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Thirty-nine NAD supplements went through a validated laboratory assay in February 2025. Thirteen percent contained what the label said.

Nine of them had no detectable nicotinamide riboside at all. Below: that analysis, who paid for it, and every published result that argues against the product being sold on this page.

An advertisement for Celluvate by Meo Nutrition. We make it, we sell it, and we profit if it is bought. Everything below is written with that on the table.

There is a version of this page that opens with a mitochondrion, a graph pointing down, and the word revolutionary. That page converts fine on people who have not read anything. It does not convert on people who have.

So here is the other version. It starts with the worst available fact about the category this product sits in, and it spends its first thousand words arguing against itself.

Part one

The assay

On 26 February 2025, an analysis titled Quantitative Analysis of NR Consumer Products was published. Thirty-nine nicotinamide riboside products sold in the United States were bought and run by validated HPLC-UV — a standard laboratory method for measuring how much of a compound is actually in a capsule.

• 13% met their label claim. Five bottles out of thirty-nine.
• 74% came in significantly below label.
• 36% contained under one percent of what the label claimed.
• Nine products had no detectable nicotinamide riboside in them at all.
• All four of the products advertising 1,500 mg per serving: none detectable.

Now the part that has to come before anything else, because it is the first thing a careful reader would go and find.

That analysis was run by ChromaDex. ChromaDex sells Niagen, which is a nicotinamide riboside product, which competes with this one. They tested a market they are in. Hold that against the finding to whatever degree seems right — it is a real conflict and it should cost them something.

What it does not do is make the numbers disappear. The method is standard, the products were commercially bought, and nobody in the category has published a contradicting dataset in the eighteen months since. The honest reading is narrow and it is this: a large share of this market fails the test. Not everyone. The reputable brands passed — and the fact that they passed is precisely what makes the finding worth taking seriously, because a study designed purely as a hit piece would not have had five survivors.

The practical conclusion is not "buy ours." It is: ask for a certificate of analysis tied to the lot number printed on the bottle in your hand. A generic PDF on a website is not that. A "third-party tested" badge is not that. Ask us, and ask whoever else is on the shortlist. If a brand cannot produce a lot-matched result for the bottle it sold, that is the answer to the question.

Part two

What 500 mg of nicotinamide riboside will not do

This is the section most pages do not have. It exists because the alternative is that it gets written for us, in a comment, by someone with a search engine.

Two more, while we are at it

Nicotinamide riboside is not better than NMN. The head-to-head exists: Christen and colleagues, Nestlé Research, Nature Metabolism, January 2026, n=65. The two precursors raised circulating NAD+ comparably. The "25% better" figure that circulated for years came from comparing two separate trials against each other, which is not how that works. Anyone still running that claim in 2026 either has not read it or is hoping the reader hasn't.

The resveratrol is not in here as a longevity ingredient. The Interventions Testing Program — the most rigorous lifespan-testing programme in existence, run across three independent laboratories specifically because single-lab results kept failing to replicate — found zero lifespan extension for resveratrol. The original sirtuin-activation result that started the whole story has been attributed by two separate pharmaceutical research groups to an artifact of the fluorescent dye used in the assay, not to the compound. That is settled enough that arguing otherwise is a tell.

So: 150 mg of trans-resveratrol and 50 mg of quercetin are in this formula as polyphenol companions to the nicotinamide riboside, providing antioxidant support and helping protect cells from oxidative stress. That is what they are. They are not three longevity actives stapled together, and there is no synergy claim being made — because when the NICE trial tested exactly that combination in humans, adding resveratrol to nicotinamide riboside did not add benefit, and did add nausea. We are not going to pretend that trial doesn't exist.

Part three

What survives

Having taken all of that off the table, here is the narrow ground that is left. It is smaller than the category's advertising suggests and larger than its critics allow.

1. Nicotinamide riboside raises NAD+ in the blood, dose-dependently, and the trial is a good one

Conze, Crespo-Barreda and Kruger, Scientific Reports 9:9772, 2019. Randomised, double-blind, n=140, eight weeks, three dose arms. Whole-blood NAD+ rose:

• +22% at 100 mg/day
• +51% at 300 mg/day
• +142% at 1,000 mg/day

The detail worth more than the headline numbers: the 100 mg arm decayed to +10% by week eight. The 300 mg and 1,000 mg arms held. Which is the actual argument for not buying the cheapest bottle on the shelf — under-dose it and the effect washes out inside two months, which is roughly when most people conclude the whole category is nonsense and stop.

100 mg

+22%

…then decayed to +10% by week 8

300 mg

+51%

held through week 8

1,000 mg

+142%

held through week 8

And now the restraint that this section costs us. No trial has ever measured chronic blood NAD+ at exactly 500 mg. There is a number sitting invitingly between +51% and +142% and it would be trivial to interpolate it, put a percentage sign on it, and set it in 60-point type. That would be arithmetic dressed as data. There is no figure for 500 mg on this page and there will not be one until somebody runs the trial.

2. 500 mg is a defensible dose, and that is a regulatory statement rather than a marketing one

• EFSA concluded in 2021 that 500 mg/day of nicotinamide riboside chloride is safe for adults.
• Martens 2018 and the 400-patient NOPARK phase III trial both use 500 mg as the per-dose unit.
• The one trial that has shown a same-day functional effect — Dolopikou 2020 — used a single 500 mg dose.
• The NR-SAFE trial found no moderate or severe adverse events at 3,000 mg/day. This serving is one-sixth of that.

Note what is not being claimed: that more is better without limit. The Amazon shelf is full of 1,500 mg products, and all four of the 1,500 mg products in the February 2025 analysis contained no detectable nicotinamide riboside. In this category a very large number on the front of a bottle is a signal about the marketing department, not the manufacturing.

