Nervelin Ingredients

The one entry on this panel that is not a plant. Lysine cannot be made in the body and arrives in ordinary food — meat, fish, beans, dairy — at several grams a day for most adults, which puts any share of a 1,000 mg blend a long way below a normal diet’s own supply. The hydrochloride form is what keeps a hygroscopic amino acid stable in a dry powder.

Where its human trials went is cold sores. Cochrane’s review of prevention covers that literature and did not find lysine prevented recurrence, and an earlier controlled trial reported the same result in its own title. Nothing in the record connects it to sensation in the feet or hands.

Fermented apple juice, dried onto a carrier so it can go into a capsule. The active part is acetic acid, and the amount of it that survives drying is a manufacturing variable no label in this category prints.

Its trials are about the hour after a meal rather than about anything chronic. Johnston 2005 measured post-meal glucose with vinegar and peanut products, a 2020 crossover repeated the exercise against a rice meal, and a 2026 urology crossover tested it on urinary stone prevention. Three different endpoints, none of them a nerve.

The rind of a small South Asian fruit, milled rather than extracted here: the row says powder, which usually means a lower concentration of hydroxycitric acid than a standardised extract would carry. No percentage is printed, so the hydroxycitric content of this particular row cannot be worked out from the label.

It also carries the one genuine safety signal on the panel. A case series from the US drug-induced liver injury network describes moderate to severe injury with Garcinia alone and combined with green tea. On efficacy, the 1998 JAMA trial used 1,500 mg of hydroxycitric acid a day and separated from placebo on nothing, while a 2014 trial used 2,400 mg a day of extract for lipids. The safety and efficacy review gathers both sides.

Root of a Malaysian shrub, sold as a water-soluble extract in the trials and as an unspecified extract here. Quassinoids and eurycomanone are the fraction the research follows, and standardised preparations name a percentage. This row names none, so the extract ratio is the maker’s.

The dose is unusually well pinned for a botanical. Tambi 2012 and a six-month randomised trial in older men both used 200 mg a day, which gives a reader an actual figure to hold this row against — if the row had a figure of its own.

The whole plant rather than a single part, and the active fraction is a family of prenylated flavonoids with icariin at the head of it. Strength here depends entirely on the icariin percentage, which a standardised trial extract states and this panel does not.

One controlled human trial exists for the fraction. Yong 2021 gave post-menopausal women 740 mg a day of a standardised prenylflavonoid extract for six weeks and measured bone markers. A 2026 overview sets out the chemistry and how much of the rest of the literature is preclinical.

Root carrying diosgenin, a plant steroid that a laboratory can convert into human hormones and a human body cannot. That single piece of chemistry is the origin of most of what is written about wild yam, and it has been carried a long way past what it supports.

The one randomised controlled trial in the whole literature gave a wild yam extract to healthy menopausal women and measured symptoms, lipids and sex hormones. It moved none of them. One trial, one flat result, and no second trial in the twenty-five years since.

The best piece of botanical disclosure on this panel, and it is worth saying so plainly. Cinnamomum verum is true cinnamon rather than cassia, and coumarin is the reason the distinction earns its ink: cassia carries far more of it, and coumarin has a tolerable daily intake of its own.

The glycaemic work is where this ingredient’s evidence sits. A 2024 dose-response meta-analysis pooled the type 2 diabetes trials. Species substitution is common enough that an analytical method exists to detect it, and a low-coumarin alternative species has been proposed for the same reason.

A ridged gourd eaten as a vegetable across South and South-East Asia, so the food exposure behind it is large and old. Charantin, momordicin and an insulin-like peptide are the compounds usually named, and the extract ratio decides how much of any of them a capsule carries.

A twelve-week randomised trial in adults with prediabetes ran two arms, 300 mg and 600 mg a day, and a 2020 meta-analysis pooled the hypoglycaemic work in type 2 diabetes. Those are the two records worth reading; the rest of what circulates about this plant is preclinical.

The compound that gives raspberries their smell, produced industrially for flavour and fragrance because extracting it from fruit would cost a fortune. It is a single defined molecule rather than a plant extract, which at least means nobody has to argue about a standardisation percentage.

What it has never had is a human efficacy trial. A 2017 mouse study found it reduced adiposity no further than the drop in food intake explained. The fragrance industry’s safety assessment treats it as what it is, an aroma chemical, and a 2022 dermatology screen lists it among phenols capable of depigmenting skin in cell work.