MemoHoney ingredients: all six named, with the dose each one was studied at

A conditionally essential amino acid and the direct substrate for nitric oxide synthase. Most people get two to five grams a day from food without thinking about it.

Its supplement record is uneven and the reason is pharmacological: oral arginine is degraded by arginase in the gut wall and the liver before much of it reaches the bloodstream. A 2009 meta-analysis found short-term oral arginine improving flow-mediated dilation, but chiefly in people whose baseline dilation was already low. A 2018 systematic review reached a similar place in people with cardiovascular or metabolic disorders.

The comparison worth knowing is a 2021 meta-analysis that set tree nuts and groundnuts against arginine supplementation for the same endpoint. Eating nuts did at least as well. No trial of oral arginine has measured memory in humans.

Two arginine molecules bonded to one alpha-ketoglutarate. The claim made for it is better absorption and a second metabolic route through the alpha-ketoglutarate itself.

It is the most tested ingredient on this bottle and it has the worst record. A seven-day randomised trial gave trained men 12 grams a day — four grams, three times daily — and measured brachial artery blood flow, plasma arginine, nitric oxide metabolites and asymmetric dimethylarginine before and after resistance exercise. Nothing separated it from placebo. An acute 3,000 mg dose failed to improve muscular performance in trained or untrained men. The pharmacokinetic study used four grams at a time and 12 grams a day for the training arm.

That is three trials, all at doses many times what a shared capsule can hold, and none of them positive.

The best-supported ingredient in the group and the pharmacologically sensible one. Citrulline bypasses the gut and liver arginase that destroys oral arginine, and is converted to arginine in the kidney, so it raises plasma arginine more reliably than arginine does. A 2017 study in healthy males compared the two directly.

The 2016 cycling trial gave 22 trained men 2.4 grams a day for seven days and found a faster time trial and higher plasma arginine. The 2015 oxygen-uptake work used six grams a day.

For memory there is one paper and it is an animal study: Yabuki and colleagues gave mice 50 to 100 mg per kilogram of oral citrulline after induced brain ischaemia and saw memory deficits reduced, attributed to cerebrovascular protection. It is a mouse, it is an ischaemia model, and it is labelled as both every time it appears on this website.

The same citrulline, salted to malic acid, which is the form most of the sports literature uses. The trial this form is known for gave eight grams in a single dose and reported more bench-press repetitions and less muscle soreness at 24 and 48 hours.

Having both citrulline salts on one list makes the list longer without adding a second substance. Some formulators argue for mixed salts on absorption grounds; without amounts, a reader cannot tell whether that argument is the one operating here.

The only ingredient on this bottle with a published requirement, a published ceiling and a cognitive literature of its own. The Institute of Medicine sets the adult RDA at 16 mg niacin equivalents a day for men and 14 for women, and a tolerable upper intake level of 35 mg a day, based on flushing as the critical adverse effect.

Severe niacin deficiency causes pellagra, whose third symptom is dementia, so the link between this vitamin and cognition is real at the bottom end. The Chicago Health and Aging Project followed 3,718 older adults over a median 5.5 years and found higher dietary niacin intake associated with less incident Alzheimer’s disease and slower cognitive decline. It is observational, it is about food, and the authors were careful to say so.

It is also the only ingredient here where the missing number cuts both ways. Thirty-five milligrams is a real ceiling, and a reader taking a B-complex alongside this has no way to add the two together.

The genuinely interesting entry. Beta-alanine is the rate-limiting precursor of carnosine, and supplementing it raises muscle carnosine over weeks. The ISSN position stand covers its performance use; a 2017 comparison took four weeks at six grams a day, or two weeks at twelve, to shift carnosine measurably.

What makes it unusual on a memory bottle is that it has randomised cognitive data. A 2023 double-blind trial randomised 100 older adults, mean age 70.6, to 2.4 grams a day or placebo for ten weeks. Across the whole group the Montreal Cognitive Assessment score did not differ. In the subgroup who scored at or below normal at baseline, it improved 13.6 per cent at the midpoint and 11.8 per cent at ten weeks against placebo, and geriatric depression scores fell. A 2024 follow-up at the same dose found greater change in fractional anisotropy in the right hippocampus and left amygdala — in ten analysable participants, which is a very small number and is why it is described here as a mechanism suggestion rather than a result.

Both trials used 2,400 mg a day. Every day. For ten weeks.