Mind Lab Pro combines 11 nootropic ingredients that the company says work across six biological pathways to support cognitive performance.
Neuroscientist and Arizona State University associate professor Dr. Ramon Velazquez sits on the advisory board at Mind Lab Pro (parent company Performance Lab) and seeks to understand not only how the brain functions but the environmental factors that influence cognition, including how they can deter from disease later as people age.
Dr. Velazquez began working with Mind Lab Pro about a decade ago because the brand wanted an expert who could speak to the mechanistic properties of the supplement and how the various molecules and compounds found within the supplement stack worked.
The research discussed in this interview was funded by Mind Lab Pro and conducted independently by researchers at the University of Leeds.
“They wanted my take on what the research is doing now and what it really shows in terms of efficacy,” Dr. Velazquez said. “They also presented compelling evidence with research studies that they have funded and that were conducted independently at University of Leeds.”
The research found that Mind Lab Pro could improve aspects of cognition in adults. One double-blind, placebo-controlled study showed significant improvement in reaction time, choice reaction time and anticipation. Another investigation demonstrated significant improvement in all areas of memory, particularly short and long-term recall. A third study incorporated EEG brain-mapping technology to measure the effects of Mind Lab Pro, and the results showed enhanced synergy between brain regions during perceptual decision-making tasks.
The formulation and the creation of Mind Lab Pro is based on evidence that shows the nootropics can penetrate the brain, crossing the blood-brain barrier. For certain types of nootropics, transporters allow it to get into the brain. Neuroscience suggests various signaling pathways within neurons can be activated by those nootropics.
As Mind Lab Pro expands on research into conditions such as ADHD and the cognitive health of soldiers, Dr. Velazquez emphasizes the core science the supplement was built on.
NutraIngredients: When you talk about the adults you study, are you referring to healthy adults and do you specifically study people at different age brackets to see how the supplement impacts them?
Dr. Ramon Velazquez: Yes. I believe in the study that was done at University of Leeds, they looked at slightly older adults. I think they went up to the age of 50. And that’s an important question because you want to look at the potential improvements that these nootropics might have for different age groups, because we know that different age groups might have different experiences. Those experiences tap into what type of cognitive abilities they’re really requiring at a given time. For example, if you’re doing this experimentation in a group of 30, 40, or 50 year-olds that are maybe still in the workforce, their demands might be different than someone who is 70 or 80 and is retired.
NI: What is particularly interesting about the interaction or synergy of the ingredients used in Mind Lab Pro’s universal nootropic?
RV: When you look at a lot of the ingredients that are part of Mind Lab Pro stack, a lot of them are required by the body. The one that I always focus on is choline, part of the formulation used in Mind Lab Pro. It was established in 1998 by the National Academy of Medicine for every human to take it based on preventing fatty liver disease, because choline is a molecule that’s important for fat metabolism.
What we have found, if you speed forward the last few decades, is that choline actually plays a lot of important roles in the brain. It builds a chemical in the brain known as acetylcholine, which is important for learning and memory. It’s also important for activating skeletal muscles. It has the ability to build compartments of cells, in particular neurons, which are the cells that produce our everyday behaviors. Without those, you can actually accumulate a lot of things you don’t want in those neurons, like lipids. Those lipids build up and start to harm instead of helping. That’s one example of one of the nootropics that’s part of the stack that is required.
There are also other examples. There’s resveratrol, phosphatidylserine, L-theanine. They all play different roles within actual neurons, which are once again the cells of our brain that produce our behaviors. If you administer a multi-stack that has, for example, resveratrol (which reduces oxidative stress), it’s going to limit stress on these neurons. That’s going to be good for the neuron. You’re ultimately providing the neuron with the nutrients it needs in order to actually function by activating various functions within that neuron, not just one aspect.
Editor’s note: The Institute of Medicine, now the National Academy of Medicine, established an Adequate Intake for choline in 1998. The recommendation was based in part on evidence related to liver health.
NI: What role do you see this particular supplement stack doing for the brain when it comes to larger, more substantial neurodegenerative issues?
