Why Japanese Women Have It and We Don't

Here is the part of the story that pissed me off the first time I read it.

NMN is not a sketchy chemical made in a lab.

It is naturally found in food.

More specifically: Real foods. Whole foods. The kind of food that has NOT been touched by a factory.

It is in edamame. It is in broccoli. It is in cabbage. It is in certain fermented vegetables.

It is in the kind of meals Japanese grandmothers have been cooking for their families on ordinary Tuesday nights for 800 years.

Japanese women are not doing anything special.

• They have no biohacking routine.
• They have no anti-aging clinic.
• They have no $400 bottles in their bathroom drawer.

They are just eating their grandmother's food.

The food that is full of the molecule that keeps the cellular battery charged.

That is why Japan has the highest life expectancy in the world. That is why Okinawa is one of the longest-lived spots on Earth. That is why their women in their 70s look like our women in their 50s.

It is not magic.

It is in the food.

And here is what nobody told American women.

Our food used to have it too.

Up until around 1985, American food was real.

• Frozen vegetables had real vegetables in them.
• Bread had real flour in it.
• Pickles were fermented.
• Eggs had darker yolks.
• Butter tasted like butter.

Then everything changed.

Our food started coming in boxes and bags and plastic trays.

• Heat destroys NMN.
• Processing strips it out.
• Long shelf life kills it.

For 40 years now, American women have been slowly losing the molecule that keeps their cellular battery full.

And we have been told over and over that the way we feel is "just normal aging."

It is not normal. It is starvation at the cellular level.

The day I read all of this, I sat at my kitchen table with my coffee getting cold, and I felt something I had not felt in years.

Anger.

Real, righteous, female anger.

What Hollywood Has Been Hiding for 20 Years

I told myself I would just eat more edamame.

I bought 4 bags. I steamed them every day for 2 weeks.

It was not enough.

The amount of edamame I would have to eat every day to actually refill my cellular battery is somewhere around 3 pounds.

Per day.

Forever.

That was when I started to understand why the wealthy version of this product is sold in IV bags at clinics in Beverly Hills and Manhattan for $1,000 a session.

I went down a different rabbit hole that next morning.

• Famous actresses in their 60s.
• Models in their 50s.
• The wives of billionaires.
• The women who somehow defy what is supposed to happen to women's faces and bodies after 50.

Most of them have been quietly visiting wellness clinics in Los Angeles, New York, and Miami for years.

They sit in soft leather chairs while a thin tube drips a clear liquid into their arm.

The clear liquid is NMN.

Some of them go once a week. Some of them go twice a month. The bills run anywhere from $800 to $2,400 a session.

A friend of mine in Los Angeles, who used to work as a personal assistant for a famous actress, confirmed it for me on the phone. She said:

That is also why my sister Carol, at 62, has the skin she has.

I called my cousin in California and asked her.

She told me Carol had been driving 90 minutes each way to a wellness clinic in Los Angeles for 6 years.

Getting NMN drips. Spending what my cousin estimated was about $30,000 a year.

I sat down at the kitchen table when she told me that.

For 26 years I had told myself my sister had good genes and a rich husband.

The truth was simpler. She had been buying back the cellular charge that American food stopped giving her, and she had been hiding it from me.

I cannot afford a $30,000-a-year drip habit.

I am a retired teacher with a fixed pension and a husband who still drives a 2014 truck.

So I kept looking.

And I found a small American supplement company called Floreva.

The Reason Most NMN Supplements Are a Waste of Money

Before I tell you about Floreva, I want to tell you the part of this story that surprised me the most.

I almost bought a cheap NMN bottle off Amazon first.

I am glad I did not.

Because what I learned, after another 4 hours of reading, is that most of the NMN supplements being sold to American women right now are barely working.

The reason is something most NMN companies do not talk about.

When your body uses NMN to refill the battery, it has to use a second helper molecule to actually finish the conversion.

Without that second molecule, more than half of the NMN you swallow gets wasted.

It floats through your system and gets flushed out.

The helper is called TMG.

It is cheap to add. But for whatever reason, most of the big NMN brands on Amazon and at the drugstore leave it out.

Floreva was the only company I found that includes the TMG.

They also include two more helpers.

• Quercetin — the same compound found in the skin of red onions. It cleans up the leftover damage that the cellular work creates.
• Resveratrol — what gives red wine its health benefits. It flips on the longevity switches that the NMN feeds.

So one bottle of Floreva contains 4 ingredients working together as a complete system.

• The NMN refills the cellular battery.
• The TMG makes sure the body actually uses it.
• The quercetin cleans up the wear.
• The resveratrol activates the longevity switches.

It is the same complete system the rich women in Los Angeles have been getting through their IV drips.

The difference is that Floreva put it into a capsule.

