Orchard NotesOld Apple Trees Keep Slow Time. So Do the Studies Behind This Liquid
Neurologic is a quart of berry-flavored liquid, two tablespoons a day, and its label speaks of brain health "over time." I read it through one orchard year, season by season, beside the calendars of its own studies.
This is a paid advertisement. Sponsored by Liquid Health, Inc.
The oldest tree on our place is a Northern Spy that my father set in the ground in the spring of 1958, a few weeks before I was born.
It is still bearing, and every January I climb into it with a saw.
My father used to say that an apple tree tells you nothing in a month and very little in a year.
It tells you the truth over about five of them, and then it keeps telling you for the rest of your life.
I have thought about that sentence more this year than in the previous forty.
The reason is a quart bottle of amber glass that my son-in-law left in our refrigerator at Christmas.
The bottle is a liquid supplement called Neurologic, from a company in Nevada called Liquid Health.
You pour two tablespoons of it a day, and it tastes of berries.
Printed across its front is a single sentence, and the last two words of that sentence stopped me.
The sentence speaks of mental acuity in everyday life and brain health over time.
Over time. An orchard man hears those two words differently from most people.
In an orchard, "over time" has a size.
It is the four or five years before a young tree bears, the ten before it bears well, and the fifty after that when it mostly takes care of itself if you take care of it.
So I asked the question I would ask of any nursery tag.
How much time, exactly, and measured how?
I did not ask a salesman, and I did not ask my son-in-law.
I asked the label, the seller's own product page, and the published studies behind each ingredient the label names.
Then I laid every answer against the calendar I know best, which is one year in this orchard, from pruning to harvest and back to pruning.
This is that year.
It is long, because the question is slow, and I am not going to pretend a slow question has a quick answer.
I am not going to tell you what the bottle did for me, either.
One man's year is a story, not a study, and I have pruned enough trees to know the difference.
A Tree Planted the Year I Was Born
The Northern Spy stands at the top of the slope, where the wind comes through in March.
Its trunk is split low down, the way old Spies often are, and one side leans more than the other.
My father picked the variety because it keeps.
A Spy picked in October will still be crisp in a cold cellar in March, and in the years before refrigerators that mattered more than taste.
It is also famous for making you wait.
A Northern Spy can take the better part of a decade to bear a real crop, and my father used to joke that he planted it for his grandchildren.
He was nearly right.
I was nine before that tree gave us enough apples to fill a bushel basket, and I remember the basket.
Growing up next to that kind of patience changes how you hear promises.
When a nursery catalog tells you a tree will bear "in no time," you learn to turn the page.
When it tells you the tree will bear in three to five years on a dwarfing root, you believe it a little, because now there is a number.
A number with a unit on it is the first thing an orchard man looks for, and the first thing he trusts.
"Soon" is not a number, and "over time" is not a number either.
That does not make the phrase a lie.
It makes it an open question, and open questions are there to be closed with whatever facts are available.
So before I opened the bottle, I sat down at the kitchen table with it, the way I sit down with a seed catalog in February.
I had my reading glasses, a pencil and the back of an envelope.
The first thing I wrote on the envelope was the date.
The second was a question: what is the slowest thing in this bottle, and what is the fastest?
I did not know yet that the answer would run from a single afternoon to nearly ten years.
Winter Is for Looking at the Wood
There is a reason we prune in winter, and it is not only that the trees are asleep.
With the leaves off, you can finally see the structure of the thing.
In July, an apple tree is a green cloud.
You cannot tell a strong limb from a weak one, or a branch that bears from a branch that only grows.
In January, every branch is a line against the sky.
You can follow each one from the trunk to its tip and decide what it is for.
Old orchard men have a rule for this.
You cut away what does not bear, so you can see what does.
Water sprouts go, the straight whips that shoot up from the big limbs and never make fruit.
Crossing branches go, because they rub each other raw.
What is left is not pretty at first.
But it is honest, and you can count it.
I read the bottle the same way that first evening.
I set aside everything on it that was a picture, a feeling or a word without a number, and I kept what could be counted.
It turns out the front of this bottle carries a great deal of foliage.
There are three hashtags, a drawing, a row of small printed badges and a flavor name.
None of that is dishonest, any more than leaves are dishonest.
It is just not the wood.
The wood of a supplement is its panel: what is in it, how much, and how often.
On the back of this bottle, the panel is short.
It lists four ingredients with an amount beside them, and then two blends with a single total weight each.
