Our Mission

Why We Started Human Nutrients

Human Nutrients was founded on a straightforward frustration: the supplement industry is full of products that sound scientific but aren't. Our founder spent several years deep in longevity research — reading David Sinclair's lab publications from Harvard Medical School, working through clinical trial data published in journals like Science and Cell Metabolism, and tracking the NMN human studies coming out of Japan and the United States. The science was compelling and increasingly concrete. But when it came time to actually buy an evidence-based supplement, the products on offer were a disappointment. Most NMN products on UK shelves were listing doses of 150mg or even 125mg per capsule — at a time when the clinical trials generating all the headlines were using 250mg to 500mg per day. Resveratrol formulas were similarly underdosed, often delivering a fraction of what the research used. The gap between what the science showed and what the industry was selling was too wide to ignore. So rather than accept it, we decided to fix it.

The science behind NMN centres on a molecule called NAD+ — nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide — which plays a fundamental role in three major biological processes that decline with age. First, NAD+ is consumed by PARP enzymes, which are responsible for repairing breaks in DNA strands. Every time a cell is exposed to UV radiation, oxidative stress, or normal replication errors, PARPs use NAD+ to fix the damage. Second, NAD+ powers the sirtuin family of proteins — sometimes called longevity genes — which regulate gene expression, stress response, and mitochondrial health. Third, the mitochondria themselves depend on NAD+ to drive the electron transport chain, the process that generates ATP, the cell's fundamental energy currency. NAD+ levels drop by roughly 50% between your 20s and 60s, but the decline is not caused by age alone. Chronic stress, poor sleep, excess alcohol consumption, and repeated UV exposure all accelerate NAD+ depletion. When levels fall too low, all three systems — DNA repair, sirtuin activity, and mitochondrial energy production — slow down together. NMN is preferred over the other well-known NAD+ precursor, nicotinamide riboside (NR), because NMN can be directly converted to NAD+ inside cells, potentially bypassing an extra enzymatic conversion step that NR requires, which may make it more efficient at raising NAD+ levels in certain tissues.

When it came to choosing the right dose, we went back to the studies rather than following what competitors were doing. The landmark Yoshino et al. (2021) study published in Science administered 250mg of NMN daily to postmenopausal women with prediabetes and found significant improvements in skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity. The Igarashi et al. (2022) study used 250mg per day in older men and documented improvements in muscle function and gait speed — meaningful, real-world physical outcomes. Yet many UK brands were still selling products at 125mg per capsule — barely reaching the lower bound of what research has tested. Some were worse. We chose 500mg of NMN per daily serving because it reflects serious clinical intent and sits in the range used by practitioners who apply this research in practice. We paired it with 100mg of trans-resveratrol, the specific isomer of resveratrol shown to activate SIRT1 in research settings, dosed to complement NMN rather than serve as a token addition. This is not a formula designed to fit a price point. It is a formula designed to reflect what the evidence actually supports.

Our Omega-3 DHA product came from a separate but equally frustrating realisation about the fish oil industry. Fish do not produce DHA themselves — they accumulate it by eating smaller fish, which in turn eat marine algae, the organism that actually synthesises DHA from scratch. By the time DHA reaches a large fish like tuna or salmon, it arrives alongside everything else that has concentrated up the food chain: mercury, lead, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and dioxins. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has published assessments documenting PCB contamination in commercially available fish oil supplements, and mercury accumulation in large pelagic fish is a well-established public health concern. Algae-derived DHA sidesteps all of this entirely. Our algae is cultivated in closed, controlled fermentation tanks — no ocean exposure, no heavy metal uptake, no contamination risk. Beyond purity, there is a nutritional argument too: algae-sourced DHA tends to deliver a higher DHA-to-EPA ratio compared to standard fish oil formulas, which is particularly relevant for brain health applications where DHA is the dominant omega-3 fatty acid in neural tissue. For people who want the cognitive and anti-inflammatory benefits of DHA without the contamination gamble of fish oil, algae is simply the better source.

Every batch of Human Nutrients products is sent to an independent, ISO-accredited UK laboratory for third-party testing before it is offered for sale. Third-party testing means the lab has no commercial relationship with our manufacturer — they receive a blind sample and run it through a standardised testing protocol. For our NMN + Resveratrol formula, that protocol includes HPLC analysis to confirm NMN purity and concentration, verification that the resveratrol present is the active trans isomer rather than the inactive cis form, heavy metals screening for lead, mercury, arsenic, and cadmium against regulatory limits, microbiological contamination testing, and label-weight accuracy checks to confirm that what the capsule says it contains is what it actually contains. The resulting documents — Certificates of Analysis — are available to any customer who requests them by emailing our support team. We publish this information because we believe you have a right to see it, and because a brand that declines to show its CoAs is a brand that has something to hide. We do not.

We are a small team, and we intend to stay focused rather than sprawling. We do not have a celebrity ambassador or a large advertising budget. What we do have is a direct relationship with our manufacturers, a genuinely obsessive approach to reading the research, and a growing community of customers who engage with the science themselves — people who share their routines, notice their energy levels improving, and reference the clinical literature when they recommend Human Nutrients to friends. That community is what keeps this meaningful. Our long-term vision is straightforward: as the longevity science matures and new compounds move from promising animal data into robust human trials, we will expand our range to reflect what the evidence actually validates. We will not chase trends or launch products because they are fashionable. We will wait for the science to catch up to the marketing — and then, when it does, we will be ready with formulas that take it seriously.