And the capsule costs less than a cup of coffee a day.

What I Verified Before I Bought

I want to tell you what I checked, before I gave Floreva my credit card information that night.

I am a retired teacher. I do not part with $90 lightly.

So before I clicked the order button, I sat at my kitchen counter with my reading glasses on and I went through their website slowly.

Here is what I found.

Floreva is made in the United States. The bottles are produced at an American facility, in batches, and every batch is sent to an outside laboratory for testing.

That outside lab checks two things:

• First, that what is printed on the label is actually inside the capsule.
• Second, that nothing else snuck in during production. No mystery fillers. No heavy metals. No contaminants.

This is called third-party testing, and it is rare in the supplement world.

Most of the cheap NMN bottles on Amazon are not third-party tested. The companies are allowed to print whatever they want on the label, and most of them are doing exactly that.

A 2022 industry investigation found that nearly 60% of cheap NMN supplements contained less of the active ingredient than the label claimed.

Some had almost none at all.

Floreva publishes their lab results.

The other thing I checked was the customer reviews.

That refund rate is the lowest I have ever seen for a supplement.

For comparison, the average supplement on Amazon has a refund rate somewhere between 8 and 14 percent.

Floreva is at less than 1 percent.

That number told me everything I needed to know.

If a product was a scam, more than 1 percent of customers would ask for their money back. The fact that the rate is that low means the product is doing what it is supposed to do.

I clicked order.

I bought 3 bottles, with free shipping, for $89.99.

The bottles arrived about 3 weeks later in a brown box.

• The label was clean.
• The capsules were clear vegetable capsules with no weird coatings.
• Inside were 60 capsules per bottle. A 30-day supply per bottle, at 2 capsules a day.
• There were 4 ingredients listed on the back. Just the four. No fillers. No stimulants. Nothing else.

That night I set the bottle on the counter next to my coffee maker, so I would remember to take it the next morning.

What Happened in My First 90 Days

I want to walk you through every week, because the messages I keep getting ask me what to expect.

Week 1

I took two capsules with my morning coffee on a Tuesday.

I felt nothing on day one. Nothing on day two.

By Friday morning, something was different.

• I woke up at 5:48 a.m. before my alarm.
• I got out of bed without my knees popping.
• I made breakfast standing up the entire time.
• My husband said I seemed cheerful. He was right.

Week 2

I started sleeping all the way through the night.

For the first time in 4 years, I did not wake up at 3 a.m. with my heart racing.

I caught my reflection in the hallway mirror on a Sunday afternoon.

I stopped. I backed up. I looked again.

• There was color in my cheeks.
• The dark circles were lighter.
• My eyes looked awake.

Week 3

• I lost 4 pounds without changing my diet.
• My old jeans, the ones I had shoved to the back of the closet, fit again.
• My nails started growing. I had to file them on a Tuesday for the first time in years.

Week 4

A young woman tapped me on the shoulder in the checkout line at Kroger.

She asked me what I used on my skin.

I told her I did not really have a routine.

She laughed and said she did not believe me.

I got to my car and sat in the parking lot for 10 minutes, almost in tears, because I could not remember the last time a stranger had stopped me to say I looked beautiful.

Month 2

• My hair started looking thicker at the crown.
• The thinning patch I had been hiding with hair powder was filling back in.
• I lost another 7 pounds.
• I started walking 2 miles a day on the path behind our subdivision, and I actually enjoyed it.
• My husband asked me what I was doing.

Month 3

• I went to a salon for the first time in 2 years. I got my hair colored back to the exact same blonde I had at 40.
• I bought a red silk dress from Macy's that fit me in a way no dress had fit me in 15 years.
• I started wearing lipstick again.

An old friend from church saw me at Target and did not recognize me.

She walked up and introduced herself like I was a stranger.

When she figured out who I was, she said:

That was the week of the wedding.

The rest of that story is in my other post.

What I will say here is this:

• I lost 22 pounds.
• I dropped 3 dress sizes.
• My hair came back.
• My skin came back.
• My energy came back.
• My mood came back.

The version of me from the photographs in my forties came back.

She had been waiting for me.

I Am Not the Only One

In the four months since my first post went up, women have written to me from all over the country to share what happened to them.

I am not allowed to use anyone's name in this article. The privacy of these women matters more than convincing you. So I am going to share what they said in their own paraphrased words.

Each of these is a woman over 50 who started taking Floreva NMN.

I have over 600 of these messages saved.

I will not pretend everyone gets the same result. The product page itself says individual results may vary. Some women feel something within the first week. Some women take 30 to 45 days before they notice. A small number of women try it and decide it is not for them, and they get a full refund.

But the pattern in these messages is clear.

