Understanding NAD levels allows people to make informed choices about their diet, lifestyle, and wellness strategies, helping them take proactive steps toward better health. Many health professionals are beginning to recognise the importance of NAD testing in optimising metabolic function, with growing interest in its potential applications for athletic performance, nutritional advice, and links to addiction treatment and reproductive health.

With increasing public interest in personalised health and longevity, measuring NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) levels, a vital coenzyme, could offer a practical way to understand the connection between nutrition, metabolism, and cellular health. Early test and clinical discussions suggest that NAD may be a key biomarker to help understand diet quality, inflammation, obesity-related metabolic dysfunction, and mitochondrial performance.

As the body’s active form of vitamin B3, NAD is central to over 500 cellular processes — including energy production, DNA repair, and immune response. While NAD levels do not naturally decline, poor diet quality, chronic inflammation, and obesity can cause this depletion, often without symptoms.

Jari Närhi, CEO of NADMED, commented, “NAD is a highly sensitive marker for nutritional status and mitochondrial function. Low NAD levels may reflect vitamin deficiencies, poor diet, or metabolic stress, long before symptoms emerge. By measuring all NAD coenzymes in the blood, we can gain actionable insights into a person’s biochemical health — and use this to guide targeted interventions such as supplementation, diet adjustments, or clinical therapies.”

Highly processed modern diets, particularly those depleted of fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K) due to thermal treatment, have been linked to vitamin malabsorption and NAD depletion. Additionally, certain types of obesity, even among individuals with similar BMI, show different metabolic and NAD profiles, pointing to the heterogeneity of obesity and its underlying biology.

Until recently, NAD testing has been costly, slow, and often inaccurate. NADMED, a spin-out from the University of Helsinki, has introduced an innovative lab-based solution that overcomes these barriers. This new CE-marked method offers a fast, reliable, and cost-effective way to measure the most common forms of NAD: NAD+ and NADH, with their ratio providing valuable information on an individual’s cellular health.

The insights from the test can offer a much deeper understanding of nutritional and metabolic health than traditional vitamin or biomarker tests alone.

Early data suggest that NAD levels may also help track the effectiveness of obesity treatments, such as calorie restriction, GLP-1 medications, or bariatric surgery. Additionally, shifts in NAD/NADH ratios may point to mitochondrial dysfunction, a common feature in chronic illness and fatigue-related conditions.