The four with amounts are vitamin E, folate, vitamin B12 and choline.
The two blends hold eleven more names between them, with 1,470 milligrams shared out among all eleven in proportions the label does not give.
That was the structure of the tree, seen bare.
Four limbs I could measure, and two thick bundles of branches I could not separate.
Two Words on the Front of the Bottle
Let me go back to the sentence on the front, because it is the only place the bottle talks about time.
In full, it reads: "A powerful blend to promote mental acuity in everyday life & brain health over time."
It is set in small type under the name, where you would miss it if you only poured.
What does "everyday life" promise, set beside "over time"?
Read slowly, the sentence makes two claims on two different clocks.
The first clock is short.
"Mental acuity in everyday life" is about the day you are in: a name at the hardware store, a figure in your head, the thread of a conversation.
The second clock is long.
"Brain health over time" is about the years, and it does not say how many.
The verb in front of both is "promote."
That is a careful word, and I respect it more than the "powerful" at the start of the sentence.
To promote something is to encourage it.
It is the verb a nurseryman uses about compost, not the verb he uses about a sure thing.
Does the label anywhere say how long "over time" is?
No, there is no line on the bottle that puts a number of weeks, months or years on it.
The seller's product page does not put one on it either.
It describes what the ingredients are for, and it says the liquid form is designed to be absorbed more quickly and efficiently by the body.
That last sentence is about speed, not about years.
And the page, as of my reading, does not publish a trial that compares this liquid with any other format.
So the bottle leaves "over time" open.
The only place left to find a real calendar is in the studies of the ingredients themselves, each with its own number of weeks or years.
That is where I went next.
And that is why the rest of this reading follows the seasons, because the studies turned out to sort themselves by season almost exactly.
A Quart Is a Month, Not a Season
Before the studies, there was one more thing to count in winter, and it was the bottle itself.
It holds 32 fluid ounces, which is a quart, the same size as the glass jugs we used to fill with cider at the press.
The serving is two tablespoons, which is one fluid ounce.
That makes 32 servings to the bottle.
At one serving a day, it is a month, with two mornings to spare.
So how many bottles fit in one season?
Three, roughly, if a season is thirteen weeks.
And how many fit in a year?
Twelve, if you never miss a morning, which nobody I know has ever managed with anything.
I wrote those numbers on the envelope under the date.
A month to a bottle, three to a season, twelve to a year.
Then I looked up the seller's return terms, because an orchard man likes to know what happens if the tree does not take.
The store calls it the Vitamin Joy policy.
If you do not like the product for any reason, including its taste, its packaging or its effect, you call or write within 30 days of your purchase.
What you get back is not money.
The policy says the store will exchange it for another product or give you a store credit, and it covers only bottles bought directly from the seller's own site.
Thirty days is one bottle, and one bottle is one month.
That is worth holding in your head next to the studies we are about to walk through, most of which ran far longer than a month.
I am not saying the policy is unfair.
A nursery that sells bare-root trees does not take them back after the first summer either.
But it does mean the bottle and its policy both live on the short clock.
Whatever "over time" means, you will be past the exchange window long before you reach it.
Bloom Is Not Fruit
In the second week of May, the orchard goes white.
The blossom comes all at once on the old trees, and for about ten days the whole slope smells of it.
Visitors love this week.
They take pictures and say what a crop we are going to have.
Orchard men are quieter about it.
A tree in full bloom has promised nothing yet.
Most of those blossoms will fall without setting fruit.
Some will set and then drop in June, which the old men call the June drop, and the tree decides on its own how much it can carry.
What you pick in October is a small fraction of what you saw in May.
Nobody is being cheated; that is just how the tree works.
Some of the studies behind this bottle are bloom.
They measured what happened in the first hours after a single dose, and the result is real, but it is a flower, not an apple.
A single afternoon in a laboratory is May. It is not October.
Which ingredients in this bottle have only been tested over a few hours?
Two of the ones I could find: L-theanine and huperzine A, both inside the blends.
That does not make them worthless.
It makes their results the kind you should read the way you read a white hillside in May.
What One Afternoon Can Show
The L-theanine study is a careful one.
It was double-blind and placebo-controlled, run in Japan with men and women aged 50 to 69 whose thinking scores were in the normal range. [1]
After a single dose, the people taking L-theanine had a faster reaction time on an attention task than those on placebo. [1]
They also gave more correct answers and made fewer errors of omission on a working-memory task.
That is a genuine result in people our age.
