If you've watched a Mads Pedersen Instagram story in the last 18 months, you've seen them. Tiny green bottles. Riders downing them before stages. The cycling internet has been busy filing them away as "the new beetroot." That's the wrong file.
I sat down with Dr Filip Larsen — Chief Scientific Officer at Nomio and a researcher at the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences — for the green shots episode of the Roadman Cycling Podcast. The conversation went the way these conversations should go. He didn't oversell. He laid out the mechanism, the study data, what's plausible, and what isn't.
This is the breakdown.
The mechanism
The active compound in Nomio is sulforaphane, an isothiocyanate found at high concentration in broccoli sprouts. Sulforaphane's claim to relevance in sport science is what it does inside the cell — specifically what it does to a transcription factor called Nrf2.
Nrf2 sits in the cytoplasm, bound to a partner protein called Keap1, until something disturbs it. Under stress — oxidative load, certain dietary compounds, exercise — Nrf2 dissociates, translocates to the nucleus, and switches on a battery of genes that produce the body's own antioxidant defences. Glutathione synthesis. Superoxide dismutase. Catalase. The whole endogenous machinery.
This matters because exercise is, fundamentally, an oxidative stress event. Reactive oxygen species spike during hard efforts. The body's response — clearing them, repairing damage, adapting — is one of the things that determines how quickly you recover and what your ceiling looks like over a season. Sulforaphane gives the system a nudge. It activates Nrf2 ahead of the stress, so the antioxidant capacity is already elevated when the work starts.
That's the mechanism. It's real, it's well-documented in basic biology, and it's distinct from how beetroot juice works.
The cycling study
In 2023, a research group at GIH ran a trial on cyclists, using a standardised broccoli sprout extract similar to what's in Nomio. The protocol is the right kind: trained cyclists, controlled supplementation, measured outcomes including lactate response, power output at threshold, and submaximal economy.
The headline result was a reduction in lactate accumulation at submaximal intensities. In practical terms, that means at the same wattage, riders were producing less lactate after the supplementation period. That's a meaningful shift — it suggests the energetic cost of holding a given power has decreased, which translates to either holding the same power longer or producing more power for the same accumulated stress.
The effect size mattered without being huge. Larsen was careful about this on the podcast. He didn't claim 30 watts. He didn't claim race-changing magnitude. He described what the data showed: a real, measurable shift, most relevant to threshold and tempo intensities rather than to maximal sprints.
The honesty there is rare in supplement marketing. It's also what makes the science worth taking seriously.
What it isn't
Nomio is not a stimulant. There's no caffeine. There's no sudden hit on race day. The Nrf2 pathway takes time to ramp up — the studied protocols use daily intake over weeks. The mental model is closer to a training adaptation than a pre-workout. You're shifting the antioxidant baseline gradually, and the benefit shows up as a chronic effect, not an acute one.
Nomio is not beetroot juice. They both come in small bottles. They both get shoved in a jersey pocket before a hard ride. The similarity ends there. Beetroot juice acts on the nitric oxide pathway — dietary nitrate is reduced to nitrite and then to NO, which improves vasodilation and reduces the oxygen cost of submaximal work. Nomio acts on the antioxidant defence machinery. Different lever, different result. Stacking them is plausible. Substituting one for the other isn't.
Nomio is not on any banned list, doesn't require a TUE, and isn't a grey-area product. It's a concentrated vegetable extract. The reason it ended up in pro cycling is that the riders and teams who were paying attention to Nrf2 research saw a tool that could be added to a stack without the regulatory headaches that come with most "performance" interventions.
Where supplements sit on the pyramid
I'll repeat what I told Larsen on the podcast. Most amateur cyclists ask about supplements before they've handled the foundations. That's the wrong order.
The pyramid for performance looks like this. At the base: training intensity distribution, sleep duration and quality, daily energy intake matched to training load, and consistent execution over months. Above that: race-specific training, in-ride fuelling of 60 to 90 grams of carbohydrate per hour, recovery nutrition timing, and structured strength work. Above that: bike fit, position aerodynamics, equipment optimisation. At the very top: supplementation.
If your sleep averages six hours, your Zone 2 rides creep into Zone 3, and you bonk on every long ride because you're under-fuelling — Nomio isn't the answer. Or rather, it might give you a small effect, but the size of that effect is small relative to the size of the foundation work you're skipping. You'd be paying for a fractional gain while leaving 30-40 watts on the table elsewhere.
If you've handled the foundations and you're looking for the next two or three percent, then a properly mechanism-grounded supplement like Nomio enters the conversation. Beetroot juice. Caffeine timed to events. Creatine for shorter, harder efforts. Nomio if you're working on threshold capacity. The interventions stack, but the order matters.
What this tells us about the supplement market
The episode with Larsen is also a tutorial in how to read supplement claims. Three filters worth running every product through:
Mechanism plausibility. Is there a clear, documented physiological pathway between the active compound and the claimed outcome? Sulforaphane activates Nrf2; Nrf2 upregulates endogenous antioxidants; antioxidant capacity affects oxidative damage during exercise. Each step has cellular biology behind it. Compare that to "boosts your metabolism" — vague, no specified pathway, no measurable endpoint. The first is a hypothesis you can test. The second is marketing.
Trial quality. Are there controlled trials in athletes, with the actual product, measuring the outcomes that matter? Many supplements have evidence in rats, in petri dishes, or in completely sedentary populations. That's not the same as evidence in trained cyclists doing a threshold protocol. The Nomio cycling study at GIH is the right level of evidence. Most products don't have it.
Effect size honesty. When a researcher describes the result, do they describe it in proportion to what was found? Larsen described meaningful but modest effects. He didn't say "transformational." That kind of measured language is a positive signal. Outsized claims usually mean something is being hidden.
These filters apply to almost every product you'll see at a sportive expo. Most fail at least one of the three. Nomio passes all three, which is why I gave it air time. That doesn't mean every rider needs it. It means the claim is honest enough to evaluate.
The Mads Pedersen effect
A lot of pro cycling supplement adoption follows a pattern. A team starts using a product, a star rider posts about it, the cycling internet decides this is the new edge, and amateurs flood the market. Six months later, half of them have abandoned it because they didn't see results.
The Mads Pedersen Instagram presence has driven some of that with Nomio. The product is real, the science is real, and the riders aren't acting. They are using it. But the conditions under which a Pedersen sees a measurable effect — already at the limit of physiological optimisation, with every other variable controlled — aren't the conditions an amateur is operating in.
The amateur version of "Pedersen takes Nomio" should not be "I should take Nomio." It should be "Pedersen has nailed every other variable, which is why a small additional intervention shows up clearly. Have I nailed every other variable?"
Usually the honest answer is no. The work to be done sits below the supplement layer.
What to do with all this
Three positions, in order:
If you're not already executing your training intensity distribution properly — if your easy rides aren't easy, your hard sessions aren't hard, and your week looks like grey-zone soup — that's the work. Read the polarised training guide and audit your last six weeks of files.
If your fuelling on rides over 90 minutes is below 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour, that's the work. The in-ride nutrition guide has the specifics. The performance return on closing a fuelling deficit is several times the return on any supplement.
If you've handled the above and you're curious about Nomio specifically — try it as a four-week protocol, daily, and benchmark a threshold test before and after. The effect is real, it's measurable, and it's defensible. Whether it's worth the cost is a question of where you sit on the pyramid.
For the full conversation with Dr Larsen — including the protocol he uses and the testing he ran on me directly — the green shots episode is on the feed. The rest of the nutrition-focused conversations are a good next stop if this is the rabbit hole you're going down.