Comment · Mon, December 23, 2019
NMN - Worth the money?
Original post in this thread
hwtu · 15 points
Hello, is taking NMN worth the money?
What they were answering
Friedrich_Ux · 2 points
I see, why is the arsenic so high? Would assume most of it is produced in China so maybe just not the best manufacturing procedures?
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb
My lab director thinks it might be the water quality of the lab making it. There are only a few labs making NMN, and they are in the same region. If the local water supply is high in arsenic, it could be accumulating in the synth. It could also be a precursor used.
As for the other impure batches, those are a different synthesis pathway. The main synthesis pathway, and the cheapest, is one that is resulting in roughly 60-70% pure batches. The impurities are too close in solubility to NMN itself, so they can't purify it further. To get into the 99% purity range, you need to use a completely different synthesis that results in higher yields. Of course this pathway is much more expensive. Well you can imagine that most people are buying the cheaper synths and not the more expensive ones. If you find really cheap NMN on the market, that's likely the 60-70% purity stuff. Assays on NMN are not standard either, and I have seen many people just using area percent calculations to give a purity number. That's not accurate at all. HPLCs with a UV detector, which most are, can only "see" things with a chromophore. So if there is a ring structure in the compound, there is likely a good chromophore. Many impurities do not have a chromophore. So you cannot see them directly on an HPLC. If you are comparing to a reference standard, you can see the lack of something and calculate the purity that way. However, to "see" things without a chromophore you need different methodologies, like NMR, IR, mass spec, etc.