It is also, by design, a result about one afternoon.
The summary does not give the dose in milligrams, and it does not give the number of people.
So there is no way to say whether the amount of L-theanine inside this bottle's blend is anywhere near what they used.
What about huperzine A?
The study I found gave healthy adults single doses of 100 or 200 micrograms, with twelve people in each group. [2]
The 200-microgram dose kept people's recall steady across the test sessions.
But neither dose improved their overall performance on the full battery of tests. [2]
Again, a single day, a small group, and a mixed result.
And again, the label does not say how many micrograms of huperzine A are in two tablespoons.
There is one more small thing about huperzine A on this label.
The panel gives its source as "Club serrata," where the plant is usually named Huperzia serrata, a club moss.
It is almost certainly a shortening, not an error of substance.
But I note it the way I would note a nursery tag that spelled the variety a little oddly: it makes you read the rest more slowly.
Two blossoms, then, and both of them on the one-afternoon clock.
Neither tells us anything about "over time," because neither study lasted longer than a day.
Two Weeks on Night Duty
The next clock is a little longer, and it belongs to an ingredient with a hard name: Rhodiola rosea, a root from cold mountain country.
The study most often cited for it was run on 56 young physicians working night duty.
They took one tablet a day of a standardized rhodiola extract, in a double-blind crossover design. [3]
In the first two-week period, their scores improved on tests of associative thinking, short-term memory, calculation, concentration and speed of perception. [3]
Nobody in the trial reported a problem with the extract.
Two weeks is longer than an afternoon, but who was being tested?
Young people on night shifts, not men our age on an ordinary morning.
That matters the way soil matters.
A variety that thrives in a valley may do nothing on a windy hilltop, and a result in tired young people may not carry over to rested older ones.
The same pattern shows up with L-tyrosine, another name in the blends.
A 2015 review concluded that tyrosine seems to help thinking mainly in short, demanding situations, when the body's own supply of certain messenger chemicals is temporarily run down. [4]
Outside those situations, the review found its usefulness limited. [4]
In orchard terms, it is a frost blanket: very useful on the one cold night, and not much use in July.
So by the end of spring I had three results on short clocks: an afternoon, an afternoon and two weeks.
All three were real, and none of them had been measured over the kind of time the front label talks about.
July Is Mostly Water
By July, the orchard has stopped performing for visitors.
The fruit is small and green, the grass wants cutting every week, and most of my work is carrying water to the young trees.
The old trees have roots deep enough to find their own.
The young ones, the ones I planted in the last five years, will stall in a dry July and take a full season to catch up.
Nobody writes songs about watering.
But ask any orchard man what decides a young tree's future, and he will tell you it is the dull summer weeks, not the pretty spring ones.
I found a study on people that reads almost like a note from the orchard.
In Berlin, researchers followed 1,111 adults aged 60 to 89 and measured their hydration directly rather than asking them about it. [5]
About a third of them were short of water.
Over the years that followed, those people showed a steeper drop on a test of how quickly the mind processes information, and in their sense of well-being. [5]
It is an observation, not a trial, so it shows two things traveling together, not one causing the other.
A 2021 review of 18 studies in older adults came to a similar, careful place: some evidence, but sparse, linking low water intake with poorer thinking scores. [6]
I mention water here for a plain reason.
Whatever else you do for your head in the summer of your life, the glass of water is the cheapest thing on the list, and it has a study behind it in people our age.
It also happens that the bottle on my refrigerator door is mostly liquid.
Two tablespoons is not a glass of water, but it does not take the place of one either.
I also started carrying a glass of water out to the porch with me in the morning, before anything else.
It is a small habit, and it is the only one in this whole reading that I can say, with a study behind me, is worth keeping at any age.
The Bottle on the Porch Rail
It was in July that I finally took the bottle out of the refrigerator and set it on the porch rail in the morning light, to look at it the way I look at a new tree before it goes in the ground.
The bottle is heavier than you expect, because it is real glass.
The amber color is there for the same reason cider makers and brewers use it: it keeps light off what is inside.
The label asks for three things in small print.
Shake well, take two tablespoons daily, and refrigerate after opening.
The shaking is the first habit it teaches you.
Anyone who has let a jug of fresh cider stand knows why: what is heavier settles to the bottom, and the first glass poured is not the same as the last.
The cold shelf is the second.
Once the seal is broken, the bottle lives in the refrigerator door, next to the milk.
The tablespoon is the third, and it is the one people get wrong.
