Can broccoli sprouts help Andreas Almgren in New York?
Andreas Almgren makes his marathon debut in New York on Sunday after a season of European and world titles. We look at Nomio, the broccoli sprout shot he uses, how it is meant to work and what the evidence says.
Andreas Almgren makes his marathon debut at the TCS New York City Marathon on Sunday after the season of his life. The Swede won the European 10,000m title in Birmingham in a championship record of 27:23.44, then took the world half marathon title in Copenhagen in a European record of 58:06.
He is also one of the most prominent users of Nomio, a refrigerated broccoli sprout shot that has been spreading through endurance sport. Emil Sjölander, the company’s chief commercial officer, told AW that Almgren was “perhaps the first sort of professional user” of the product and, “after Filip Larsen”, the researcher who co-founded the company, “probably the second biggest consumer of Nomio in the world”.
Nobody is claiming a shot of juice made Almgren a world champion. “99.9% of all the credit should go to Andreas and just his insane training,” says Oskar Holmblad, Nomio’s co-founder and CEO. But the marathon is the kind of event where the company believes its product could matter. Here is what Nomio is, how it is meant to work and what the evidence says so far.
Nomio is a small, refrigerated shot made by a Swedish company of the same name. Each bottle is about 80% broccoli sprouts, with roughly 60 grams of sprouts in every shot, blended with lemon and sugar. It was co-founded by Holmblad, Sjölander and Filip Larsen, the researcher whose work underpins the product.
Holmblad is keen to stress that it is not a conventional supplement. “It’s a juice,” he says. The sprouts are grown in the south of Sweden and the shots are made in a facility “where otherwise they only press oranges and apples and carrots”. It is registered as a food.
The lemon and sugar are there for a reason. “The potent taste is actually quite terrible if we don’t mask it with lemon,” Holmblad admits. He adds that a performance product shouldn’t taste too nice either: “There is actually decent science on the fact that you don’t want it to taste too good because you want that taste of potency.”
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The active ingredient is a family of compounds called isothiocyanates (ITCs). They form when substances in broccoli sprouts called glucosinolates meet an enzyme called myrosinase – and they don’t last. “The second that you harvest, [glucosinolates] and myrosinase, they mix, they form ITC and then half-life is insanely quick,” Holmblad explains.
ITCs stimulate a protein called Nrf2, which helps regulate the body’s defences against stress. “If you have a really, really tough training week, you can push sort of beyond your limits,” says Sjölander. “It can take quite a long time for you to get back to full fitness.”
Larsen saw that Nrf2 was involved and went looking for ways to stimulate it. “When you take isothiocyanates, that window extends. You’re essentially capable of taking more training before you go into overtraining.”
Larsen, a vegan triathlete who grows his own sprouts, first tested the idea on himself. Holmblad says he trained 23 hours in a week with no supplement, “and he took lactate measurements, glucose measurements and biopsies on himself”. He repeated the week with sprouts, “and he saw that he didn’t actually fall off a cliff”.
A 2023 study led by Larsen followed up with volunteers who took Nomio or a placebo during a week of daily hard intervals. The Nomio group showed less oxidative stress and lower lactate during exercise, better blood glucose regulation and about 12% longer time to exhaustion in a VO2 max test, although VO2 max itself didn’t change.
Sjölander says the same research group was part of the team behind the first study of nitrate and exercise performance in 2007, the work that led to beetroot juice becoming a staple of endurance sport.
Two things the company says about Nomio explain why it might suit a marathoner. The first is event length, as it is not aimed at the shortest races.
“For maybe 100m or 200m race, I don’t think we see necessarily a performance benefit that’s large there,” says Sjölander. “We’re more seeing that when you’re at a persistent level of effort over a slightly longer period of time, that’s where the real performance benefits are present.”
Few efforts are more persistent than 26.2 miles. Holmblad adds that football and hockey players tell the company that “in the last 10 minutes of the game, they feel that they’re a little bit fresher still”, because they don’t see the same spikes of lactate.
The second is training load. “For recreational athletes, it’s more of an acute performance benefit,” Holmblad says. “And for people who train tonnes, it’s more about being able to handle the training load better.”
That is where Almgren comes in. Sjölander calls him “perhaps also the most data-driven runner in the world today”, with data on every training session since 2014 “in a massive Excel document”.
When Almgren became convinced that Nomio was good for his double threshold programme in 2024, “I think that was a big moment for us in terms of confidence in that the product actually worked”.
Holmblad says Almgren started working with the company at prototype stage after the Paris Olympics. “Where he’s gone from there, being able to stack up training, not get injured, which has always been his issue previously, and kind of balancing that very delicate tightrope, I think is a testament,” he says.
That balancing act is what a first marathon build demands: more volume, more time on the legs, and the same need to recover for the next quality session. Almgren has said he has learned to suffer for around an hour, but that two hours feels like new territory. Sunday will show how far his training – and whatever part Nomio plays in it – can carry him.
Holmblad’s advice is to take a shot about three hours before hard sessions. For anyone who tracks data, he suggests watching glucose and lactate if you measure them, plus sleep and HRV, and says that “heart rate at threshold can actually drop a couple of beats”. Nomio is available at drinknomio.com.
