Youthful Brain Review

Our chief writer and nootropics expert James Dixon examines this nootropic supplement with a slightly different focus in our Youthful Brain review.

Youthful Brain is an innovative nootropic supplement that stands out from the crowd – whether that is a good or bad thing – I will seek to determine through this Youthful Brain review.

It seeks to zone in on a couple of very specific areas of brain health whilst also being a broad enough nootropic to do what any nootropic should do – optimize your cognitive health and function whilst allowing for improved mental health and wellbeing.

The ingredients list is slightly odd for today’s nootropic market in some ways. In others, it’s quite conservative, retaining a solid core of ingredients we see all the time with very good reason. It all combines to give you a unique, potent supplement, sure to keep your brain healthy and functioning optimally for years to come.

It’s time to find out just how good I think it is after testing this nootropic for a month for this Youthful Brain review.

What Is Youthful Brain?

Youthful Brain is a nootropic supplement. This means that it is designed to bolster cognitive function, improve longer-term brain health, and even out your mood and stress levels. In fact, Youthful Brain is one of the better known, more reputable nootropics on the market, known for its ability to improve clarity, focus, memory, and overall brain health.

It’s completely natural and safe, using a blend of potent, over-the-counter ingredients to elicit its results. All told, these ingredients should combine to improve your cognitive function and health, productivity, and wellbeing, whilst also ring-fencing your brain health for years to come.

What Does Youthful Brain Do?

There are plenty of benefits to be gained from taking nootropics like Youthful Brain, most of them, obviously enough, revolving around cognition and brain health.

For example, Youthful Brain should give you a good boost of cognitive energy. Your brain needs to receive glucose from the blood to function optimally. However, the aging process slows this down – your brain doesn’t absorb this glucose as efficiently, and your blood flow can often diminish.

Youthful Brain contains some potent ketones. These are the second-resort energy source that your brain uses when it can’t access sufficient glucose levels. They are what power those following a ketogenic diet, in which glucose is severely limited. These ketones should give your brain a good deal of extra, long-lasting energy. 

It’s not just about ketones, however.

There is plenty included in Youthful Brain’s formula that should help to fuel your brain. This includes a broad range of nutrients – vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and so forth – that should support your brain’s health and productivity.

Youthful Brain should also improve overall cognitive functioning, as you would expect. In doing so, it shows you where it got its name from.

Our cognitive abilities decline as we age. However, we can slow this down – we can keep our brains youthful. Youthful Brain contains a combination of ingredients known to support cognitive health both in the short- and long- term.

This cognitive decline is partly down to a decline in our brains’ neurogenesis – their ability to produce new cells and connections. We can maintain and improve neurogenesis through a few different methods, including a healthy diet and lifestyle accompanied by plenty of physical activity.

The ingredients found in Youthful Brain’s formula also help, supporting neurogenesis to keep your brain as healthy and productive as possible.

It can also protect our brains from oxidative stress, which should also help to keep them young whilst also mitigating the danger of developing neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and overall cognitive decline.

You should also experience some mood-boosting benefits from taking Youthful Brain. This is the case across the board for nootropics – simply boosting cognitive functions like memory, focus, and concentration will naturally lead to greater mental wellbeing.

However, it generally goes a bit further than this.

Youthful Brain also contains a slew of ingredients designed to bolster your mood whilst also mitigating the effects of stress and anxiety.

Then there is focus and clarity, the main aim for many when looking into nootropic use. Youthful Brain’s formula should work to improve both.

This means no more brain fog or fatigue. It means no more prevarication or procrastination – you should be able to enter something of a flow state far more ably, with far less effort, over a far more sustained period using Youthful Brain.

This will improve efficiency and productivity, of course. It will also allow you to use your time better, more wisely, whilst removing a great deal of the stress associated with hitting deadlines and staying engaged the whole day long, as many of us typically must. 

Youthful Brain Ingredients

So what are these ingredients? In short, they are a solid mix of high quality natural nootropic compounds and nutrients that really should combine to give you all the benefits you’re looking for from Youthful Brain.