A tablespoon from the silverware drawer is not a measuring tablespoon, and the two can differ by a good deal.
The store includes a measuring cup with larger orders, and the seller's page says the liquid can be stirred into a drink.
I used a proper measuring spoon from the baking drawer, and after the first week I stopped thinking about it.
What does it taste like?
Berries, mostly, and something darker underneath.
The seller's page calls the flavor Berry Pomegranate.
The bottle itself prints it the other way round, Pomegranate Berry.
It is a small thing, and I only noticed it because I had the envelope out.
But it was the first of several places where the page and the bottle do not quite say the same thing, and I will come to the others.
The panel lists 5 calories, 1 gram of carbohydrate and 0 grams of sugar in a serving.
So the sweetness is coming from something other than sugar, and the store's list of what the bottle leaves out includes gluten, sugar, yeast and milk.
It is a daily spoonful, not a harvest. The question was still how long.
A Flavor Is Not a Fruit
Standing on the porch with the spoon, I could see the Montmorency cherry at the bottom of the yard and the row of blueberries my wife planted along the fence.
It struck me that the bottle tastes of berries and pomegranate, and the panel does not list any berry or any pomegranate among its ingredients.
The flavor is a flavor, the way a candle can smell of apples without any apple inside it.
Is that a problem?
No, not in itself; plenty of honest things are flavored.
But it is worth separating the taste from the contents, because the fruit itself has studies of its own, and they are more interesting than most people know.
In one small trial, 26 healthy older adults with an average age of 68 took a daily blueberry concentrate for twelve weeks. [7]
The concentrate carried 387 milligrams of the dark-blue plant pigments called anthocyanidins.
Brain scans showed more blood flow and more activity in the areas used during a task, compared with placebo. [7]
On a working-memory test, the improvement was only borderline.
So even the real fruit, concentrated, over a full season, gave a modest and partly uncertain result.
That is the honest size of it, and I find it oddly reassuring: nobody is pretending a berry is a miracle-worker, least of all the scientists who measured it.
The bottle borrowed the fruit's color and taste. The fruit's twelve weeks of study belong to the fruit.
I went down the yard that evening and ate a handful of blueberries off the bush, warm from the sun.
They were not a supplement, and they did not come with a label, but they had been growing on that fence for fourteen years.
Six Months and Seventy-Eight People
August brought the first study on this bottle's list that ran long enough to feel like a season.
It concerns phosphatidylserine, a fat-based compound found in every cell membrane, which the panel says comes from non-GMO soy.
The trial followed 78 Japanese adults aged 50 to 69 who had noticed their memory slipping, for six months. [8]
They took 100 or 300 milligrams a day of soybean-derived phosphatidylserine, or a placebo, without knowing which.
What happened after six months?
The honest answer is: nearly the same thing in every group.
Scores on the thinking tests rose in all three groups, including the placebo group. [8]
Only in the subgroup whose scores had started relatively low did memory scores in the phosphatidylserine groups rise significantly from where they began, mostly on recalling words after a delay.
Neither dose brought any reported problems. [8]
That is a good result for comfort, and a mixed one for effect.
It is also the first time in this reading that the word "placebo" did so much of the work.
Every orchard man knows this effect in his own way: the year you finally fertilize is often the year the weather is good, and you will never know which did it.
When the placebo group improves too, the question becomes how much of the change belongs to the tree and how much to the weather.
There is one more thing to set beside this study.
It used 100 or 300 milligrams a day of phosphatidylserine alone.
In this bottle, phosphatidylserine shares an 815-milligram blend with five other ingredients, and the label does not say how much of the 815 is phosphatidylserine.
It could be a large share or a small one, and nobody reading the bottle can tell.
The Four Limbs With a Number on Them
With the leaves full on the trees and the fruit sizing up, I went back to the part of the panel I could actually measure.
Four lines, four amounts, four percentages of the Daily Value.
Vitamin E, 7.5 milligrams, 50 percent of the Daily Value.
That line adds up: the Daily Value for vitamin E on a US label is 15 milligrams, and half of it is 7.5.
Vitamin B12, 400 micrograms, 16,667 percent.
That also adds up, against a Daily Value of 2.4 micrograms, though the percentage looks alarming the first time you see it.
The federal fact sheet on B12 says it has no upper limit set, because of its low potential for toxicity. [9]
It also says that between 3 and 43 percent of older adults living at home are low in B12, depending on how you define low, and that B12 in supplements is already in a form the body does not have to separate from food. [9]
That second fact is the most useful sentence I found all summer.
