I have a confession: I watched my husband take nitric oxide gummies for 6 months. He was hoping the claims made by the beet-adjacent product, “Nearly 2x more effective blood pressure support than diet and exercise alone.” were going to help lower his blood pressure. As someone who knows a bit about reading marketing claims for the exaggeration, I should have known better. Nothing changed. Eventually, he reached the right conclusion: good marketing, tasty treat, cancel the subscription.
According to Dr. Nathan Bryan — the biochemist who’s been doing nitric oxide research since before most wellness influencers were born — gummies are, biochemically speaking, a scam.
Let’s get into it.
You can also listen to the audio here. Also available on Spotify and Apple
Prefer reading? Get the episode transcript here:
Nitric Oxide Is Not a Supplement Trend. It’s a Mechanism.
Nitric oxide got crowned “Molecule of the Year” by Science magazine back in 1992, and in 1998 the Nobel Prize went to the scientists who figured out what it actually does in the body. Dr. Bryan has spent the three decades since then studying it — not marketing it, studying it, which is a distinction that’s going to matter a lot in a minute.
Here’s the plain-language version of what nitric oxide does: it’s a gas your body produces that opens up your blood vessels, which means better blood flow, better oxygen delivery, better blood pressure regulation, better cognitive function, and yes, better sexual function. It also tells your own stem cells when to mobilize and differentiate, which is why it matters for wound healing and recovery. And it protects your telomeres — the caps on your chromosomes that shorten as you age — by activating an enzyme called telomerase.
Dr. Bryan’s actual claim, verbatim: the loss of nitric oxide production in the body is the earliest event in the onset and progression of every chronic disease. Not a contributing factor. The earliest event. Sit with that for a second, because it reframes almost every conversation you’ve had about “healthy aging.”
And yet — over 200,000 scientific papers have been published on this molecule, and most people have never heard of it outside of an Instagram ad for a gummy or beet powder for improved heart health.
The Two Faucets, and How Modern Life Turns Both of Them Off
Your body makes nitric oxide two ways.
The first is an enzyme in the lining of your blood vessels called nitric oxide synthase, or NOS. Over time, a high-sugar, high-carbohydrate diet, antacids, proton pump inhibitors, and cholesterol-lowering medications all degrade this enzyme’s function — what’s clinically called endothelial dysfunction. (Statins, in particular, are mitochondrial toxicants — that’s Dr. Bryan’s phrase, not mine, and I’m not wading further into the statin wars today. I’ve written separately about statins and women, here, and here, and that’s a rabbit hole for another day.)
The second pathway runs through your mouth. Dietary nitrate — from vegetables — gets converted by oral bacteria into a usable form of nitric oxide. Which means anything that nukes your oral microbiome shuts this pathway down too: fluoride in your water and your toothpaste, and antiseptic mouthwash.
Here’s Dr. Bryan’s actual recipe for tanking someone’s nitric oxide production, and it should sound uncomfortably familiar:
- eat a lot of sugar and refined carbs,
- drink fluoridated water,
- brush with fluoride toothpaste,
- swish antiseptic mouthwash a couple times a day,
- and take an antacid daily.
The numbers on how many Americans are doing exactly this are not subtle. Seventy-two percent of U.S. municipalities fluoridate their water. Ninety-eight percent of Americans use fluoride toothpaste. Two out of three use antiseptic mouthwash every day. There are 100 million antacid prescriptions written annually, on top of the two-thirds of Americans who report using an over-the-counter antacid. As Dr. Bryan put it: “And we wonder why Americans are sick.”
Why Arginine and Beet Supplements Are Mostly Theater
If you’ve bought a nitric oxide supplement, it probably contains L-arginine, the amino acid your enzyme converts into nitric oxide, or it’s beet-based, banking on beets’ nitrate content. Here’s the problem with both.
You are not deficient in arginine. Ever. Your body makes plenty of it. The bottleneck isn’t the raw material — it’s the enzyme that converts it, which is the thing getting wrecked by sugar, statins, and antacids in the first place. Dr. Bryan’s metaphor, and it’s a good one: taking arginine to fix a nitric oxide deficiency is like putting gas in a car with a blown engine. You’re not out of fuel. You’re out of engine.
Beets have the opposite problem. The active compound, nitrate, requires two things to become usable nitric oxide: healthy oral bacteria and adequate stomach acid. Most adults — especially anyone on a PPI or antacid, and especially anyone dealing with age-related low stomach acid — have neither in sufficient supply. So you can eat all the beets you want and get nothing for it, because nitrate that never gets converted is just… nitrate. It leaves in your urine, your sweat, and elsewhere. Inert.