Things kick off with one of my personal favorite nootropic ingredients, Huperzine A.

It’s a fully natural compound that boosts your overall levels of acetylcholine by inhibiting its breakdown, leaving more in your system.

This is incredibly important for any nootropic.

Acetylcholine plays a key role in maintaining healthy memory and learning skills, whilst also warding against oxidative stress, inflammation, and thus the damage both cause. It’s an incredibly potent tool in your belt.

Youthful Brain also includes a healthy dose of gingko biloba. It’s a herbal supplement often cited for its ability to improve overall cognitive function.

There is little by way of clinical data backing this up, but anecdotal data stretch back centuries. It is believed to help keep the brain young by warding off age-related decline, damage, and disease. There is also a growing body of data showing that it may improve blood flow to the brain.

As we have seen, this should bring about more energy, as your more glucose and other nutrients are delivered to your brain. It should also help to keep nerve cells safe from damage.

Bacopa monnieri, another favorite of mine, enjoys a good deal more scientific backing. It’s a herb native to India’s wetlands, where it has been used for centuries or more in traditional forms of medicine.

Bacopa monnieri often rears its head in the nootropic community, where it is celebrated for its proven benefits in treating varied cognitive disorders, bolstering cognitive function, and benefitting focus and memory.

It has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. These should help to keep the brain young and functioning optimally by protecting it against free radical damage. However, its main role here is its ability to boost neurotransmitter creation, thus aiding intra-nerve communication.

Then we come to dicalcium phosphate, which is an ingredient I’ve not really come up against that much. Certainly, the main, high-quality nootropics out there (NooCube, Mind Lab Pro, Alpha Brain, and so on) don’t use it.

However, it makes for a really strong inclusion thanks to its ability to reduce levels of stress and anxiety, which have their own mental health benefits, whilst also improving concentration and focus.

It also boosts blood flow to the brain, which as we have seen, should mean more oxygen and nutrients, thus raising overall health, function, and energy levels.

I’ve also rarely seen carbylamine made use of in supplementation. Again, common nootropics don’t particularly make use of it where perhaps they should. It’s an organic compound, once more, with links to improved overall cognitive function and brain health. It manages this by raising levels of acetylcholine (see above – a key neurotransmitter).

Carbylamine has also been linked with improved neuron health, by protecting them from damage, and improved blood flow to the brain, which means protection from the effects of aging. It’s an astonishingly good ingredient to include in a nootropic supplement, especially one aimed at keeping your brain young.

Phosphatidylserine rears its head, too. It’s not the most common ingredient, though you do see it from time to time. I always like to see it. It’s a form of phospholipid found in high volumes in the brain, tasked with maintaining healthy cell signalling and neurotransmission. Thus, it’s pretty key in proper cognitive health and function.

This has been well-studied. Recent data have shown that it can bolster executive function, including memory, working memory, and focus and attention. It’s also been shown to improve mood and mitigate the effects of stress and anxiety.

I always like to see certain amino acids in a nootropic. L-tyrosine and l-theanine are pretty good bets. Youthful Brain forgoes these stalwarts in favor of l-glutamine, an amino acid present in quite high levels in the body.

It plays a key role in protein synthesis, aids immune health and function, and acts as a neuro-protectant, keeping the brain safe from harm. It has been shown to be particularly good at aiding healthy brain function in those suffering with neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, as well as at improving stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms.

Youthful Brain includes vitamin B12. This is another strong inclusion as vitamin B12 is key for keeping your overall brain health and function on track. It aids in metabolising fats and proteins, thus in keeping your energy levels high. It also plays a central role in maintaining the myelin sheath.

The myelin sheath is a protective layering over nerve cells that also helps to facilitate inter-cell communication.

Vitamin B12 deficiencies have been linked with various cognitive concerns, neurodegenerative diseases, and a host of additional neurological concerns.

Finally, this energy is backed up by MCT oil, a particularly high-quality, potent ketone source that should give you the extra energy for which Youthful Brain users often praise it.

This really is quite the list. It’s a bit of an oddball in a couple of ways, using less common ingredients than many of its competitors. This sets it apart. All of the ingredients also make a great deal of sense.

