Learning to evaluate health claims is the most valuable health skill you can build right now. Not because the science is too complicated to understand. Because the people selling you things have gotten very good at making it sound like they already did the hard work for you.
They haven’t.
This week, a GPB/NPR investigation confirmed what I’ve been watching for years in the supplement industry: a molecule with genuine biological importance, NAD+, is being sold through IV drips that a Stanford researcher whose lab is running the actual trials calls very inefficient at reaching the cells. A thousand dollars a session. Side effects. Probably not working. And clinics all over the country are booking appointments for it.
This is not a NAD+ problem. This is a discernment problem. And the fix is learnable.
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Why You Can’t Evaluate Health Claims Alone
The ability to evaluate health claims correctly isn’t just about having good information. It’s about having the right context for that information. And here’s what most people don’t realize: context is not something you build alone. You build it alongside guides who’ve been down this road, inside a community of people asking the same honest questions you are.
This became clear to me in a conversation I had this week with an Iroquois chieftain in Salt Lake City. We were talking about plant medicine — ayahuasca, peyote, the ceremonial traditions the Haudenosaunee nation has carried for centuries. The point he made wasn’t about any specific substance. It was about the container those substances were held inside.
In every traditional indigenous context where these medicines were used, they were never a solo experience. The healer was there. The elders were there. The entire community was present. The ceremony held the individual inside something larger than themselves. And when you strip that container away, he told me, you don’t have medicine anymore. You have a drug.
That is the operating logic of the modern health market. Strip the context. Hand the individual a product. Tell them to figure it out alone. Then sell them another one when the first doesn’t work.
The Haudenosaunee — the People of the Longhouse — built their civilization around a different premise. You do not heal alone. You heal inside a community that understands what is happening and has the wisdom to hold you through it. Their medicine societies operated on this principle for hundreds of years before Western medicine arrived and decided it knew better.
Understanding this isn’t just interesting history. It’s a direct explanation for why so many people keep making the same expensive health mistakes. They’re trying to evaluate health claims alone. No guide. No community. No framework built through real clinical experience. Just a polished sales page and a celebrity endorsement.
The NAD+ Drip Problem: When Good Science Gets Bad Packaging
NAD+ is a real molecule with real biological importance. It drives mitochondrial energy production. It’s involved in DNA repair. Its levels fall measurably as you age, and that decline is connected to real age-related disease. The biology is solid.
The problem is the product.
What I’ve watched happen across twenty-plus years in formulation and sourcing is always the same pattern. A molecule gets enough real science behind it to generate buzz, and the market moves. Fast. Products arrive years before the delivery science has been worked out. With NAD+, that gap has produced something genuinely absurd.
IV infusions at a thousand dollars a session. A Stanford researcher whose lab is running the actual trials says those infusions are very inefficient at getting NAD+ into the cells at all. Side effects include cramping, nausea, and vomiting. Significant side effects, significant cost, and probably not reaching the cells.
That is what happens when you can’t evaluate health claims and you’re relying on the loudest voice in the room instead of the quietest one.
The loudest voice has a wellness clinic, a marketing budget, and a beautiful Instagram page. The quietest voice is the researcher who publishes what the data shows and doesn’t have a referral commission.
What Actually Works for NAD+ Support (And What Doesn’t)
The form question is the whole question with NAD+. It’s also the question almost no clinic or supplement brand will walk you through honestly, because the honest answer doesn’t favor the most expensive products.
Oral NAD+ supplements: the molecule itself very likely does not survive digestion intact. Your gut breaks it down before it can be absorbed as NAD+. This is a known limitation of the direct supplement form, and it’s why serious researchers have largely moved on from it.
IV infusions: the Stanford data is what it is. A thousand dollars, significant side effects, and very inefficient delivery to the cells. Bypassing digestion sounded like it would solve the absorption problem. What the actual trial data shows is that it doesn’t solve it the way the industry claims.
NMN and NR precursors: this is where the most promising human data sits right now. Your body can absorb these compounds and convert them to NAD+ through natural metabolic pathways. The studies are early and mostly small, and I won’t oversell where the science is. But the mechanism makes sense and the preliminary signals are genuinely interesting. If someone wants to explore NAD+ support seriously, this is where I’d start the conversation.