The Gummy Grift, Spelled Out
This is the part of the conversation that made me want to write this whole post.
Gummies and chews are made from a sugar-and-glycerin (or seed oil) matrix. Sugar is sticky at a molecular level — it binds to the active ingredients you’re trying to deliver and blocks them from doing whatever they’re supposed to do in your body. So the very format of a gummy can inactivate the ingredient inside it.
Then there’s the clinical trial sleight of hand. Companies will cite a published clinical trial for their “clinically proven” claim — except the trial was run on the raw ingredient in isolation, not on the actual gummy or chew being sold. Dr. Bryan was blunt about this: you will never find a clinical trial using the actual gummy product that replicates the results of the ingredient alone. It doesn’t happen. He called it fraud and deceptive marketing, and honestly, I’m not going to soften that for him.
His tip for spotting a marketing company dressed up as a science company: try to find the president or CEO’s name on the website. If you can’t, ask yourself what they’re hiding, and why.
You Can’t Dose Nitrate Through Diet, and Here’s Why
Even if you’re doing everything “right” — eating your kale, your spinach, your celery — Dr. Bryan’s own research shows you still can’t reliably control your nitrate intake through food. In a 2015 study, his team pulled the same vegetables off shelves in five different U.S. cities and tested them. The nitrate content varied by as much as 50-fold in the same vegetable depending on where it was grown — soil conditions, regional agronomy, all of it. Celery from Dallas versus celery from Chicago might as well be different foods.
Conclusion: you genuinely cannot know how much nitrate you’re getting from produce. Combine that with the oral bacteria and stomach acid bottleneck above, and “just eat more vegetables” turns out to be much less useful advice than it sounds.
If You’re on an Antacid or a PPI, Please Don’t Just Quit
I want to be careful here because this is exactly the kind of information that gets misused. Dr. Bryan was explicit: do not stop a proton pump inhibitor cold turkey. Your body will overproduce stomach acid in response and you will be miserable, possibly worse off than before.
The protocol he described: take half your current dose for ten days, then that same half dose every other day for another ten days, then stop. The idea is to let the drug clear your system slowly instead of rebounding. He also suggested apple cider vinegar before meals during the taper, to help re-acidify the stomach so you can actually digest protein without triggering reflux.
Talk to your physician before you touch a prescription. This isn’t hedging — it’s just how tapering off a drug that changes your stomach chemistry actually has to work.
Hydroxyapatite: The Ingredient Dr. Bryan Forgot to Explain
Midway through our conversation, Dr. Bryan mentioned that his toothpaste, Breath of Life, is hydroxyapatite-based — and then, understandably, got so excited talking about why he built it that he never actually told listeners what hydroxyapatite is. So let me fill that gap, because it’s worth knowing.
Hydroxyapatite is a naturally occurring mineral — a form of calcium phosphate — and it happens to be the primary mineral your body already uses to build teeth and bone. It makes up about 97% of your tooth enamel and roughly 60% of your bone mass. A toothpaste formulated with hydroxyapatite works by redepositing that mineral directly onto your teeth, patching microscopic erosion in the enamel and remineralizing it — which is a fundamentally different mechanism than fluoride, which works by chemically hardening the enamel surface (and, per this whole conversation, by killing a chunk of your oral microbiome in the process).
That second part is the reason hydroxyapatite matters for this episode specifically: your teeth get remineralized without collateral damage to the oral bacteria your body needs to convert dietary nitrate into nitric oxide. Dr. Bryan’s actual design goal for the toothpaste wasn’t just “avoid fluoride” — it was to selectively clear out the bad, opportunistic oral bacteria while leaving room for the good bacteria to repopulate. Remineralize, deplaque, freshen breath, and don’t torch the microbiome doing it.
The Mouth-Heart Connection Your Cardiologist Has Never Mentioned
This one is over a century old and somehow still not part of mainstream cardiology: bleeding gums allow pathogenic oral bacteria to translocate into your bloodstream, triggering a systemic inflammatory response. If you already have vulnerable arterial plaque, that inflammation can be the thing that causes it to rupture — which is a heart attack. Researchers have actually cultured oral pathogenic bacteria directly out of the arterial clots of people who died of sudden cardiac death.
Clean up the oral microbiome, and inflammatory markers — CRP, homocysteine, ferritin — measurably drop. Dr. Bryan’s observation: cardiologists don’t look in the mouth. Neither do GI doctors, or the specialists treating cognitive decline, despite the mouth being about as close to the brain as an organ gets. Something is broken about how specialized modern medicine has become when the mouth is nobody’s jurisdiction.
