Published October 29, 2025 02:45PM<\/p>\n
Andreas Almgren, who streaked to a new European half-marathon record of 58:41 earlier this month, swears by it. So does Cole Hocker: \u201cYeah, I ripped a shot before the 5K,\u201d he said<\/a> after taking gold in that event at the track and field world championships in Tokyo in September. Mads Pederson, former world cycling champion, credits it with spurring him to his best-ever 90-minute ride.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u201d is a supplement called Nomio, a concentrated shot extracted from broccoli sprouts that has emerged as the hottest new performance-enhancer among elite endurance athletes (as Velo\u2019s Jim Cotton recently reported<\/a>). The tagline printed on the box and splashed across the company\u2019s website<\/a> is that it\u2019s \u201ca natural compound that reduces lactate buildup during intense physical activity.\u201d The promise to lower lactate is reminiscent of claims about baking soda<\/a>, which has swept through endurance sport over the past few years. That\u2019s what is drawing athletes in\u2014but the actual science behind Nomio, preliminary though it remains, suggests a more complicated and perhaps more interesting picture.<\/p>\n Nomio as a Lactate Fighter<\/p>\n The active ingredient in Nomio is isothiocyanates, or ITCs, which are found in cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, kale, and cabbage. The product was developed by scientists at Sweden\u2019s Karolinska Institute and the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences\u2014by some of the same scientists who did pioneering research into the endurance-boosting abilities of the nitrates found in foods such as beets. Beet juice<\/a> has turned out to be one of the very few purported sports supplements backed by robust evidence, one of just five that the International Olympic Committee gives a thumbs-up to<\/a>. That parallel is encouraging: maybe another vegetable extract is ready to join the list.<\/p>\n The claims on the Nomio website are all over the map. Not only will it reduce lactate, it will also lower oxidative stress and inflammation, enhance training response to create more mitochondria, and accelerate post-exercise recovery. Oh, and it will also make your legs feel lighter. That sounds suspiciously like a magical pill that makes all your wishes come true\u2014a bargain at $28 for four doses.<\/p>\n The \u201cScience<\/a>\u201d tab on Nomio\u2019s website offers three references for these claims:<\/p>\n The first is a 2023 study<\/a> led by Filip Larsen, one of Nomio\u2019s co-founders, in which volunteers took a shot of Nomio (or a placebo) twice a day for a week while completing intense interval workouts on an exercise bike every day. The supplement reduced oxidative stress and lowered lactate levels during exercise, improved regulation of blood glucose, and extended time to exhaustion by about 12 percent in a VO2 max<\/a> test (though it didn\u2019t actually change VO2 max).<\/p>\n The second study hasn\u2019t yet been published, but is available as a preprint<\/a> while it undergoes peer review. It\u2019s also from Larsen\u2019s group, led by Michaela Sundqvist. This time it\u2019s a one-shot test: take a broccoli shot, then three hours later do some exercise. Once again, lactate levels were lower at a given speed or power output compared to with a placebo.<\/p>\n The third study<\/a> is a little more arcane. It involved stimulating individual muscle fibers in a test tube to simulate exercise. In the presence of ITCs, there was a dramatic increase in training response leading to lower oxidative stress and the creation of more mitochondria, the cellular \u201cpowerhouses\u201d that are key to aerobic exercise. This was an independent study by David Hood, a prominent muscle physiologist at York University. And it really was independent; when I contacted Hood, he\u2019d never heard of Nomio. But he confirmed the study\u2019s findings: \u201cThe results were dramatic for us,\u201d he said. His group is now running a training study in live mice with and without ITCs, with results expected in January.<\/p>\n These studies are certainly suggestive, but two things are missing, from my perspective. One is direct evidence that ITCs enhance performance. Nobody wins a medal for best mitochondria or lowest lactate levels; all we really care about is whether the supplement makes athletes faster. The other is a coherent explanation of why we should expect ITCs to make athletes faster. I\u2019ll come back to the question of evidence below, but let\u2019s start with the why.<\/p>\n Nomio\u2019s Other Origin Story<\/p>\n When I got in touch with Larsen (whose research I\u2019ve written about previously<\/a>), he explained the evolution of his thinking about ITCs in a way that made more sense to me. It\u2019s not about lactate, or at least it wasn\u2019t initially.<\/p>\n In Larsen\u2019s telling, the starting point was a 2021 study<\/a> on overtraining. They had volunteers progressively ramp up their training over the course of three weeks, with the final week pushing them into overtraining. At that point, their mitochondria were no longer working as well, their blood sugar control was compromised, and they were slower. \u201cThis aligns well with how athletes typically feel when they train harder than they can adapt: muscles feel heavy and unresponsive, and they don\u2019t recover between sessions as they should,\u201d Larsen says. The culprit appeared to be a signaling pathway called Nrf2<\/a>, which is a key regulator of the body\u2019s antioxidant defenses and (as David Hood and others have shown) how it responds to training.<\/p>\n With those results in mind, Larsen and his team wondered whether boosting Nrf2 might counteract the effects of overtraining. There was already a robust literature showing that ITCs boost Nrf2. \u201cBased on that,\u201d Larsen says, \u201cwe simply asked: \u2018What happens if we give people ITC (from broccoli sprouts) while they train really hard?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n That question is what led to the 2023 study mentioned above. As hypothesized, ITCs seemed to protect people from oxidative stress during heavy training. But the other benefits\u2014better blood sugar control, and especially lower lactate during exercise\u2014were surprising. That\u2019s what prompted the second study, where even a single dose of ITCs\u2014as much as you\u2019d get from about six pounds of raw broccoli, packed into a shot glass-sized container\u2014lowered lactate during exercise.