Barring ginkgo biloba, all are well-studied. All are very relevant and should combine nicely to give you the benefits Youthful Brain claims to offer.

Using Youthful Brain

Youthful Brain use isn’t as Earth shattering as you might expect from a top-tier nootropic. You will certainly feel the benefits offered by many of its competitors far more keenly, far more quickly. Everything included in its formula is kind of slow burn.

This isn’t to do it down at all. Far from it. If you look at its central purpose, this is to its credit. It isn’t flash. There isn’t a bucket of stimulant in there to perk you up right away. There isn’t much at all, if anything, that works acutely.

Rather, it aims to support you in the long run. It aims to keep your brain young over a number of years – decades, even.

You’re not going to feel the most profound benefits now. You’ll feel them when you get to sixty with your cognitive function and brain health where they were in your thirties and forties.

This isn’t to say that there are no immediate benefits. There are. You will likely feel more energetic within a few days of beginning a course of Youthful Brain. This may be more or less profound depending on your brain’s ability to uptake glucose and/or ketones.

I know I certainly found it very helpful. I had a long-lasting, gentle energy boost, quite at odds with the janky peaks and dips you get with caffeine.

I use nootropics a fair amount. I’m a professional writer. This means that I often have to blast out three thousand words daily, sometimes more. I’m also father to a toddler, which means my time is squeezed, my attention is very much split, and my energy levels routinely take a beating.

Hence my nootropic use – they make up the shortfall in energy and cognitive ability caused by life and all its travails whilst also enabling me to focus and function as a high-output writer, meeting deadlines and writing at least semi-coherently.

I’m a big fan of NooCube, VyvaMind and Mind Vitality Focus. They are my go-to nootropics, particularly the latter.

However, of course, I ditched them for a few weeks to trial Youthful Brain. I didn’t notice much of a difference to my attention span, clarity, focus, and drive – although how much of that I can attribute to Youthful Brain is up for debate. Certainly on the face of it, all three of my usual options have what I would consider to be a better make up.

I was still able to meet deadlines, juggle life, keep a clear head, and not feel too anxious or stressed. This lack of stress and anxiety was further heightened by a decreased reliance on caffeine – I probably drank about two thirds what I usually would to keep my head in the game, which I credit to the long-lasting energy granted by the ketones in Youthful Brain’s formula. To be fair to Youthful Brain – this was quite a triumph!

It’s a rare achievement to make me take notice of something over NooCube, Mind Vitality or VyvaMind. If you’re interested in lasting brain health, and want something a little different to what the nootropic market typically offers, Youthful Brain is probably worthy of consideration – although I still feel there are better products out there.

Verdict

So how do I round up such an different product? Well – let’s start with what I like about it.

It’s a bit different. This isn’t always a good thing, of course. The base nootropic supplement DNA we see in market leaders is there for a reason – it works incredibly well. Take deviation from this norm with a pinch of salt and some slight hesitation.

But Youthful Brain manages to take us in a different direction with skill, quality, and, most importantly, some decent results. The ingredients list is a little oddball, but it’s very intelligently made. Everything has its place, everything performs a function, most of it is clinically backed, and it all combines to give you all the benefits you would want and expect of a modern-day nootropic.

This slightly left-field formula is also demonstrative of what Youthful Brain seeks to achieve. The clue is in the title, after all – it is there in large part to keep your brain young. However, it also lacks in transparency – using a proprietary blend of ingredients rather than giving us the individual quantities of each – this can lead to confusion and makes it hard to assess how optimal the doses are of each ingredient.

It has a number of antioxidants and anti-inflammatories and they should manage to help give your brain the best chance of avoiding age related cognitive decline. These combine with a whole host of additional ingredients that protect your brain, fuel its healthy function and maintenance, and all-in-all keep it working optimally for years to come.

I want to like Youthful Brain more. But from this review and my research in to the ingredients alone I can’t be sure how effective it is – and for that reason, I’d sooner go with an alternative – and for me, it has to be Mind Vitality Focus.