The Wound That “Couldn’t” Heal
This is the story that anchors Dr. Bryan’s whole skincare line, and it’s a good one. His father was paralyzed in a car accident in 1984 and has used a wheelchair for over 40 years. In 2014, at 60 years old — paraplegic, diabetic, hypertensive — he developed a stage-four pressure ulcer that became infected and nearly killed him. Every wound care specialist told the family it was a non-healing wound. Impossible to close in a patient with his profile.
Dr. Bryan refused to accept that and started treating the wound himself, twice daily, with nitric oxide-releasing gauze. Within three to four weeks, the infection had cleared and the wound had generated roughly 50–60% new tissue. Combined with stem cell injections and oral nitric oxide lozenges, the wound was fully healed within six months.
That personal experience led directly to a shelf-stable, dual-chamber topical nitric oxide serum, launched in 2019, now backed by seven or eight published clinical trials showing improvements in fine lines and wrinkles, collagen deposition, skin hydration, acne (both cystic and teenage), eczema, and rosacea. It’s also being used by dermatologists and surgeons directly on incision sites to reduce infection and scarring, including keloid formation.
I’ll be testing his products over the next couple of months and will do before-and-after pics for the skincare line.
The underlying mechanism is the same throughout: nitric oxide dilates blood vessels and improves microcirculation, and skin — like any organ — needs adequate blood supply to repair itself. Diabetic wounds specifically fail to heal because poor circulation leaves the wound bed hypoxic and cut off from the immune system, so it can’t mobilize the stem cells needed for repair.
You Can’t Out-Supplement the Sun
Dr. Bryan’s take on sunlight is refreshingly free of the sunscreen panic that’s dominated the last few decades of dermatology messaging. Vitamin D is a potent activator of nitric oxide production, and there’s a real synergy between the two — which is part of why he sees people taking 5,000 or 10,000 IU of vitamin D supplements and still showing mediocre serum levels. You cannot fully replace what actual sunlight does.
There’s a second mechanism at play too: nitric oxide gets stored in your body bound to metals and to proteins via a chemical bond, and both ultraviolet and infrared light have enough energy to break those bonds and release the stored nitric oxide. That’s part of why red light therapy and infrared saunas work — but, importantly, your body still has to be capable of making nitric oxide in the first place for that release mechanism to have anything to release. Morning sunlight, in particular, is Dr. Bryan’s preference.
Nasal Breathing Is a Free Nitric Oxide Hack, and You’re Probably Not Doing It
The same NOS enzyme that lines your blood vessels also lives in your nasal passages. When you breathe through your nose, mechanoreceptors activate that enzyme and produce nitric oxide gas directly, which then gets delivered into your lower airways — dilating your bronchioles and pulmonary arteries, matching ventilation to blood flow, and improving oxygen delivery. This is a real, mechanistic reason nasal breathing and deep breathing lower blood pressure, not a wellness platitude.
Where This Leaves You
Dr. Bryan’s closing list, more or less verbatim: get rid of fluoride toothpaste, stop using antiseptic mouthwash, get off antacids (properly, with your doctor, not cold turkey), cut the sugar and refined carbs, move your body regularly, breathe through your nose, get 20 to 30 minutes of sunlight — morning if you can manage it — try an 18-hour daily fast, eat real food, and drink clean water.
None of that is complicated. None of it requires a subscription. Most of it is free. Which might be exactly why it doesn’t get marketed nearly as hard as the gummies do.
If you want to go deeper, Dr. Bryan’s book is The Secret of Nitric Oxide: Bringing the Science to Life, and his products — including the toothpaste, mouth rinse, lozenges, and skincare serum — are at N101.com. Find him on Instagram at @drnathansbryan and on YouTube, where he regularly does public myth-corrections on nitric oxide misinformation, which, frankly, is a genre I wish more scientists were willing to participate in.
Aging happens. Suffering — and apparently, useless gummies — are optional. If this one shifted how you think about your medicine cabinet, forward it to a friend, and come back next week for another conversation worth being rebellious about.
About the Host
I, Greg Cox, have been working in the wellness space for 20+ years and was a chef for 25 years before that, often creating health meals for restaurants and as a private chef. I created the Rebellious Wellness Lifestyle Podcast to empower women to challenge the limitations society places on them as they age.
I believe in science without outsourcing intuition, in prevention over treatment, and in the radical act of remaining visible, engaged, and fully expressed at every age.
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