Mind Nutrition lion's mane review: is it worth it for lifters?

The Giurgea rubric: five criteria a nootropic must meet, and lion's mane scored against each

A brand that sells lion's mane under the word nootropic has, whether it meant to or not, chosen the standard it will be reviewed by, because the word has an author and a definition. Corneliu Giurgea, the Romanian chemist who synthesised piracetam, coined nootropic in 1972 and set five criteria for the class: a nootropic should enhance learning and memory; should protect learned behaviours and memories against conditions that disrupt them, such as low oxygen or electroconvulsive shock; should protect the brain against physical and chemical injury; should increase the efficacy of cortical control mechanisms; and should lack the pharmacology of ordinary psychotropic drugs, with few side effects and very low toxicity. A nootropics brand's lion's mane is therefore reviewed first by scoring the mushroom against the rubric the brand invoked, and the scoring is instructive. Criterion one, learning and memory: lion's mane has a double-blind trial of thirty Japanese adults aged fifty to eighty with mild cognitive impairment, taking 3g a day of fruiting body powder in tablets for sixteen weeks, whose cognitive scale scores rose above placebo and fell back after stopping, and a young-adult pilot in which a single 1.8g dose produced a faster Stroop test at sixty minutes with no clear chronic effect over four weeks; small, real, unreplicated at scale, a partial pass. Criteria two and three, protection against disruption and injury: the hericenones and erinacines stimulate nerve growth factor synthesis in cell culture and animal models, and animal studies report protection in injury models, bench findings that have not reached a human trial of protection; a pass on the bench, nothing in people. Criterion four, cortical control: no human data of any kind. Criterion five, low toxicity and few side effects: human trials at grams-scale daily doses reported no serious adverse events, mild gastrointestinal complaints and rare allergic reactions, and the species has a long history as a food; a pass. The score is about one and a half criteria out of five, and that is not an insult to the mushroom, since by Giurgea's own standard almost nothing sold as a nootropic scores much better; it is an honest description of where lion's mane stands, and it is the score a reader should carry into any brand's page that uses the word, because lion's mane holds no authorised UK health claim and the word nootropic on a tub is positioning rather than evidence.

The certificate request as the review a lifter can run on the brand, the label reads, the positioning premium, and the verdict

The second instrument reviews the brand rather than the ingredient, and it is the one review a lifter can actually run from a kitchen table: the certificate request. Every capsule brand buys its lion's mane extract from a supplier, encapsulates it or has it encapsulated, and either tests the batch or does not, and the document that records the test is a certificate of analysis, which should show the batch number, an identity test confirming the material is Hericium erinaceus, a beta-glucan content by an accepted method, and heavy metals, lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic, against the limits that apply to food supplements. The request is an email to the brand's customer address asking for the current batch's certificate, and the answer is the review. A brand with a quality system sends it within a working week with the numbers on it, perhaps with a lab's name and accreditation; a brand without one sends a reassurance, a page of marketing, a promise that all products are tested, or nothing, and each of those is also an answer. Nootropics-positioned brands tend, as a category, to write more about testing than plain supplement brands do, which makes the request more pointed rather than less: a brand that has made quality part of its pitch should find the request easy. Alongside the certificate, the label is read for the same facts this site asks of every tub: fruiting body stated or not, an extract ratio stated or not, a beta-glucan percentage, and the directions, which for a nootropics brand sometimes run to two or three capsules a day and change the per-day price accordingly. The price itself is read as the positioning premium: a nootropics brand sells to a reader who wants to think of themselves as optimising, and prices for that reader, so its lion's mane often lands at twenty to forty pence a day for a comparable stated extract, against thirteen pence for the same facts from a brand that does not use the word, and the premium is legitimate if the reader knows it is the positioning they are paying for and not the mushroom. The verdict for a lifter: a nootropics brand's lion's mane is worth it when the certificate arrives within a week with numbers on it, the label states fruiting body and a ratio, and the reader accepts the per-day premium knowingly for a brand whose range they otherwise like; it is not worth it when the certificate does not come, whatever the label says, and it is never worth it on the strength of the word nootropic, which Giurgea's own rubric scores at one and a half out of five. The benchmark, a capsule that passes the certificate request without the positioning premium: a stated 5:1 fruiting body extract labelled 1500mg mushroom equivalent, 120 capsules for £15.49, 120 days at 13p, vegan shell, UK made under GMP and BRC, independently lab tested, caffeine free.

What to check on the label