Choosing a memory supplement: six questions, applied honestly

This is the first question because everything else depends on it. A label that names ingredients without amounts cannot be evaluated, compared or costed, and no amount of reading around it fixes that.

What a good label looks like: a Supplement Facts panel with a serving size, a servings-per-container figure, every active named with its amount in milligrams, a %DV column where one applies, and an other-ingredients line naming the capsule shell.

What a weak label looks like: a blend name with a single total, or a list of names with nothing beside them.

A proprietary blend is not automatically dishonest — there are real commercial reasons for one — but it moves all the risk onto the buyer, and it should move the price down rather than up.

This is where most of the shelf comes apart, and it is easy to check once the numbers are printed.

Find the ingredient’s best-known trial. Find the dose. Compare. The gap is frequently an order of magnitude, and a tenth of a trial dose is not a tenth of the effect — it is usually none of it.

Two ways this goes wrong that are worth naming. Pixie dusting is including an ingredient at an amount too small to do anything, purely so the name can appear on the front of the bottle. Borrowed credibility is quoting a trial in the marketing without mentioning that the trial used twenty times what the capsule contains.

The arithmetic that catches both is simple: a capsule holds four hundred to eight hundred milligrams of powder in total. If an ingredient’s trial dose is two grams and there are six ingredients in the capsule, the trial dose is not in there.

Form matters more than most labels admit, and it is the question that catches products the first two miss.

A salt is not automatically equivalent to the free form: citrulline malate and citrulline hydrochloride deliver different amounts of citrulline per gram, and a label that does not say which one was weighed is ambiguous about its own dose.

A plant part is not interchangeable with another plant part. A leaf extract and a root extract of the same species can have entirely different chemistry, and trials are run on one of them.

A standardised extract is not the same as a raw powder. ‘300 mg of bacopa’ and ‘300 mg of bacopa standardised to 50 per cent bacosides’ are different products at the same weight.

The check: find what the trial used, in exactly those terms, and see whether the label says the same thing.

Most of this shelf works on timescales of weeks to months, and most buyers quit in week one. Those two facts together explain most of the disappointment in the category.

Find the trial length before you buy. The beta-alanine cognition trials ran ten weeks with a midpoint at five. Bacopa trials typically run twelve. The nitrate trial ran thirteen and found nothing, which is its own kind of answer.

Then compare that with the pack and the refund window. A thirty-day supply behind a fourteen-day refund window, for an ingredient whose trials ran twelve weeks, is a product you cannot fairly test before the money stops being refundable. That is worth noticing at the point of purchase rather than at the end of it.

The fourth row is the one that quietly decides the other three. A window that excludes opened bottles is not a window.

Ask this before buying rather than after, because the answer is usually findable and occasionally important.

Interactions. Which pathway do the actives work on, and does anything you already take work on it too? Nitric oxide formulas and nitrates. Anything sedating and anything else sedating. Cholinesterase inhibitors and the real drugs that share the mechanism.

Ceilings. Does anything in it have a tolerable upper intake level, and does the label print enough to let you add it up? Niacin's is 35 mg a day for adults, and it is in more products than people realise.

Tolerability. What does it do that you will notice? A harmless beta-alanine tingle is fine once you know it is coming and alarming if you do not.

The shell. If you avoid gelatin, is the shell material named? On many labels it is not, and a vegetarian badge is not the same as a stated material.

The most practical question of the six, and the one most often skipped.

Read the refund policy before the ingredient list. How long is the window? Does it start at purchase or at delivery? Are opened bottles included? Who pays return postage? Is there a phone number, and does it belong to the people who took the money?

A long window including opened bottles is worth more than any ingredient claim on the label, because it converts an unverifiable formula into a bounded bet. It is not evidence the product works — it is evidence the seller has calculated that few people will use it — but it moves the risk off the buyer, and on a shelf where nothing can be verified that is the main thing available.

• Sixty days or more, including opened bottles, is good.
• Thirty days from delivery is workable for a fast-acting product and not for this category.
• Unopened-only is not a refund policy for a supplement.
• No telephone number is a warning sign on its own.
• A window shorter than the trial length of the lead ingredient means the product cannot be fairly tested inside it.

Four passes and two failures, and the two failures are the first two questions, which are the ones that matter most.

That is an uncomfortable table for a page on a retail website and it is printed anyway, because a method that is only applied to other people’s products is not a method.

What it leaves a reader with is a specific decision rather than a general impression: MemoHoney is a routine and a bet, behind a window long enough to make the bet bounded. Anyone who needs to know what they are taking, in milligrams, should buy something else, and this page is the one that says so.