The Nootropics I Stopped Taking, and Why
A supplement cabinet audit. Nine compounds went in, three came out the other side, and the reasons for each removal were different.
Every eighteen months I empty the cabinet onto the table and require each bottle to justify itself. The bar: is there human evidence, does the dose I take match the evidence, and did I notice anything when I stopped?
Most things fail. Here is the 2026 cull.
Removed: racetams
Piracetam, aniracetam, oxiracetam. I took these for the better part of two years on the strength of a large but old literature and a great deal of forum consensus.
The problem with that literature is that most of it studied cognitively impaired or elderly populations, much of it predates modern trial standards, and the healthy-adult evidence is thin to the point of absence. Regulatory status is also murkier than enthusiasts suggest — piracetam is not an approved drug in the United States and is prescription-only across much of Europe.
I stopped, waited a month, and noticed nothing. That is not proof of absence, but combined with the evidence base it was enough.
Removed: Lion's Mane
The mechanism is genuinely appealing — hericenones and erinacines stimulating nerve growth factor, demonstrated in vitro. The human evidence is one small Japanese trial in older adults with mild cognitive impairment, some rodent work, and an enormous amount of extrapolation.
The gap between "increases NGF in a dish" and "improves your cognition" is where most of this industry lives. I might revisit it if a decent randomised trial in healthy adults appears. There is not one now.
Removed: multivitamin
Not because it is harmful — because in a person eating a varied diet, large trials have consistently failed to show benefit on the outcomes that matter. If you have a specific documented deficiency, treat the deficiency. If you do not, you are producing expensive urine.
I kept vitamin D, at a modest dose, through the northern winter. That one has a defensible case for people at my latitude and my indoor habits, and it is easily checked with a blood test rather than assumed.
Removed: Alpha-GPC
Reasonable pharmacology as a choline source. What moved it off the shelf was a set of observational findings associating high circulating choline metabolites — particularly TMAO — with cardiovascular risk. The evidence is contested, the causal direction is unresolved, and the cognitive upside in a healthy adult is small. Small uncertain benefit plus non-trivial uncertain risk is an easy removal.
Kept: caffeine plus L-theanine
Discussed at length elsewhere on this site. Replicated placebo-controlled trials, sensible effect size, honest about its limits.
Kept: creatine monohydrate
Extensive safety data, strong physical evidence, plausible and partially supported cognitive case. Cheap. Would keep taking it for the training benefits alone.
Kept: vitamin D, conditionally
Winter only, dosed against an actual blood level rather than a guess.
What the audit taught me
Nearly every removal followed the same pattern: I had accepted a mechanism as though it were an outcome. NGF upregulation, choline availability, receptor modulation — these are stories about how a thing might work, and they are extremely persuasive if you have any scientific training, which is precisely why they are the industry's preferred marketing.
Three surviving items out of nine. I expect the next audit to be similarly unkind.
Not medical advice. Vitamin D in particular should be dosed against a measured level, not a blog post.