RV: It’s a question I get all the time, and it’s a discussion I have with the CEO quite a bit. To truly test whether Mind Lab Pro will have efficacy in an individual with Alzheimer’s disease, you need a double-blind placebo-controlled trial. You can’t just speculate based off what is in the stack and then say because this goes haywire in Alzheimer’s disease, ultimately the person’s going to benefit.
However, what I could say is that there’s a lot of evidence that individuals are consuming less amounts of key nutrients that increase their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. We can’t say right now that taking Mind Lab Pro is going to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. We can say that it may give the individual the needed nutrients to reach optimal performance in cognition. Whether it can stave off disease, we just don’t know that yet. We would have to conduct a longitudinal study that might be ongoing for 20 or 30 years and that’s an incredibly expensive venture to take on.
NI: Is there a targeted age that you’re looking at that is optimal for prevention?
RV: I’m a big advocate of lifestyle factors to really promote brain health. One of the big things that I focus on in addition to nootropics is exercise, because we know exercise is very efficacious for brain health. I’d say that the evidence suggests that you can start to see changes in the brain before you actually see behavioral changes 30 to 40 years before one gets diagnosed with the dementia. So since most individuals with Alzheimer’s disease are diagnosed after the age of 75, in your 30s and 40s you should really be focused on what are the things I can be doing now to try to prevent disease later on from happening.
NI: Can we look back at previous generations to kind of see if they were facing some of the same neurodegenerative issues? Is there a way to document how their diets played a role in their health later in life compared to where we are now?
RV: It’s a little bit convoluted, because what we have to remember is that earlier generations did not live as long as we do. Most people who get Alzheimer’s disease are over the age of 75 or 85. So it’s becoming an age-related disorder because a lot of the things that happen to your brain with age are going to become more prominent.
The activity of the neurons is changing. However, I will say to your point, there’s now evidence of diets that we know are efficacious in reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, including the Mediterranean DASH diet. That diet has been shown to actually have a significant effect on individuals because it has a high amount of choline. If you look at the diets that a lot of people consume nowadays, it’s going to be the ultra-processed foods types that are going to lead to diabetes, which is a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.
NI: Was there something surprising about the research that has been accomplished by the company that you were not expecting?
RV: When we studied EEG changes in participants to measure brain activity, we noticed altered brain activity and that was surprising at first. The fact that brain activity was altered just taking Mind Lab Pro was a little surprising at first. Just changing the activity of your brain overall doesn’t necessarily mean it is a good thing. Like people that have seizures, for example, their activity at an EEG looks different than an individual that is a non-seizure patient. When I looked at that, I was trying to put my head around it. When speaking to the scientists at the University of Leeds who conducted the study, it made sense. If you can change the activity of the chemicals in the brain, which dictates how that creates the activity electrically in the brain, it is understandable that it was detectable it in the EEG. We do need more research to really see what that means.
The other thing that I’m really interested in now is sleep. Sleep is critically important. We spend a third of our life sleeping, yet many individuals do not get enough of it. If you can regulate the chemicals in your brain to allow you to get that sleep-wake cycle more efficiently, that can actually promote sleep. One of the things we’re trying to do is see if the individuals that are taking Mind Lab Pro are actually getting better sleep, because that not only is going to allow your body to rest, but it’s also going to reset a lot of aspects of your brain to have better performance cognitively.
NI: Anything that I didn’t ask that you want to say before we go?
RV: The one thing I want everyone to know is that a nootropic and a multi-stack like Mind Lab Pro are not going to address a poor lifestyle. If an individual doesn’t sleep well, if an individual is consuming a lot of alcohol and smoking, if an individual does not exercise, don’t think that the nootropic is going to be able to offset all of that. It’s part of a combination of lifestyle components. If you’re trying to reach optimal cognitive performance and you’re exercising and you’re eating well and you are sleeping well and you have all these in check, this can be one of the components that’s necessary to really allow you to reach that optimal performance, but it cannot offset things that are detrimental to your life.
