The short version: it's a concentrated broccoli sprout shot from a Swedish company, and it has become one of the hottest supplements in endurance sports. Cole Hocker says he took one before winning the 5K at the Tokyo world championships. Mads Pedersen credits it with his best-ever 90-minute ride. Conner Mantz has used it. And the claims are… ambitious. Lower lactate, more mitochondria, better recovery, less oxidative stress. Basically everything short of curing your split ends or healing a broken heart.
So does Nomio actually work? Maybe, a little, for some kinds of hard training, based on a very small amount of research run mostly by the people who sell it. The mechanism is genuinely interesting. The evidence is genuinely thin. Here's the full Nomio review: what's cool, where I'd pump the brakes, and who should save their $28 a box.
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Nomio is a 60-milliliter shot made from broccoli sprouts. The active compounds are isothiocyanates (ITCs), the same family of compounds you get from broccoli, kale, and cabbage, just in a much more concentrated dose. By one estimate, a single shot delivers roughly what you'd get from about six pounds of raw broccoli (Hutchinson, 2025). It comes out of research at the Karolinska Institute and the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences, and one of its co-founders, Filip Larsen, is the scientist behind most of the studies.
A box of four shots runs about $28, so roughly $7 a pop.
How the Nomio Broccoli Shot Is Supposed to Work
This is the genuinely cool part. The mechanism is different from your typical antioxidant supplement.
ITCs are actually mild pro-oxidants, a bit like exercise itself. They activate your body's Nrf2 pathway, which turns up your own built-in antioxidant defenses. That matters because high-dose antioxidant supplements can backfire for athletes. In one well-known trial, people who took vitamin C and E while endurance training had a blunted increase in the markers of new mitochondria compared with people who trained without them (Paulsen et al., 2014). The idea behind ITCs is the opposite: instead of mopping up the training signal, amplify your body's response to it. That's a meaningfully different approach than most of what's on the supplement shelf, and it's worth paying attention to.
The backstory is interesting too, because lactate wasn't even the original hypothesis. The research started with a 2021 overtraining study. Larsen's group pushed volunteers through four weeks of progressively harder training, and in the hardest week, their mitochondria stopped working as well and their blood sugar control got worse (Flockhart et al., 2021). That pointed the researchers toward oxidative stress, and they wondered whether boosting Nrf2 with ITCs could counteract some of the damage. The lactate reduction showed up later, almost as a side finding. Honestly, that's more compelling to me than if they'd set out to build a lactate-lowering supplement and conveniently found one. It suggests they stumbled onto something real, even if nobody fully understands the mechanism yet.
Does Nomio Really Work? What the Research Shows
Here's everything I could find on humans:
The 2023 study. Nine healthy people did seven days of daily intense training twice, once with broccoli sprout shots and once with a placebo, in random order, without knowing which was which. With the sprouts, they showed less oxidative damage in muscle, lower lactate during submaximal exercise, fewer severe overnight blood sugar crashes, and better performance on a test to exhaustion. VO2 max itself didn't change (Flockhart et al., 2023). The performance gain was about 20 seconds on a lab test to exhaustion, roughly 12%.
The 2025 preprint. A follow-up from the same Stockholm group found that a single shot lowered lactate at a given speed or power about three hours later, compared with placebo. As of this writing it's a preprint, meaning it hasn't been through peer review (Hutchinson, 2025).
The cell work. An independent lab at York University reported dramatic effects on training response and mitochondria in muscle fibers exposed to ITCs in a dish (Hutchinson, 2025). Interesting, but that's muscle in a test tube, not humans running races.
The lactate effect seems to show up most at moderate-to-hard intensities, roughly 3 to 8 millimolar lactate, which lines up with sustained efforts from about ten minutes to a few hours. That's a different window from baking soda, which seems to help shorter, harder efforts in the one-to-ten-minute range. Fittingly, the company recommends taking it only before hard sessions or during tough training blocks, not on easy days or rest days, because the whole idea depends on amplifying an oxidative stress signal that only exists if you're training hard enough to create one. Larsen has even said he doesn't think ITCs are useful for healthy people who don't train (Hutchinson, 2025). Which is… refreshingly honest for a supplement company.
The research team has real credibility, too. Members of this research community did the foundational dietary nitrate work that helped make beet juice one of the handful of performance supplements with strong enough evidence to earn a nod in the International Olympic Committee's supplement consensus (Maughan et al., 2018). That pedigree matters.
Nomio Reviews: Where I Get Skeptical
The evidence base is really thin. One published human study with nine people, one preprint, and some cell work. The published human study comes from Larsen's own lab, he co-founded the company, and two of the study's authors hold a patent on using isothiocyanates to boost athletic performance. 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. It doesn't mean the science is bad. It does mean we're leaning heavily on research from people with a financial stake in the answer, and none of it has been independently replicated in humans yet.
