I got this wrong about nitric oxide.

I thought I had nitric oxide supplements figured out. But when the results were underwhelming, I took a closer look. Here's what I found.

By Martin Boyle · Sponsored Content

Ann Arbor, MI · Updated this week · 7 min read

Four purchases, four reorder dates, and no line item anywhere telling me what the whole thing covered. (Photo: Daily Health Briefs)

The One Thing I Never Checked

I have been buying supplements for a long time and I am reasonably good at it. I check the dose against the study rather than against the marketing. I know which forms survive digestion and which ones mostly do not.

Which is exactly why it took me years to do the obvious thing. I had never checked whether all four bottles together were actually doing the job.

Rule One: Nitric Oxide Boosters Are Usually The Weakest Link

I had the rest of my routine dialled in. Protein, creatine, sleep, training. I knew what I was taking and why. The circulation product was the one part I had never questioned.

That was the weak link. Not because the other things were wrong, but because I had applied a different standard to the one thing I was taking specifically for blood flow.

If the circulation product is the part you never really checked, that is the part worth checking first.

Rule Two: The Number On The Front Is Not The Dose On The Back

My beet powder said 8,000 milligrams on the front. Turn it over and that is an extract ratio, not 8 grams of anything in the scoop.

Raw powder weight, extract ratio, standardized active content and supplied dose are four different measurements, and only one of them is what the research was run on.

So the biggest number on the front tells you almost nothing.

The other half of it is consistency. Plants are a crop, so what is in them changes from farm to farm and season to season. When an ingredient is branded, a company is guaranteeing you get the same thing in every bottle. That is what you are paying extra for. It is worth deciding on purpose instead of by accident.

Rule Three: Check What The Bottle Does Not Do

Every bottle I owned was solving one part of the problem and leaving the rest to me.

My beet powder gave me nitrates. It did nothing about absorption, so I bought a black pepper extract. It did nothing for the vessels themselves, so I bought resveratrol. Every one of those purchases made sense on its own. That is how a careful shopper ends up with four bottles and no plan, because nobody buys a stack. You buy one bottle at a time, months apart, and you never add it up.

Run Your Own Shelf Through It

Here is the comparison I ended up with. Four jobs, four separate bottles, and what BloodFlow-7® uses for each one.

Filling this in took me about ten minutes and I had been putting it off for years. Two of my four were doing versions of the same job and I was paying twice for the overlap on the three days a week I remembered the pre workout. The gap was absorption, which is the least interesting line on any panel and the one I had skipped for six years.

Rule Four: Does It Help Your Body Produce Nitric Oxide?

Beetroot and nitrate depend on bacteria in your mouth. Nitrate only becomes nitric oxide if oral bacteria convert it first. Studies show antiseptic mouthwash blunts the effect. If you use mouthwash, you may be cancelling your beet powder before it reaches your bloodstream.

Straight arginine is mostly broken down before it gets to work. Oral L-arginine is largely metabolised on first pass, which is why the plasma response is poor relative to the dose on the label.

Every one of these works on one pathway. Anything that blocks that pathway makes the whole product ineffective, and you would have no way of knowing.

Where I Landed

I moved to BloodFlow-7® because its four ingredients could do a better job than the stuff I was taking before.

Nitrosigine® keeps a key building block for nitric oxide elevated in the blood for up to six hours per dose.

S7® is a blend of seven plant extracts studied for supporting the body’s own nitric oxide production

Trans-Resveratrol is studied for how well arteries relax and widen.

BioPerine® is the absorption piece. It was the gap in my own stack and it is the line most formulas leave you to solve yourself.

★★★★★ From People Who Audited Their Own Shelf First

Martin Boyle

Health & Wellness Contributor

Martin Boyle has been reading supplement panels for twenty years and building spreadsheets about them for about fifteen. He writes about buying decisions that survive contact with arithmetic.

This article is sponsored content. Daily Health Briefs may receive compensation for purchases made through links in this article. Juvenon.com is a private dietary supplement company. Statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. Products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.