It means the B12 line on this bottle is the one line whose job is plain and whose amount is generous.
Choline, 100 milligrams, 18 percent.
It comes from choline bitartrate, and the arithmetic works against a Daily Value of 550 milligrams.
In the Framingham Offspring study, 1,391 adults aged 36 to 83 who ate more choline in their ordinary food did better on tests of verbal and visual memory. [10]
That is a study of diet, not of supplements, and it shows a link, not a cause.
Folate, 7.5 milligrams, 50 percent.
Here the arithmetic stops working.
The Daily Value for folate on a US label is 400 micrograms.
Half of that is 200 micrograms, while 7.5 milligrams would be many times the Daily Value, so either the amount or the percentage on this line is a misprint.
The panel does not say which.
I wrote a question mark next to it on the envelope and moved on, because one wrongly labeled limb does not tell you the whole tree is sick.
There are two other small mismatches between the seller's page and the bottle.
The page's description names vitamin B6 as a key ingredient, and B6 does not appear on the panel at all.
And the store's list of what the bottle leaves out includes soy, while the panel says the phosphatidylserine is "from non-GMO soy."
I record these the way I would record a tag that named the wrong rootstock: not as a scandal, just as a reason to read everything twice.
Eleven Names in Two Blends
The rest of the panel is where the counting stops.
There are two blends, and each carries one total weight.
The first is called the Memory and Focus Blend, 815 milligrams.
Inside it: aloe vera inner-leaf juice, acetyl-L-carnitine, alpha GPC, phosphatidylserine, L-theanine and alpha lipoic acid.
The second, the 655-milligram blend, is named for alertness.
Inside it: L-tyrosine, DMAE, a rhodiola root extract, a ginkgo leaf extract and huperzine A.
Can the blends be compared with the studies?
Not one ingredient at a time, because the label does not give one amount at a time.
A blend is like a mixed row in an old orchard, where the trees went in without a planting map.
You know how many trees there are, and you know the row is so many feet long, but you cannot say how much of the row is Baldwin and how much is Spy.
In fairness, blends like these are legal and common, and a company may keep its proportions to itself.
But it means that for eleven of the fifteen ingredients, there is no way to set the amount in two tablespoons beside the amount in any trial.
Those eleven names are real ingredients. What the bottle does not give is how much of each is in your spoon.
The full list, with what each ingredient is and what its research found, is in the ingredient guide linked at the foot of this page.
There is no need to repeat it here, and in any case the more useful thing was coming in October.
The Seller's Sentence About Speed
There is one sentence on the seller's page that I kept coming back to through the summer.
It says the liquid form is designed to be absorbed more quickly and efficiently by the body.
Quicker than what, and measured how?
The page compares its liquid favorably with other formats, and it does not link to a study that measured the difference.
I looked for one on the page and did not find it.
That does not make the sentence false; it makes it a claim the seller has not shown its work on.
An orchard man has heard sentences like this before.
Every few years a nursery sells a rootstock that "comes into bearing faster," and some of them do, and the good nurseries print the trial plots that show it.
Speed is also a strange thing to sell on a bottle that talks about "over time."
If the goal is the long clock, a few minutes faster on the short clock is not the number that decides anything.
What I can say from the panel is simpler.
Two tablespoons is a fluid ounce, it is mostly liquid, it has 5 calories, and whatever it carries goes down with it in one swallow.
A liquid is easy to take every morning, and a habit that is easy to keep is worth something over a season.
That is the honest advantage of the format, and it does not need a speed claim to stand on.
September Is the Waiting Month
September is the hardest month in an orchard, because everything looks ready and very little is.
The apples color up weeks before the starch in them has turned to sugar.
Pick too early and you get a hard, sour fruit that never sweetens in storage.
Pick too late and the fruit goes soft on the tree and drops.
So how does an orchard man know?
He cuts one apple open and looks at the seeds, and he presses a thumb into the flesh, and he tastes it.
The seeds of a ripe apple have gone from white to brown.
It is a small sign, easy to miss, and it is the only one worth trusting.
I thought about that when I read how the studies measured their results.
They did not ask people whether they felt sharper; they gave them timed tests of recall, attention and speed, many of them, at the start and at the end.
Even with all those tests, the differences they found were small.
Some came out slightly better than placebo, some came out even, and the placebo groups often improved on their own.
