What is NAD+?

hi everybody dr mike here there's a lot of talk about nad particularly nad supplementation now my job is to inform you about what nad actually is and what it does in the body so this is what this video is going to go through so to begin with we need to know that nad actually stands for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide and it's a carrier molecule now the question is what is it carrying well it's actually carrying electrons and protons that can be utilized by the mitochondria to produce that wonderful wonderful energy that we call atp that's the whole purpose of it but you need to think about it like this nad biochemically as a carrier molecule it's actually nad plus that's how it's floating through the body now nad plus ultimately wants to turn into something called nadh and how does this occur that's the next question but before we jump into this i need to talk to you about some really basic chemistry remember the periodic table where you've got hydrogen helium lithium beryllium boron carbon nitrogen oxygen and so forth hydrogen is the first atom on the periodic table and just so you remember you've got hydrogen then helium then lithium right hydrogen number one it's number one it has one proton so that's one positive charge in its core and it has one electron which is a negatively charged thing flying around the outside this is hydrogen right this is the atom hydrogen now that we've got that one positive proton in the core one electron that's negatively charged flying around the outside if you want to interact with hydrogen the only thing you can really interact with is that electron keep that in mind all right now remember that within our body we've got our micronutrients things like well we've got macronutrients like proteins fats and carbs and they get broken down into their micronutrients so let's focus on carbohydrates getting broken down into glucose remember that glucose and remember the chemical structure of glucose is c6 h12 o6 all right six carbons 12 hydrogen six oxygens now glucose in order for us to remember we utilize glucose in the body to produce energy right so the way we do this is glucose needs to undergo something called glycolysis to produce something called pyruvate and then pyruvate needs to enter the krebs cycle in the mitochondria and both of these spit out something what they actually spit out is nadh but we'll get there in a sec and then the products of the krebs cycle enter the electron transport chain oxidative phosphorylation atp is produced but we're starting off with glucose glucose wants to turn into pyruvate so pyruvate has a chemical structure of c3 h4 o3 now remember one glucose molecule actually turns into two pyruvate molecules so we actually have two of these what that means is we actually have c6 h8 o6 now compare that to the original glucose what changed same amount of carbons same amount of oxygens but what we've done is we've stolen some hydrogen and this is what nad plus does it steals hydrogen now what specifically is it stealing from this hydrogen that electron and what it actually does is one nad molecule will go to two hydrogen and steal two electrons because it can and what it's left with is obviously going to be two protons right now one of the protons it takes on board and the other one it freely lets float throughout the solution so it releases this free proton all right so this is what happens one nad plus steals two hydrogen takes two electrons one of the protons and frees the other proton and what you're left with is nadh okay now when we look at glycolysis this process of glucose to pyruvate we produce two nadh which means we use 4 hydrogen 8 9 10 11 12 there's the 4 hydrogen from going from glucose to pyruvate it makes total sense so we're actually producing here we take nad plus and we turn it into nadh the same thing actually happens in this krebs cycle we also produce nadh now why why does it want to do this process so this nadh that we're now producing remember it's got electrons associated with it it's hugging these electrons and it's hugging some protons once it's in this mitochondria what happens is that the naa nadh releases those negative electrons and releases those positive protons and what we find i'll move over here and what we find is that embedded in the inner membrane of the mitochondria are some enzymes and what these enzymes do is they take these electrons and they pass them to each other one electron goes to the next enzyme that goes to the next enzyme this is the electron transport chain it's transporting electrons and as it does this it allows for these positive protons to be pushed into this intermembrane space so through the transport of electrons it allows for the protons to be pushed into this inter membrane space and what we end up having is a high concentration of positive protons in the intermembrane space high concentration here low concentration here we know diffusion that this high concentration wants to go down to a low concentration it wants to diffuse down but it has to do it through a structure now this structure importantly is part of an atp synthase so as it allows for these hydrogen ions to diffuse down their concentration gradient it steals the energy from this process of diffusion and hijacks it to produce atp so as you can see the whole purpose of nad plus in the body is to steal electrons and protons from hydrogen within important molecules like glucose it then takes it into the mitochondria releases the electrons and protons the electrons are transported by the electron transport chain which then pushes these protons into the intermembrane space they move down through diffusion through this channel which is associated with an atp synthase that produces a butt ton of atp which is energy so nad and nad plus is used to produce energy

Channel: Dr Matt & Dr Mike

Views: 257,644

Keywords: nad+, nad, nadh, nadph, metabolism, energy, supplement, supplements, supp, nm, nmn, nr, infusion, intravenous

Id: LmRDCBx42Ew

Length: 7min 27sec (447 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021