3. The steadiest signal in the literature is inflammatory, not energetic

Elhassan 2019 — the same trial that found muscle NAD+ unchanged — did report reductions in the inflammatory markers IL-6 and TNF-α. Of the twenty-five or so human nicotinamide riboside trials run to date, this is the one direction the sceptics' own review is willing to endorse. In permitted, honest language: nicotinamide riboside helps maintain a healthy inflammatory response. It is the least exciting sentence in this advertisement and it is the best-supported one.

Part four

Three labels, side by side

The two closest comparables are Thorne ResveraCel and Life Extension NAD+ Cell Regenerator with Resveratrol. Both are legitimate products from established companies. Here is what the panels say.

Swipe the table sideways →

Figures as printed on each product's supplement facts panel; competitor cost-per-day from list pricing at time of writing.

Two things about that table, and one refusal.

Life Extension's numbers are the ones to look at twice. Their resveratrol appears on the panel inside a 55 mg proprietary blend, of which 10 mg is actual trans-resveratrol; their quercetin ingredient is 14 mg, of which 5 mg is quercetin. That is fifteen times less resveratrol and ten times less quercetin than this formula, at a higher price per day. That is not an inference. It is on their own label.

Thorne's 415 mg is a salt. Nicotinamide riboside hydrogen malate weighs more per unit of nicotinamide riboside than the chloride form does, so 415 mg of the salt is not 415 mg of nicotinamide riboside. And here is the refusal: we are not going to do that conversion for you. We have not put a Thorne bottle through a laboratory, the arithmetic depends on assumptions about the raw material, and this page has just spent a thousand words on why unverified numbers are the problem. Both labels are printed above. Compare them.

The question that always gets asked: where is the TMG?

It is not in here. The reasoning: the methylation-demand concern around NAD+ precursors is a plausible mechanistic extrapolation that has not been demonstrated as a clinical problem in humans at 500 mg. Rather than add a guessed-at dose of trimethylglycine and charge for it, the position taken here is that trimethylglycine costs roughly eight dollars a month on its own, and anyone who finds the argument persuasive should buy it separately and control the dose themselves. That is a genuine disagreement, stated as one.

Part five

Twelve reviews. One of them is bad, and it stays.

Celluvate has 4.7 stars from twelve verified reviews. Twelve. Not four thousand. At the volume this product sells, a five-figure review count would itself be the thing worth investigating.

The most useful one is the three-star:

That review is displayed here on purpose, at the same size as the good ones. It is the single most informative thing on this page, for two reasons.

First, it is proof that the review page is not curated. Second — and this matters more — Adelaide's experience is a normal outcome, not a failure of the product. A supplement that raises a coenzyme measured in blood is not obliged to produce a sensation. Anybody promising that it will is making a promise the literature does not underwrite. Read the rest with that in mind:

"Slow and steady." "Be patient." "I don't feel any difference." Those are the three most repeated notes across twelve reviews, and they are a more accurate description of this product than anything a copywriter would have chosen.

Part six

The honest expectation timeline

Nobody in this category answers the only question that actually determines whether a bottle gets refilled: will anything be felt, and when? Here is the answer, hedged exactly as far as the evidence requires and no further.

• Days 1–7

  Realistically, nothing. Some people report unusually vivid dreams in the first week; that is a consistent anecdote across the category, it is not a trial finding, and it is reported here as an anecdote. If anything feels wired or over-stimulated, take it earlier in the day, or stop.

• Weeks 2–4

  In the trials, blood NAD+ is rising in this window. That is a laboratory measurement, and there is no reliable published relationship between it and how any given day feels. Most people report nothing yet. Reid's review — "you must be patient" — belongs here.

• Weeks 4–8

  If something is going to be noticed, this is usually where it turns up in self-reports, and the register is unglamorous: sleep that holds together better, an afternoon that stays level, fewer small aches. These are customer self-reports, not trial endpoints. A meaningful number of people will still be where Adelaide is.

• Week 8 onward

  This is where dose matters. In Conze, the 100 mg arm had faded to +10% by week eight while the higher arms held. Consistency is doing more work here than any single day's dose.

• The part nobody advertises

  The most common way long-term users describe arriving at conviction is not the starting. It is the stopping — running out, going two weeks without, and noticing the gap. It is entirely possible that nothing is noticed at all in either direction. That possibility is priced into the guarantee below.

How to take it, and who should not

• Two capsules in the morning, with water. Morning rather than evening, since a minority report feeling stimulated.
• Contains fenugreek (as galactomannans). Declared regardless of dose. Avoid if fenugreek is an allergen.
• Resveratrol has antiplatelet activity and interacts with the CYP3A4 and CYP2C9 pathways. Anyone taking warfarin or other blood thinners, or medication metabolised by those pathways, should speak to their doctor before starting.
• Resveratrol has phytoestrogenic activity. Anyone with a hormone-sensitive condition should raise it with their doctor first.
• Not for use during pregnancy or breastfeeding, or by anyone under 18.

Part seven

The arithmetic

A NAD+ IV drip delivering 250 mg runs $250–$429 per session. A 500 mg drip runs $399–$698. Telehealth NAD+ injections run about $190 a month. Those are real prices for a real service, and one 500 mg session costs more than a year of this.

At $0.88 a day on the six-bottle purchase, this is below the cost per day of every established branded product in the comparison above — Thorne at $2.00–$4.00, Life Extension at $1.28–$1.50, Tru Niagen at $1.22–$1.47. That is arithmetic off published prices, not a claim about who works better. Nobody has run that trial either.

One last time, because it is the actual point of this page: a supplement in this category is worth exactly as much as its assay. Ask for the certificate of analysis matched to the lot number on whatever bottle is bought. Ask us. Ask the other one. The brands that will not answer that question have already answered it.

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