Comment · Thu, December 26, 2019
NMN - Worth the money?
Original post in this thread
hwtu · 15 points
Hello, is taking NMN worth the money?
What they were answering
wobuxihuanbaichi · 2 points
Have you tested the NMN from Xian Lyphar? Too much arsenic as well?
I think a lot of people over on r/longevity would be interested in the test results with the names of the suppliers.
Hopefully you'll find a supplier soon.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb
I am not sure we have bought directly from Lyphar and tested it, but there are only a couple labs actually making NMN. Every Chinese suppliers claims to be the one making it. That's not the case, though. They are middle men most of the time. The real lab manufacturers are names you have never heard of, and they only sell to other Chinese companies in large amounts. Lyphar might be making NMN in smaller amounts, but they are likely just buying it from another lab. I just looked at Lyphar's NMN info, and sure enough they are just using area percent on the HPLC for their "purity" claim. So if the impurities don't have a chromophore, you won't see them on an HPLC. Just because you see a nice clean single peak on an HPLC chromatogram, doesn't mean that it's pure. You can create shitty HPLC methods that don't separate things and get a peak like that. You can also modify your run times to mask all the impurities that come out. Also, even if you honestly are doing the HPLC methods to try and see impurities, most won't have a ring structure in them. So you won't see them on the chromatogram. You need to run valid methods against a reference standard to really get assay numbers. You also likely need to do orthogonal techniques to see everything. So HPLC, IR, NMR, ICP-MS, and maybe LC-MS or GC-FID if you can't fully identify everything. These Chinese suppliers are NOT doing that. I don't see any heavy metals testing, either. I can get some in to test, though. The big issue with NMN is that it will look the same as nicotinamide riboside on an NMR. Most places use H-NMR. So you will only see hydrogen signals. You could do a phosphorous NMR, but nobody does that as is is super expensive. So you need to add phosphorous to your ICP-MS testing to confirm that it is actually NMN. I have yet to see anyone out there actually doing these tests, though. I've never even seen anyone talking about them at all. Properly testing some of this stuff is very hard, so nobody actually does it.