Top Cognitive Enhancement Supplements Recommended Online

Hello self-aware brain,

If you subscribed this week (about half of you have, thank you) I suggest going back to review the foundation → a set of self-care habits that research shows will help us improve our neurocognitive performance (if we adhere to them).

In the second entry, the first floor on that foundation, we opened brain health nutrition. Because, by both evidence and definition, supplements should supplement whole foods.

Caffeine, not a nutrient, is removed from this list. But it is part of the MIND diet, and it keeps coming up across top supplement recommendations. We'll dive into the deep end of reasons for that in a future BrainHealth.news letter. Stay tuned!

Last week we established which of these nutrients to consume via whole foods, which as supplements, and why. Our third floor.

Now for the fourth edition (or floor) on Structural Brain Health: Expanding the cognitive enhancement supplements list.

So far, our house of brain health is based on research by Dr. Morris, supporting the MIND diet’s peer-reviewed, time-tested advantages.¹ But here’s the disadvantage. Her research points primarily toward mitigating cognitive decline, long term. Healthspan is important too, of course. But my readers and I want quick cognitive performance gains too. Those measurable in hours, not only years. That’s our focus today.

I’m not abandoning an expanded list of nutrients/supplements that provide durable long-term neuroprotection. On the contrary, I plan to expand on it as well. Coming soon to an inbox near you.

Only three of the neurocognitive/brain health nutrients identified so far in this series, for building Structural Brain Health, provide same-day cognitive enhancement benefits:

To expand on this, I believe my educated, highly intelligent, well informed reader might have the same epistemological question I do: How do we know what supplements to take?

The short answer is evidence. So where do we get it? For most of us, the interwebs.

Most of us aren’t doing biochemical research. So we listen to those who are. But here’s the thing, few publishing scientists are active on web/social channels, except where their research is published. The next best thing for us is what’s most available - high profile practitioners and journalists the web and social algorithms serve up. Altogether, a very mixed bag indeed. A whole lotta hype’n happen’n.

So let’s turn up the signal, and reduce the noise.

I’ve taken the following inventory of supplement recommendation sources with the intent to help my beloved reader contextualize and evaluate recommendations through a lens of high-level media consensus. Then summarize those most relevant today.

It isn’t perfect. My intent is to improve our predicament in an age of hyper-intensive marketing and overwhelming content volumes, from a new or improved sense of the consensus among the top web/social channels we’re regularly exposed to.

Discovery has a push and a pull side. Push is social media algo’s feeding us more of anything we signal interest in behaviorally. Pull is opening a web browser and typing terms we think should show us what we’re interested in. Unsurprisingly, these two discovery modes have demographic differences. Mainly, by age group.

Web vs socials are not equally trusted, however. While social wins reach, web generally wins on trust, primarily from more institutional sources i.e. hospitals and universities.

Initially, I’d planned to provide you the top five channels who recommend brain health and cognitive performance supplements per platform. But IG and TikTok data are not entirely or readily available for today’s email/post. Apologies. However, I plan to spin up the APIs and services/python to gather them for future emails/posts. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile I’ll provide you the data available for the top two supplement recommendation channels we use: Web still beats YouTube search by volume across the 18-79 age range as a whole. So web first.

Because of the number of variables, like potentially relevant search keyword or key phrase combinations, I’ve first ranked web sources by total traffic volume (source: Similarweb.com). Secondly, only those with “brain health supplement” recommendations in SERPS (excluding ecom and sponsored results). Lastly, I include one site editorially for highly relevant science data and recommendation quality, instead of search volume.

Health-category websites where U.S. consumers discover supplement recommendations. Ranked by Similarweb estimated monthly visits. Positive supplement endorsements.

Health category channels that post long-form brain-supplement content. Ranked by subscribers. Videos recommending specific supplement compounds only are included.

For both the top web and youtube channel supplement recommendations above, I’ve shown all compounds for you. Yet our main focus today is same-day cognitive enhancers, aka nootropics.

Here’s the list without vitamins, minerals, long-term neuroprotections, and those already covered in Structural Brain Health series recaps above, with a count of occurrences.

Note: I’m not recommending any or all of these nutrient isolates to anyone, yet.

Next week we’ll winnow down and weed-out this list, based on both sturdy science and my personal experience. Yours too is requested. 🤓

Soon we’ll also continue our discovery journey by considering more bioavailability and bioaccessibility factors, such as time of day and combined consumption synergies? Please let me know in web comments.

Stay active, self-aware brains!

🫶🏽