An Evaluation of the Effects of a Non-caffeinated Energy Dietary Supplement on Cognitive and Physical Performance: A Randomized Double-Blind Placebo-Controlled Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A large and growing body of research shows that non-caffeinated plant-based nutritional supplements can increase cognitive and physical performance. This study aimed to build on this work by investigating the possibility that a specific botanical blend (consisting of Bacopa monnieri bacosides, Kaempferia parviflora methoxy flavones, pomegranate peel polyphenols, and Moringa oleifera leaf saponins) could improve cognitive and physical performance. To this end, we carried out a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled 21-day parallel study on 36 healthy adults. We compared the effects of the botanical blend at baseline to a caffeine and a placebo condition on 1) self-reported alertness, anxiety, and headaches; 2) multiple measures of attention and cognition; 3) physical performance; and 4) stress biomarkers. We found that relative to baseline and compared to the Caffeine and Placebo groups, the botanical blend increased alertness and improved cognitive performance. The cognitive effects were most robust for attention measures. The botanical blend did not improve physical performance on a time to exhaustion (TTE) test. Of note, there was not the expected increase in catecholamine response after the TTE on Day 21, suggesting that long-term botanical blend use decreases the catecholamine stress response of a physical endurance task. In conclusion, we show that, within the confines of this study, a combination of the botanical blend could serve as a safe and effective nutritional supplement to improve cognitive performance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".