<\/p>\n Larsen and his colleagues still aren\u2019t sure why ITCs lower lactate; there are a few possible biochemical explanations, but none has been proven yet. The effects are most apparent when lactate concentrations are in an intermediate range between about 3 and 8 millimolar, which corresponds to moderately hard but not all-out paces of the type you\u2019d see in efforts lasting between about ten minutes and a few hours. (In contrast, the biggest benefits of baking soda<\/a> are thought to accrue in shorter, more intense efforts between about one and ten minutes.)<\/p>\n Before these lactate findings popped up, though, the original reason for trying ITCs was to fight the oxidative stress caused by hard training. This raises a dilemma, because there\u2019s a well-established body of evidence suggesting that taking high doses of antioxidant supplements can actually blunt the benefits of training. The basic idea is that oxidative stress is a signal that tells your body to adapt and get stronger, so suppressing that signal by taking antioxidants results in less training adaptation.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a genuine concern, Larsen says. But in this case, ITCs aren\u2019t really antioxidants. In fact, they\u2019re mild pro-oxidants, just like exercise itself. In both cases, generating a small amount of oxidative stress causes the body\u2019s own antioxidant defenses, controlled by Nrf2, to kick into higher gear. So instead of eliminating training\u2019s adaptive signal with an antioxidant, Nomio is trying to amplify that signal. Still, Larsen says, that means it\u2019s really only useful if you\u2019re training reasonably hard. \u201cWe also recommend that athletes only take it before hard sessions or during tougher training blocks,\u201d Larsen says, \u201cnot before easy sessions or on rest days.\u201d<\/p>\n More specifically, the company\u2019s recommended usage plan<\/a> has two components. For the acute benefits, take one shot three hours before a race or hard workout. For the chronic adaptive benefits, take one shot daily during hard training blocks, three hours before your main workout, then take a second shot before bed on hard workout days, and no shots on rest or easy days. Given the body\u2019s finely tuned antioxidant balance, Larsen says, \u201cI don\u2019t think ITC intake is useful for healthy people who don\u2019t train.\u201d<\/p>\n But Does It Actually Work?<\/p>\n Here\u2019s where things get sticky. In the scientific papers published so far, all we have is that subjects lasted a little longer in a VO2 max test, which isn\u2019t really comparable to a race. Emil Sj\u00f6lander, one of Nomio\u2019s co-founders, connected me with a few scientists who have done or are doing performance testing either in academia or professional cycling, but none were willing to publicly share the results of their testing.<\/p>\n When I reached out to others who work with professional endurance athletes, the responses were mixed. Everyone had heard of it, and most were at least intrigued. \u201cTheir work thus far looks well-done and credible\u2026 just not a lot of it yet,\u201d said Trent Stellingwerff, the chief performance officer at the Canadian Sports Institute Pacific, who hasn\u2019t yet worked with any athletes using Nomio. The most skeptical person I spoke to (who asked not to be named) said the data so far seemed \u201cweak and unconvincing,\u201d but they are nonetheless planning a study of Nomio\u2019s effects this fall\u2014which is an expression of interest, if nothing else.<\/p>\n The list of athletes using it, both with and without the company\u2019s cooperation, is long and growing. Among the unpaid names Sj\u00f6lander mentioned: Conner Mantz, Clayton Young, Sarah Hall, and Graham Blanks. I asked Young about his experiences, and he admitted sharing my initial confusion about what the product\u2019s main goal is. \u201cAfter reading the research papers, it seemed like much of the science targeted changes in mitochondria,\u201d he wrote in an email. \u201cI was then surprised to see that it was marketed more towards reducing lactic acid levels. Almost as if they wanted to simplify the marketing and label it more as a bi-carb [i.e. baking soda] alternative.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, based on the positive experiences of some of his friends and training partners, Young gave it a shot in the lead-up to the World Championships marathon in Tokyo last month, where he placed ninth despite a hard fall early in the race. \u201cMy Tokyo build was one of the best I\u2019ve ever had, if not the best,\u201d he wrote. \u201cMy workouts, especially my speed workouts on the track, seem to be better than ever. That being said, there are so many factors that go into training, and it\u2019s hard to say that it all came from\u00a0Nomio.\u201d<\/p>\n Elite cycling tends to be more data-driven than marathoning, and the most detailed feedback I got on Nomio was from a coach working with a UCI World Tour team, who I agreed not to name. To this coach, the promise of lower lactate was not what interested him. \u201cBiomarkers are one thing, but to know if something really works, it\u2019s hard to get much out of lactate testing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Instead, the coach was interested in how the team performed in real-world field trials, which included a mix of moderate and all-out intervals. They didn\u2019t notice an obvious decrease in lactate levels, but most of the riders reported \u201ca feeling that it worked,\u201d and many notched objectively high power outputs compared to their usual training. Proof? Not really. But the team isn\u2019t waiting for further evidence. \u201cIf we wait, somebody else will try to use the advantage,\u201d the coach says. \u201cSo in our world, you have to be able to work even when you don\u2019t have clear answers.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to say anything more definitive than that for now. The anecdotal evidence is intriguing, but who among us can really say for sure why we\u2019ve had a particularly good or bad day? \u201cThe first principle is that you must not fool yourself\u2014and you are the easiest person to fool,\u201d as Richard Feynman once said. That\u2019s why we do studies with placebos and control groups and so on. There\u2019s enough interest in Nomio that those studies will come\u2014or, if they don\u2019t, that their absence will become increasingly glaring. Until then\u2026 broccoli season continues.<\/p>\n For more Sweat Science, join me on Threads<\/a> and Facebook<\/a>, sign up for the email newsletter<\/a>, and check out my new book The Explorer\u2019s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map<\/a>.<\/p>\n