Before any of that, though, I want to know three things. How is your sleep? How much are you moving? What does your diet look like?
Vigorous exercise raises NAD+ levels through documented pathways. Fasting raises them. Deep sleep raises them. These are free. They have strong evidence behind them. They do fifty other things for your health at the same time. Don’t pay for theater before you’ve built the foundation.
How to Evaluate Health Claims: 5 Questions Worth Asking
This is the framework I’ve built from watching the supplement industry operate for more than two decades. These five questions let you evaluate health claims on the spot, before the purchase, every time.
1. What form is this product, and can it actually reach the target?
This is the delivery mechanism question. It eliminates most of what gets marketed. An oral NAD+ supplement doesn’t survive digestion. An IV infusion may not efficiently reach intracellular levels. A precursor compound works through a specific metabolic conversion pathway. Form determines whether the claimed biology is even possible. Ask this first, always.
2. Who is saying this, and what do they gain from me believing it?
The brand’s website is not a neutral source. A sponsored podcast is not a neutral source. A celebrity who is also an investor is not a neutral source. The researcher running the clinical trial — the one who publishes results whether they’re positive or not — that is the voice worth finding. Always ask who benefits from you believing the claim.
3. What does the primary research actually show, versus what the press release says?
Press releases summarize studies in ways that favor the product. The actual study almost always includes limitations, small sample sizes, animal model data presented as if it directly translates to humans, and effect sizes that are real but much smaller than the marketing suggests. Reading just the abstract of a study puts you ahead of most health consumers.
4. What happens to my biology if I skip this and do the free version instead?
Exercise raises NAD+. Sleep raises NAD+. Fasting raises NAD+. Time in nature lowers cortisol. Movement builds muscle, which produces myokines that regulate immune function and brain health. For almost every marketed supplement in the longevity space, there is a free behavioral intervention doing most of what the product claims. Know what that is before you pay.
5. Is this filling a real gap, or am I paying to feel like I’m doing something?
Health anxiety feels like action. It mimics the feeling of taking care of yourself. But if your sleep is broken, your movement is inconsistent, and your diet is driving inflammation, adding a five-hundred-dollar supplement protocol to that foundation builds nothing. It just makes you feel temporarily better about the wrong problem. This is the hardest question and the most important one.
AI4L and the New Era of Evidence-Based Longevity
One of the most interesting tools for people trying to evaluate health claims just became publicly available. The Forever Healthy Foundation released AI4L 1.0, a free open-source system designed to produce rigorous evidence-based reviews of longevity interventions including senolytics, NAD+ restoration, mTOR modulation, and peptides.
Their approach is called Audit-Driven Prompting. Instead of asking an AI to write a longevity evidence review, they give it a 390-item quality checklist and ask it to produce something that passes the audit. A separate AI agent handles the auditing, so the model can’t confirm its own errors. A process that previously required a two-person team more than two months per review can now run in a fraction of that time.
I’ll be transparent: AI4L is Forever Healthy’s own tool, and the coverage I read comes from their own release. But the system is MIT-licensed and publicly available, and the approach is methodologically sound.
What genuinely excites me is access. The filter I’ve built over decades — knowing which studies hold up clinically versus which ones only look good on a press release — most people don’t have it. They’re getting their information from the brand selling the product. A tool that helps close that gap is worth paying attention to.
What it can’t replace is pattern recognition built from watching real patients. Two people walk in with identical biomarkers and the same protocol. One responds dramatically. The other barely moves. The variables that explain the difference are almost never inside the published study. They live in the full human context: sleep quality, stress load, gut health, whether they’re actually following the protocol, what else is running in the background of their lives. A 390-item checklist, however thorough, cannot see that.
Use AI4L as a starting point, not an endpoint. Let it raise better questions. Don’t expect it to close them.
Health Anxiety vs. Health Literacy: Two Different Bodies
Most people trying to evaluate health claims right now are doing it from a state of health anxiety, not health literacy. These feel similar from the inside. They are physiologically different states.
