What is natural nootropics?

Three tests for one word: origin, which toxins pass too; processing, which almost nothing passes; and regulation, the only meaning with legal force

What natural nootropics are is a question about two words, and this site has already taken the second apart on its own page, nootropic being a 1972 coinage drifted into a marketing category with no legal meaning; this page takes the first apart, because natural is the word doing the selling and it carries, in a buyer's mind, a safety and an evidence that it does not carry in fact. The way to see what the word actually means is to put it through three tests, one for each thing people mean by it. The first is the origin test: natural means that the substance comes from a plant, a fungus or an animal rather than from a laboratory synthesis. Caffeine passes, being an alkaloid of coffee, tea and a few other plants; creatine passes on a technicality, being present in meat and fish, though the creatine in any tub was synthesised from sarcosine and cyanamide; lion's mane passes, being a culinary mushroom; L-theanine passes, from tea; omega-3 passes, from fish and algae. So far the test seems to sort the gentle from the harsh, until the rest of nature is admitted: psilocybin passes the origin test and is a Class A controlled drug; the amatoxins of the death cap mushroom pass it and are among the most lethal substances known; aconite, hemlock, ricin and strychnine all pass it. Natural origin is not a safety class, which is why every regulator in the world assigns a substance's status by what it is and does rather than by where it came from, and a buyer who reads natural as safe has made an inference the word was never entitled to. The second test is processing: natural means minimally refined, close to the form the plant or fungus made. Almost no supplement passes this test, and the ones sold as natural nootropics pass it least of all. An extract is a refinement by definition; a 10:1 lion's mane extract is ten kilograms of mushroom boiled down to one, with its water-soluble fraction concentrated and the rest discarded, which is excellent manufacturing and the opposite of unprocessed. Caffeine in a tablet is purified to a white powder, theanine is extracted or fermented, omega-3 in a capsule is molecularly distilled and often re-esterified, and creatine is a synthesised chemical. The only natural nootropic that passes the processing test is a cup of coffee or a plate of fresh mushroom, which is to say food. The third test is the regulatory one, and it is the only meaning with legal force: natural, on a UK shelf, usually means sold as a food supplement under food law rather than as a medicine under the medicines regulations, which decides what the label must say and may not say and what the seller is allowed to do, and which says nothing whatever about whether the thing works, since a food supplement is lawful because it is a food and not because anyone assessed its effect on cognition.

What a natural nootropic therefore is, the honest shelf under the phrase ranked by evidence rather than origin, where lion's mane sits, and the four reads that do not change

Put through the three tests, a natural nootropic turns out to be a food-law product of biological origin, which is a real category and a modest one: it tells a buyer which regulations the tub obeys and roughly where its ingredient came from, and it tells them nothing about dose, safety record or evidence, each of which has to be read separately exactly as for any other supplement. The honest shelf under the phrase, ranked by what the evidence rather than the origin supports, runs as follows. Caffeine first, by a distance: decades of trials and meta-analyses on attention, vigilance and reaction time, a real performance literature, a known dose and a known half-life, no authorised claim and no need of one. Creatine second: several hundred trials, an authorised UK claim for physical performance at 3g a day, and a preliminary cognition literature with signals under sleep deprivation and in vegetarians, the one natural nootropic that is also a muscle supplement and the one most lifters already own. The register nutrients third, conditionally: iron, zinc and iodine hold normal cognitive function, the B vitamins hold psychological function and tiredness and fatigue, DHA holds maintenance of normal brain function at 250mg, and each does something measurable in a person short of it and nothing in a person replete, so a blood test decides and a natural nootropic stack that includes them is guessing. L-theanine fourth, with small trials of a calmer alertness beside caffeine and no claim. Then the botanicals and fungi, bacopa, ginkgo, Rhodiola, ashwagandha and lion's mane, with small, mixed and often industry-linked trials and no authorised claims, lion's mane sitting among them on a sixteen-week trial in thirty older adults with mild cognitive impairment and a young-adult pilot, described on this site as studies. Below the whole shelf and outranking all of it sit sleep, which the natural nootropics borrow their promises from, and exercise, which a lifter already does. Where lion's mane sits, then, is on the natural shelf by all three tests, a fungus, extracted, sold as a food, and near the bottom of the evidence ranking, which is not an insult to the mushroom but a description of the file, and a buyer who wants it should want it for that file and not for the word. The four reads do not change on the natural shelf: the ingredient and its tissue or source, the dose against whatever evidence exists, the evidence itself at its real size, and the testing, since natural products concentrate heavy metals from soil and substrate at least as readily as synthetic ones are contaminated in manufacture, mushrooms and cadmium being the category's standing example. A natural nootropic by every test, bought on its evidence and not its origin: 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, with the word natural doing none of the work on its label and the four reads doing all of it.

What to check on the label