The only real performance result so far is that nine people lasted about 20 seconds longer on a lab test to exhaustion. That's a lab protocol, not a race. Nobody has shown that ITCs make athletes faster in competition. Even one athlete who uses Nomio, marathoner Clayton Young, has pointed out the disconnect between the research, which focuses on mitochondria, and the marketing, which sells it as a lactate reducer (Hutchinson, 2025). It's almost as if the company simplified the pitch into "baking soda alternative," which may undersell what's actually going on.
When sports scientists have been asked about it, the responses are mixed. Trent Stellingwerff of the Canadian Sport Institute Pacific called the work well-done and credible, but said there's not much of it yet. Another researcher called the existing data weak and unconvincing, though they're running their own study, which tells you something about the level of interest. And a WorldTour cycling team that tested it in the field didn't see an obvious drop in lactate, but riders said they felt like it worked and posted strong power numbers (Hutchinson, 2025). Which is exactly the kind of evidence that could be real, or could be placebo doing what placebo does best.
As Richard Feynman put it: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." That's why we run studies with placebos and control groups. The anecdotes are interesting. Anecdotes are not data.
Is Nomio Worth It? The Bottom Line
Nomio is more interesting than 95% of what the supplement industry sells. The mechanism is plausible, the researchers are legit, and it isn't just a repackaging of the same old antioxidant-vitamin-superfood nonsense. But "more interesting than most supplements" is a low bar. Right now the human evidence is one nine-person study and a preprint, both from the company's own research circle. Before I'd call it a must-have, I'd want to see independent replication, actual race performance data (not just biomarkers and lab tests), and that 2025 preprint through peer review. At about $7 a shot, it's also not cheap for something where the evidence is still emerging.
I'm not rushing out to buy it. More importantly, I don't want you to follow my lead in either direction. Our whole thing is helping you think more critically about supplements, 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 ripped 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, broccoli sprout compounds aren't on the banned list, and nothing in the research so far raises a safety flag. If you're a drug-tested athlete, check whether the batch you're buying is third-party tested, as with any supplement. And notice how hard the marketing leans on "organic" and "natural," which, as we've discussed 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. (Same energy as mushroom coffee.) I wouldn't restructure your fueling around this, and I'd be wary of the hype cycle doing what hype cycles always do. If you want a supplement with a much deeper evidence base, start with creatine. And the thing that will move your performance more than any shot is still eating enough carbohydrate, which, no, will not give you diabetes.
We pick apart supplement claims like this one on the Your Diet Sucks podcast. And if there's a product you keep seeing in your feed and want us to look into, bring it to the YDS community on Patreon. This post started as exactly that kind of listener question.
References
Flockhart, M., Nilsson, L. C., Tais, S., Ekblom, B., Apró, W., & Larsen, F. J. (2021). Excessive exercise training causes mitochondrial functional impairment and decreases glucose tolerance in healthy volunteers. Cell Metabolism, 33(5), 957–970. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2021.02.017
Flockhart, M., Nilsson, L. C., Tillqvist, E. N., Vinge, F., Millbert, F., Lännerström, J., Nilsson, P. H., Samyn, D., Apró, W., Sundqvist, M. L., & Larsen, F. J. (2023). Glucosinolate-rich broccoli sprouts protect against oxidative stress and improve adaptations to intense exercise training. Redox Biology, 67, 102873. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.redox.2023.102873
Hutchinson, A. (2025, October 29). The newest endurance supplement is a broccoli shot. Does it work? Outside. https://www.outsideonline.com/health/nutrition/nomio-endurance-supplement-broccoli/
Maughan, R. J., Burke, L. M., Dvorak, J., Larson-Meyer, D. E., Peeling, P., Phillips, S. M., Rawson, E. S., Walsh, N. P., Garthe, I., Geyer, H., Meeusen, R., van Loon, L. J. C., Shirreffs, S. M., Spriet, L. L., Stuart, M., Vernec, A., Currell, K., Ali, V. M., Budgett, R. G. M., … Engebretsen, L. (2018). IOC consensus statement: Dietary supplements and the high-performance athlete. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 52(7), 439–455. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2018-099027
Paulsen, G., Cumming, K. T., Holden, G., Hallén, J., Rønnestad, B. R., Sveen, O., Skaug, A., Paur, I., Bastani, N. E., Østgaard, H. N., Buer, C., Midttun, M., Freuchen, F., Wiig, H., Ulseth, E. T., Garthe, I., Blomhoff, R., Benestad, H. B., & Raastad, T. (2014). Vitamin C and E supplementation hampers cellular adaptation to endurance training in humans: A double-blind, randomised, controlled trial. The Journal of Physiology, 592(8), 1887–1901. https://doi.org/10.1113/jphysiol.2013.267419
