Trying to decide between Citicoline or Resonance Lions Mane to improve my memory, mood and blood flow to the brain

We are not the only lab that can assay erinacine A anymore, now that Chromadex released reference standards extracted from our product. You can reach out to Twin Arbor and have them test it now, and I am sure other labs are working on it as we speak, too. We are also now on the AOAC advisory panel for functional mushrooms, and will be having this assay made into an official AOAC one.

Also, we can show you the chromatogram (Chromatograph is the instrument. Chromatogram is the output of the instrument.) However, most people don't understand analytical chemistry. A chromatogram alone won't tell you anything. Most people think if they see a peak on the chromatogram, and the peak area is like 99%, that means it is 99% pure. That's not true. You have to run your sample, then run a known reference standard, and then compare the peak areas between them. That's the only way you know what the concentration is. Brands know consumers don't understand that, though; so they post up chromatograms to confuse people.

Here is a chromatogram from our Erinamax capsules.

On our outputs we actually have the machine put the calculation, so you can see mg/cap. However, that's just a setting in our Empower software. You can see the peak area below at 100%. That's because these methods are optimized to only pull out erinacine A. This doesn't mean our capsules are 100% erinacine A. That's just the % of the peak area in the chromatogram. You have to take the peak area number, then run another run with a known reference standard, then compare the two peak area numbers.

Here is the run of the reference standard.

You can see the peak area of the standard is 986,913. The peak area of our sample is 696,100. Then you have to run a calculator to translate that to concentration.

Here is that calculator.

You can see that you need to know the purity of the standard, the mass of standard used, the volume of the standard solution injected, the standard dilution factor (if any), the concentration of the standard in solution, the sample mass used, sample dilution factor, and the sample prep volume. This allows you to calculate the amount of erinacine A in the sample. If you didn't know any of this other data, the chromatogram would be meaningless. Brands that just toss up chromatogams are trying to mislead consumers that don't actually understand the minutia of analytical chemistry. You can see that based on the calculation, there is 2.5mg of erinacine A per capsule, which is our spec. Again, our Empower outputs put the calculation result in the actual chromatogram result, but the data is all calculated behind the scenes. We just do it to make it easier when I want to pull up a chromatogram and see results.

Let's look at some data from runs we did on other brands claiming erinacine concentration.

Here is a batch of Oriveda lion's mane we ran.

We found 0.001% erinacine A in the sample.

Then someone sent us this product from the Czech Republic. It claimed 0.3% erinacines, which was more reasonable, so we had Emiel in the Netherlands buy it and ship it to us.

Here is the chromatogram from the Mycomedica product.

We found 0.019mg per capsule, way below what they are claiming. They were claiming 1.5mg per capsule.

Then we decided to test Triquetra's, since they were making crazy claims.

Here is Triquetra's MycoMax.

Now you will notice that the baseline in this chromatogram is very uneven and noisy. Why is that? Look at the scale on the left. We had to zoom in so much to see anything. When you zoom in to that AU, the baseline is not flat. There is absolutely no erinacines in this Triquetra product.

Then someone said Vibe Mushrooms was standardized to erinacines, so we bought that. This is the product.

Here is the Vibe Mushrooms chromatogram.

You can see we had to zoom like crazy again, but there was some in this sample. It was only 0.0004%, a far cry from the 3% they claim on their site. We also ran beta-glucans on it, and it only had 7%. They are liar liar pants on fire!

So there is some data for you. I started our mushroom project 9 years ago, and spent millions building out our lab to be able to do this stuff. As of right now, nobody is anywhere even close to us in erinacine A concentration. Everyone is just lying to try and sell more product. You can all verify this yourselves now that Twin Arbor is offering erinacine A assay services. Go ahead and do it. You will find the same as we are finding. We are also friends with the guys at Chromadex. They have sold the erinacine A standard to a lot of brands now. Everyone scrambled to get it to start assaying things. Then everyone went quiet, because they now know what we have known for years: no retail products have meaningful amount of it.