The women who give it 60 to 90 days, two capsules every morning, are the women who are writing me with stories that make me want to cry.

The Three Reasons I Am Telling You to Buy 3 Bottles

I want to be honest with you about something.

I am not paid by Floreva. I have no business relationship with them. They do not even know I am writing this article.

But I am about to tell you to buy 3 bottles instead of 1.

I want to explain why, in plain English, so you understand the math.

REASON ONE — The deepest changes show up between day 60 and day 90.

If you buy 1 bottle, you get 30 days. That is enough time to feel the first shift.

• The energy.
• The sleep.
• Maybe the mood.
• Maybe the first compliment from a stranger.

But the skin tightening, the hair regrowth, the 18 pound weight drop, the moment your old friend does not recognize you in the store…

Those happen in month 2 and month 3.

After your cellular batteries have had time to refill, hold the charge, and start to compound.

If you only buy 1 bottle, you will likely see the beginning. Then your bottle will run out. By the time you reorder, wait 3 weeks for shipping, and start back up, you will have lost momentum.

The women writing me with the strongest results are the women who took it every morning for at least 90 days without a gap.

REASON TWO — The math on the 3-pack is the best deal Floreva sells.

I am going to lay it out for you the way I had to lay it out for myself before I bought.

• 1 bottle: $50 + $15 shipping = $65 total
• 2-pack: $69.99 with FREE shipping ($35/bottle)
• 3-pack: $89.99 with FREE shipping (~$30/bottle)

If you bought 3 bottles one at a time, you would pay $195 total.

The 3-pack is $89.99 with free shipping.

The 3-pack saves you $105.

That is real money, especially for a woman on a fixed income, the way I was.

It also works out to a little over $1 a day.

Less than a small coffee from a gas station.

REASON THREE — Stock has been moving fast.

Floreva is a small American company. They make their bottles in batches.

Twice last year they ran out of stock and customers had to wait 2 to 3 months for the next batch.

If you decide later you want more, you may have to wait.

If you have the 3-pack already in your pantry, you have 90 days of consistent supply, and you do not have to think about it again until late summer.

This is what I did. I have done it three times since.

The Guarantee

This was the part that gave me the courage to order in the first place.

Floreva offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on every order, including the 3-pack.

Here is how it works.

1. You order. The bottles arrive in about 3 weeks.
2. You start taking 2 capsules every morning, with or without food.
3. If at any point in the first 30 days you decide it is not for you, for any reason, you email their support team.
4. They refund your money. No returns. No restocking fee. No hoops.

According to Floreva's own customer numbers, fewer than 1 in 100 people who order ever ask for a refund.

That is a very small number.

I have been around the supplement world long enough to know that most companies have refund rates 10 to 20 times higher than that.

The reason their refund rate is that low is that the product works.

The 30-day guarantee gives you a full month of risk-free testing.

The 3-pack gives you the 90-day window where the deepest changes show up.

Together they give you the safest possible way to find out what this can do for you.

That is the deal.

Common Questions Women Have Asked Me

I have been answering these for 4 months now. Here are the ones that come up over and over.

Q: "Is this safe? I am on blood pressure medication."

A: I cannot give medical advice. What I will say is that NMN is not a drug. It is a molecule that exists in food. The other three ingredients in Floreva — TMG, quercetin, and resveratrol — are also food-based. If you are on any prescription, take the bottle to your next appointment and ask your physician. That is what I did. Mine was supportive.

Q: "Why have I never heard of this before?"

A: Because the wellness clinics in Los Angeles and New York were the first to figure it out, and they have been charging up to $2,400 per IV session. Until recently, that was the only place to get it. The information stayed quiet because keeping it quiet was good for business.

Q: "How long until I feel something?"

A: For me, it was Friday of week 1. The energy came first. For most of the women who have written me, the first thing they notice is in the first 2 weeks — energy, sleep, mood. The skin and weight and hair changes show up in month 2 and month 3.

Q: "Can I take it with my morning vitamins?"

A: Yes. I take mine with my multivitamin and my coffee. Two capsules, one swallow, done.

Q: "Can I take it on an empty stomach?"

A: Yes. The bottle says with or without food.

Q: "What if I do not feel anything?"

A: You email their support team within 30 days. They refund you. That is the deal.

Q: "My husband wants to know if he can take it too."

A: Yes. The product is for adults 35 and up, men and women. My husband has been taking it for 7 weeks. He has dropped 9 pounds and is sleeping through the night for the first time in a decade. His snoring is also better, which is a small marriage miracle.

Q: "Why is yours under $30 a bottle when other places sell NMN for over $200?"

A: Because Floreva is a small company that sells direct to customers. There is no middleman. There is no fancy packaging. There is no celebrity endorser getting paid millions. The savings get passed to women like us.