Precursors Explained Most people who spend money on NAD+ injections believe they are delivering NAD+ directly to their cells, and that the injection is more powerful than a pill because it skips digestion and goes straight into the bloodstream. The first part of that is true. The second part is where the logic breaks down. To understand why, you need a map of how NAD+ actually works in the body, because without that map, the argument for injections sounds perfectly reasonable. NAD+, which stands for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, is a molecule your cells use as a kind of electron shuttle, picking up and dropping off charged particles to power the energy production happening inside your mitochondria. Every cell in your body needs it constantly, and your total NAD+ supply turns over multiple times per day, meaning your body is continuously breaking it down and rebuilding it. The problem is that NAD+ is a large molecule, and large molecules cannot pass through cell membranes the way small ones can. The membrane is a selective barrier, and NAD+ does not have a direct transport mechanism that lets it cross intact into the interior of the cell where it is actually needed. This is where the injection story gets complicated. When you inject NAD+ into your bloodstream, the molecule circulates. But to get inside a cell and reach the mitochondria where it will be used, it cannot enter as NAD+. Instead, it gets broken down outside the cell into smaller components, specifically into something called nicotinamide, which is a simpler building block that cells can actually absorb. Once inside, the cell reconstructs NAD+ from that raw material through a series of enzymatic steps. The molecule you paid to inject was disassembled before it was used. What your cell actually worked with was the breakdown product, not the original compound. This is not a flaw in your biology. It is the system working correctly. Cells maintain tight control over what enters them, and they have sophisticated machinery for building NAD+ internally from precursors. The same machinery runs whether the precursor came from an injection, a supplement, or food.