Nomio: The $7 Broccoli Shot Taking Over Endurance Sports

Q: "I've started to hear a lot about Nomio lately. Do you have any thoughts?"

Great question, and yeah, Nomio is everywhere right now.

The short version: it's a concentrated broccoli sprout shot from a Swedish company, and it's become the hottest supplement in endurance sports over the past year. Elite athletes from Cole Hocker to Mads Pedersen to Conner Mantz have been using it, and the claims are… ambitious. Lower lactate, more mitochondria, better recovery, reduced oxidative stress. Basically, everything short of curing your split ends or healing a broken heart.

Here's what I think is actually interesting about it, and where I'd pump the brakes:

The genuinely cool part: The mechanism is different from your typical antioxidant supplement. ITCs (isothiocyanates, the active compound in broccoli sprouts) are actually mild pro-oxidants, like exercise itself. They activate your body's Nrf2 pathway, which upregulates your own antioxidant defense system. So instead of blunting the training signal the way high-dose vitamin C or E can, the idea is that ITCs amplify the adaptive signal. That's a meaningfully different approach than most of what's on the supplement shelf, and it's worth paying attention to.

What's interesting about the backstory is that the lactate angle wasn't even the original hypothesis. The research started with a 2021 overtraining study, they pushed volunteers into progressively harder training over three weeks until their mitochondria weren't functioning well, blood sugar control tanked, and they got slower. The Nrf2 pathway appeared to be the culprit, so the researchers wondered whether boosting Nrf2 with ITCs could counteract overtraining effects. The lactate reduction was actually a surprise secondary finding. Which is honestly more compelling to me than if they'd set out to find a lactate-lowering supplement and conveniently found one, it suggests they stumbled onto something real, even if they don't fully understand the mechanism yet.

The nuance on when it might work: The lactate-lowering effects seem most apparent at moderate-to-hard intensities, roughly between 3 and 8 millimolar lactate, which corresponds to sustained efforts lasting about ten minutes to a few hours. That's a different window than baking soda, which seems to benefit shorter, more intense efforts in the one-to-ten-minute range. The company actually recommends only taking it before hard sessions or during tough training blocks (not on easy days or rest days) because the whole mechanism depends on amplifying an oxidative stress signal that only matters if you're training hard enough to generate one. Larsen has even said he doesn't think ITC intake is useful for healthy people who don't train, which is… refreshingly honest for a supplement company.

The research team has credibility, too. They're out of Karolinska Institute and the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences, and some of them did the foundational nitrate research that made beet juice one of the only IOC-endorsed supplements. That pedigree matters.

Where I get skeptical: The evidence base is still really thin. There are essentially two human studies, a 2023 study and a 2025 preprint, and both were led by Filip Larsen, who is a co-founder of Nomio. (That's like us publishing a peer-reviewed paper titled Your Diet Sucks Is the Greatest Nutrition Podcast of All Time: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Brilliant, Beautiful Hosts.) That doesn't mean the science is bad, but it does mean we're relying heavily on industry-funded research that hasn't been widely replicated yet. There's also an independent cell study from York University that showed dramatic mitochondrial effects, but that's muscle fibers in a dish, not humans running races.

The only actual "performance" result so far is that subjects lasted about 12% longer in a VO2max test to exhaustion, but that's a lab protocol, not a race. Nobody's shown that ITCs make athletes faster in competition. And it's worth noting that even one of the athletes using Nomio has pointed out the disconnect between the mitochondrial science and the way it's marketed as a lactate reducer, almost like the company wanted to simplify the pitch into a baking soda alternative, which undersells what might actually be going on.

When sports scientists have been asked about it, responses are mixed. Most are intrigued and think the work looks credible, but there's not a lot of it yet. At least one expert has described the existing data as unconvincing, though they're still planning their own study, which tells you something about the level of interest. A pro cycling team that tested it in field trials didn't see an obvious lactate decrease, but riders reported feeling like it worked and posted strong power numbers. Which is exactly the kind of evidence that could be real or could be placebo doing what placebo does best.

As Feynman said: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." That's why we do studies with placebos and control groups. The anecdotes are interesting, but anecdotes are not data.

My take: Nomio is more interesting than 95% of what the supplement industry produces, because the mechanism is plausible, the researchers are legit, and they're not just repackaging the same old antioxidant-vitamin-superfood nonsense. But "more interesting than most supplements" is a low bar. I'd want to see independent replication, actual race-day performance data (not just biomarkers and lab tests), and peer-reviewed publication of that 2025 preprint before I'd call this a must-have. At roughly $7 a shot, it's also not cheap for something where the evidence is still emerging.

I'm not rushing out to buy it, but more importantly, I don't want you to follow my lead in either direction. Our whole thing is challenging you to think more critically about your supplement choices, period. Before you buy anything, ask yourself: Does this actually work? What do I think it's going to do for me specifically? Just because Cole Hocker rips a shot before a world championship 5K doesn't mean it's going to transform your Sunday morning group ride.

If you want to try it and you've got the budget, it appears to be safe and WADA-compliant. But I'd note that the marketing leans hard on 'organic' and 'natural', which, as we've discussed on this show approximately one thousand times, is an appeal to nature, not an appeal to evidence. Broccoli sprouts aren't better science just because they grew in soil. I wouldn't restructure your fueling around this, and I'd be wary of the hype cycle doing what hype cycles always do.