Health anxiety says: I heard NAD+ is good, I don’t want to get old, I’m going to spend a thousand dollars on a drip. It’s driven by fear of decline, not understanding of mechanism. It bypasses the delivery question, the source question, and the foundation question. It just acts, because acting feels like control.
Health literacy asks: what does NAD+ actually do, what does the evidence say about delivery mechanisms, what free pathways should I build first, and what does the research actually show versus what the brand says? Same molecule. Completely different decision. Completely different outcome.
And here is what most people miss: health anxiety is not just emotionally uncomfortable. It is a physiological state with measurable downstream effects. Cortisol climbs. Immune function drops. Sleep quality degrades. The person perpetually alarmed by the next health threat is doing something to their own biology in the process of chasing solutions. You can spend hundreds of dollars a month on longevity products and be actively working against your own health through the anxiety driving the purchases.
When someone genuinely shifts from health anxiety into real health literacy, here is what I’ve watched change.
They stop making decisions from fear and start making them from evidence, which is a measurably different state to operate from. They recognize that the most powerful longevity interventions available are free, and they stop looking past them in search of something more expensive. They bring better questions to every clinical conversation they have, and better questions consistently get better answers.
The shift does not stay in the health space. The same capacity you develop to evaluate health claims is the one you bring to a business decision, a belief you’ve carried without examining it, a relationship pattern you’ve been running on autopilot. Health literacy becomes life literacy. That is what’s actually available here.
Communal Healing and the Context Modern Medicine Stripped Away
The Haudenosaunee chieftain’s point is worth sitting with seriously, not just as cultural history but as a practical insight about how discernment actually develops.
The False Face Society, one of the Haudenosaunee’s most significant healing traditions, operated on a premise radically different from the modern clinical model. Healing wasn’t something that happened to an individual in a treatment room. It was something the community did together, with trained healers, elders who understood the full context, and the presence of everyone who mattered to the person being healed. The entire system was designed to hold the individual inside something larger than themselves during the process.
Modern medicine removed all of that and called it efficiency.
What got stripped out wasn’t just ceremony. It was the guide. The communal context. The framework built through long experience, passed through real relationships, not product lines. And in its place, we got the individual consumer standing alone in front of a wall of supplements, trying to evaluate health claims with no training, no guide, and no one to call when they’re not sure.
Discernment is a communal skill. You build it through repetition with trusted guides. You build it faster alongside people doing the same work. An individual removed from meaningful community loses the context that makes real health wisdom possible. This is what the indigenous healing tradition understood that the modern supplement industry counts on you to forget.
The people who get the most out of every clinical intervention I’ve observed share one consistent thing. They came in asking better questions than most. They had someone they trusted who helped them learn how to ask. They were not evaluating alone.
That is the context worth rebuilding. Not just better products. Better questions, held inside better relationships.
EF-AQs
What is the difference between NMN and NAD+ supplements for longevity? NAD+ taken orally very likely breaks down during digestion before it can be absorbed. NMN and NR are precursor compounds your body can actually absorb and convert to NAD+ through natural metabolic pathways. Of the two approaches, precursors are currently where the most promising human data sits, though the studies remain early and mostly small. Read more →
How do you evaluate health claims without a medical degree? The most useful starting point is the delivery mechanism question: can this product actually reach its intended target inside the body? That single question eliminates most of what is currently being marketed. From there, find the researcher running the clinical trials, not the brand running the ads, and read what they’re actually publishing. Read more →
Why don’t NAD+ IV drips work as advertised? A Stanford researcher whose lab is running the clinical trials has described IV NAD+ infusions as very inefficient at getting NAD+ into the cells. The assumption was that bypassing digestion would solve the absorption problem. The trial data shows it doesn’t solve it the way the industry claims. At a thousand dollars a session, with side effects including cramping and nausea, the product does not deliver what the price implies. Read more →
What is health literacy, and why does it matter for longevity? Health literacy is the ability to evaluate health claims from understanding rather than fear. It means knowing what a molecule actually does, what the evidence says about how to deliver it, and what free behavioral interventions are available before any product. People who operate from health literacy consistently make better clinical decisions, spend less, and produce better outcomes than those operating from health anxiety. Read more →
Action Step
You don’t need a new program to start building the ability to evaluate health claims today.
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