MemoHoney ingredients: all six named actives on the label

Nitric oxide synthase has one raw material and this is it. Arginine is conditionally essential, meaning the body makes some and wants more under load, and that is why it appears on every label in this aisle.

Getting it there is the difficulty. Arginase waits in the gut wall and again in the liver, and a good share of any swallowed dose is taken apart before it reaches the blood. Hence citrulline on the same label, and hence trials that reach for whole grams.

The largest and most sobering of those is the VINTAGE MI trial, which gave 3 g three times a day for six months to people recovering from a heart attack and was stopped early. A 2018 systematic review and meta-analysis found arginine supplementation associated with improvements in markers of endothelial function, again in people with existing cardiovascular or metabolic disease.

On cognition specifically the record is thinner and it is about different molecules. A 2021 randomised trial used inositol-stabilised arginine silicate, a patented complex, and reported acute cognitive outcomes in healthy adults. A four-week study gave twenty healthy volunteers homoarginine, a related but distinct amino acid. Neither tested the plain L-arginine on this label.

Arginine bound to alpha-ketoglutarate in a two-to-one ratio. The rationale is that alpha-ketoglutarate is itself a Krebs cycle intermediate, so the salt is sold as delivering two useful things at once.

the AAKG pharmacokinetic trial is the study that characterised it: trained adult men, 4 g of AAKG three times a day for a total of 12 g, with pharmacokinetics, safety and exercise performance as the endpoints. It is a sports-nutrition paper from a sports-nutrition journal, and it is the main human record this ingredient has.

No trial has tested arginine alpha-ketoglutarate on memory, attention or any cognitive endpoint in any population. That sentence is here because its absence elsewhere is how a reader ends up assuming otherwise.

Citrulline as a hydrochloride salt, which is simply a stable, water-soluble way to deliver citrulline.

the citrulline dose-ranging study is the study that explains why this ingredient belongs on the label. It ran a dose ladder of oral citrulline and oral arginine in healthy volunteers and measured what each did to plasma arginine and to nitric oxide metabolism. Citrulline raised plasma arginine more effectively than arginine did, and the rise tracked the dose across the ladder.

That is a genuinely useful finding and it is the strongest piece of mechanistic reasoning behind this formula. What it measured was plasma chemistry, not thinking.

Citrulline paired with malic acid, and the form the pre-workout aisle made famous.

the citrulline malate bench-press trial gave 8 g before a bench-press session and reported more repetitions and less soreness. A 2024 trial tested three days of citrulline malate on repeated sprint running in team sport athletes. A taekwondo study combined branched-chain amino acids, arginine and citrulline and looked at central fatigue across three simulated matches, which is the closest this ingredient gets to a cognitive endpoint, and it is a fatigue measure rather than a memory one.

In older adults, a chronic nitrate and citrulline trial looked at vascular function and exercise performance, and a companion study paired nitric oxide precursors with training. The pattern across all of them is consistent: the endpoints are vascular and athletic.

Of the six, this is the one a researcher has actually studied against and the only one whose useful dose is measured in milligrams rather than grams. That distinction matters more than anything else on this page: a capsule can hold a nutritionally meaningful amount of niacin without difficulty.

Niacin becomes NAD and NADP, the two cofactors that carry electrons in almost every energy-handling reaction in a cell. A severe shortage produces pellagra, whose classical description includes dementia, and cases still appear in the literature.

A prospective study of 6,158 Chicago residents aged 65 and over found that higher dietary niacin intake was associated with a lower rate of incident Alzheimer's disease and with slower cognitive decline over a median 5.5 years of follow-up. That was food intake measured by questionnaire in an observational cohort. It is genuinely interesting and it is not a supplement trial.

At the other end of the dose range the story reverses. AIM-HIGH and HPS2-THRIVE both gave extended-release niacin at gram doses alongside statins and both failed to reduce cardiovascular events, with the AIM-HIGH safety report documenting the adverse-event profile. Those are pharmacological doses, forty to sixty times a nutritional amount, and nothing about them describes a capsule.

Nothing in the body uses beta-alanine as beta-alanine. It is one half of carnosine, and every gram of it on a label is there to raise the amount of carnosine banked in tissue over the following weeks.

The ISSN position stand sets the practical range at 4 to 6 grams a day for a minimum of four weeks, notes that paraesthesia is the characteristic side effect, and recommends divided doses or a sustained-release form to manage it. The loading literature and a 2017 meta-analysis of 40 studies describe what that buys, which is a modest benefit in high-intensity exercise lasting 30 seconds to 10 minutes. An individual-participant-data meta-analysis went further and found no evidence that some people respond and others do not.

The cognitive record is two-sided and both sides belong here. the combat-soldier trial gave twenty elite combat soldiers beta-alanine for 28 days and found no difference on a serial-subtraction task, while the same soldiers did shoot more accurately. In older adults, a double-blind trial at 2.4 g a day for twelve weeks reported effects on cognitive function, mood and physical function, and a 2024 diffusion-imaging follow-up reported changes in hippocampal and amygdala fractional anisotropy.

One more distinction is worth stating plainly. The trials that found memory effects in this family gave people carnosine or anserine directly: the anserine and carnosine memory trial used 1.0 g a day of an anserine and carnosine formula in a three-to-one ratio for three months, with a follow-up in APOE4 carriers and the NEAT trial behind it. Beta-alanine is the precursor, which is a slower and less direct route to the same molecule.