only self-test available, and it is deliberately sized to finish with time still left on the money-back guarantee.

What real customers actually said

There are twelve reviews of this product. Twelve. Not ten thousand. Here are three, and the third is the reason I trusted the other two.

Adelaide is on the product page, in public, with three stars, and she has not been buried. I asked why, and was told they would rather lose the sale than curate the reviews.

Read her carefully, though, because she is also describing precisely what the research would predict. Two months, no dramatic sensation. That is not the failure case — that is the ordinary case. This does not arrive like caffeine. If it announced itself the way an advertisement wants it to, I would be suspicious of it, and so would you.

What it costs, and what the alternative costs

I priced the alternative first, because a friend had been going to a clinic. An NAD+ IV drip runs roughly $250 to $429 for a 250 mg session; the telehealth injection subscriptions sit around $190 a month; and on the shelf, the closest formulas to this one work out at roughly $1.20 to $4.00 a day.

Celluvate on the six-bottle one-time order is 88 cents a day. I did that arithmetic twice because I didn’t believe it the first time.

The last thing

I still wake up sometimes. I still have Thursdays. Nothing about my mother is different or is going to be different, and I have stopped hunting for the thing that changes that, because it isn’t out there and pretending otherwise was costing me sleep of its own.

What I wanted, that whole time, standing there with the colander, was for somebody to tell me the truth about where I am. Nobody could. So I’ve settled for the next best thing: the small, dull, daily, evidence-backed things — and honesty with myself about how much they are and are not likely to do.

Two capsules with the coffee is one of them. Less than a dollar a day. It might do very little. There are sixty days to find out, and the money comes back if it does nothing.

And I went to book club last Thursday.

See Celluvate — from $0.88 a day →