Nomio Review: What the Research Actually Says About the $7 Broccoli Shot

We watched a Tour de France winner credit a 60ml broccoli juice shot for the best 90 minutes of his career, and we'll admit our first reaction was skepticism.

But Mads Pedersen's words were specific. He held 400 watts. He recovered between climbs in a way he'd never managed before. And he was drinking the same thing American distance runner Cole Hocker and most of the Pinarello Q36.5 cycling team were drinking.

The product is called Nomio. It's a Swedish broccoli sprout extract that costs about seven dollars a shot, and it's grounded in eight years of research at the Karolinska Institute and the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences. The team behind the product also happens to be the same group that helped establish beetroot juice as a legitimate ergogenic aid roughly fifteen years ago.

That research lineage is what made us pay attention. So we read the actual studies, looked at what the early human data shows, and spent some time with the question that matters for non-Olympic readers: is this worth the money for someone who isn't trying to win Paris-Roubaix?

What Nomio Actually Is

Nomio is a 60ml shot containing 80% broccoli sprout extract, 15% lemon juice, and 5% sugar. The active compounds are isothiocyanates, which are abbreviated as ITCs and which include sulforaphane — the most studied member of the family.

The product launched in Sweden in early 2025 and entered the US market exclusively through The Feed in late 2025. A four-pack costs about $28, which works out to $7 per shot. The company describes the active dose as equivalent to roughly 2.5 to 3 kilograms of raw broccoli, packed into a 60ml container.

ITCs are notoriously unstable. They degrade quickly under heat, oxygen, and basic pH conditions, which is part of why eating broccoli — even raw — delivers a much smaller and less consistent dose than the lab numbers suggest. Nomio's main technical achievement, per the founders, is figuring out how to stabilize ITCs in liquid form long enough to ship them.

The product is WADA-compliant. It's been tested for banned substances. It's recommended for use about three hours before a key training session, with an optional second shot before bed on heavy training days.

The Research Lineage

The team behind Nomio matters here. Eddie Weitzberg and Jon Lundberg, who advise the company, ran the foundational research at Karolinska on dietary nitrates and exercise — the work that established beetroot juice as a real ergogenic aid in endurance sport.

Filip Larsen joined that lab as a graduate student in 2009, then moved to GIH (the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences) and started studying isothiocyanates in 2015. Michaela Sundqvist joined his group in 2014 and now leads research on acute ITC effects.

This is the same scientific pedigree that gave endurance sport its first widely accepted natural performance enhancer. That doesn't guarantee Nomio will follow the same trajectory, but it's worth noting that beetroot was treated as fringe in 2010 and is now a default in pro cycling.

What the Studies Show

The published human evidence on Nomio's specific application is limited but meaningful. Two studies anchor the case.

The mechanism is consistent across both studies. ITCs activate Nrf2, a transcription factor that turns on the body's own antioxidant response — including glutathione synthesis and a cascade of cytoprotective enzymes. The bioavailability of ITCs is unusually high at around 75 to 80%, which is part of why the effects show up so clearly on lab measures.

A separate independent study from David Hood's lab at York University, which Outside Online reported on, found dramatic increases in mitochondrial biogenesis when ITCs were combined with exercise stimulus. Hood had no relationship with Nomio when he ran the work and described the results as "dramatic" in scale.

Where the Evidence Gets Thin

The honest story is that the endurance-performance application of ITCs is at roughly the same stage beetroot was at in 2010 — promising mechanism, suggestive lab findings, limited but consistent human data, and not yet a definitive trial showing that the supplement makes athletes faster in real competition.

A few specific gaps are worth flagging.

The 2023 crossover trial enrolled nine subjects. That's small, even by sport science standards. Replication in larger cohorts hasn't happened yet.

The 2025 single-dose lactate study is currently posted as a preprint on bioRxiv. That means the data has been completed, written up, and made public, but it hasn't yet completed peer review at a journal.

Preprints are a normal part of how exercise science research moves — they let other researchers see findings quickly. But peer review can still surface methodology questions or revisions. We've cited it because the work comes from a serious research group and the findings are consistent with the earlier peer-reviewed 2023 paper, but readers should know formal publication is still pending.

Most of the strongest findings come from the same research group that founded the company. The 2023 paper has Filip Larsen as the senior author, and he's a Nomio co-founder. That doesn't make the science wrong, but it's a structural conflict of interest that any honest review needs to disclose. The Hood lab work is a useful counterweight because it was independent.

Performance outcomes — finish times, watts at threshold, time to exhaustion — are mostly inferred from physiological markers rather than measured directly. The 2023 study did report a roughly 12% improvement in time to exhaustion on a VO2 max test, but VO2 max itself didn't change. That's the kind of finding that needs replication before it counts as a definitive performance effect.

Who Nomio Is Probably Worth It For

The math gets clearer when you compare Nomio to its alternatives.

A serious endurance athlete training 12 to 20 hours a week, with key sessions and races where lactate management actually matters, falls into the population the research was conducted on. Pro and sub-elite athletes consistently report subjective effects that match the lab findings: lighter legs the next day, lower lactate at the same effort, faster recovery between hard sessions.

For this group, $7 per key session is reasonable in the context of what athletes already spend on coaching, equipment, and other supplements.

A recreational runner or cyclist who does two or three workouts a week and isn't training for a specific peak event is in a different category. The research was not conducted on this population, and the dose-response relationship at lower training loads is genuinely unknown. Nomio's own research notes that the effect appears stronger in higher-trained subjects.

For someone who wants the underlying biology — the Nrf2 activation, the antioxidant response, the support for cellular adaptation — without the endurance-specific use case, a stabilized sulforaphane capsule is the better economic choice. Daily dosing from a high-quality stabilized product runs roughly $0.30 to $0.80 per day. Nomio costs about $14 per day if used twice for a hard training day.

If you've decided sulforaphane belongs in your routine but Nomio isn't the right fit, our best sulforaphane supplements roundup covers the stabilized capsule alternatives we'd actually take.

For readers training seriously enough that the Nomio research applies, our best sulforaphane supplements for athletes walks through how Nomio stacks up against capsule options.

If your interest is the women's hormone and detox angle rather than the performance side, our breakdown of sulforaphane benefits for women covers what the research suggests about estrogen metabolism and Phase II liver detoxification.

For the related question about pairing sulforaphane with DIM, our sulforaphane vs DIM comparison breaks down where each one fits.

Nomio is also worth filing alongside the other research-backed pre-training tools — beetroot, electrolytes, caffeine — that we cover in our pre-workout endurance ritual.

Before adding any new supplement, especially one with the kind of metabolic effects ITCs produce, our piece on sulforaphane side effects and drug interactions is worth a read.

This matters particularly if you're on thyroid medication, blood thinners, or any prescription metabolized by the liver. Talk to your healthcare provider first, as you would with any new supplement.