That is worth knowing if you ever try a bottle like this one.
A man at his kitchen table has no stopwatch and no placebo group, so a good week or a bad week will feel like proof either way.
The honest way to read your own year is the way you read an apple in September.
Look for the small, steady signs, cut one open now and then, and do not decide from the color.
Color comes early. Sugar comes late.
Harvest: The Studies That Ran for Years
Picking time is when an orchard tells you plainly how the year went.
Every apple in the bin is a fact, and none of the blossoms you counted in May can argue with it.
In the same way, the long studies are the harvest.
They ran for years, in thousands of people, and they are the only ones that can speak to "over time" at all.
Three of them concern ingredients on this bottle's panel.
None of them tested this bottle, and I will say plainly what each one found.
What happened with B vitamins over five years?
A 2018 review by the Cochrane group gathered 14 trials in 27,882 adults whose thinking was healthy. [11]
The trials used folic acid, vitamin B12, vitamin B6 or combinations of them.
The review concluded that the supplements probably make little or no difference to overall thinking scores at any point up to five years, and may make none from five to ten years. [11]
Most of the people in those trials were over 60, which is to say men and women our age.
That is about as direct an answer to "over time" as the research gives, and it is not the answer the front of a bottle would choose.
Five years, twenty-seven thousand people, and the scores held level.
None of this means B12 does nothing in the body.
It means that in people who were already doing fine, adding more did not show up in their test scores over the years.
Six Years of Ginkgo, Nine of Vitamin E
The longest study on ginkgo I could find ran for a median of 6.1 years.
It enrolled 3,069 adults aged 72 to 96 living in their own communities, and gave them 120 milligrams of ginkgo extract twice a day or a placebo. [12]
At the end, the ginkgo group did not do better than the placebo group on memory, attention, visual-spatial skills, language or planning. [12]
Six years is a long time to wait for an apple that did not come.
The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health sums up ginkgo in a sentence: there is no conclusive evidence that it helps for any health condition. [13]
It also advises caution with ginkgo for anyone who takes something daily to thin the blood, so that is a question for the pharmacist before any bottle that contains it.
And vitamin E, over nearly ten years?
In a large trial, 6,377 generally healthy women aged 65 or older took 600 IU of vitamin E every other day, or a placebo. [14]
Over up to 9.6 years, the vitamin E group showed no benefit in thinking over the placebo group. [14]
The dose was far larger than the 7.5 milligrams in two tablespoons of this liquid, and the people were all women, but the length of the study is the point here.
Nine and a half years is longer than a Northern Spy takes to bear.
It is the closest thing in all this research to the phrase on the front of the bottle, and it came out even.
I am not writing this to be gloomy.
I am writing it because a man our age deserves to know the size of the harvest before he buys the tree.
What a Real Harvest Is Made Of
If the long studies of single ingredients came out mostly level, what did not?
That was my question in late October, with the bins full and the cider press running in the barn.
The best answer I found was not about a bottle at all.
It was about a whole pattern of eating, tested over three years.
In that trial, 604 older adults with healthy thinking, who were overweight and whose diets had room to improve, were put on one of two plans for three years. [15]
One group followed the MIND diet, built on vegetables, berries, nuts, whole grains, beans, fish and olive oil, and the other followed their usual diet with a mild cut in calories.
Both groups improved on their overall thinking scores over the three years, and the difference between them was not significant. [15]
The scans of their brains changed about the same in both groups.
So the berries did not beat the calorie cut, but both groups moved in the right direction when they changed how they ate.
The harvest came from the whole row, not from any single tree in it.
Another long study, from Brazil, followed 10,775 adults aged 35 to 74 for a median of eight years. [16]
Those who ate more ultraprocessed food, above the lowest quarter, saw their scores on thinking tests drop about 28 percent faster than those in the lowest quarter.
It is an observation, not a trial, and the absolute difference was modest.
But it points the same way as the diet study: what fills most of your plate, over years, seems to matter more than any one thing added to it.
We pressed cider that week from every kind of apple in the orchard, the Spies and the Baldwins and the russets from the old tree by the road.
No single variety makes good cider on its own, and every cider man will tell you so.
What the Neighbors Wrote
By November, I wanted to hear from people who had used the bottle longer than I had read about it.
The seller's product page carries reviews from buyers through its review service, and I read all of them.
When I read them, there were 18 reviews with an average of 4.67 stars: thirteen of five stars, four of four and one of three.
Here are four of them, word for word, chosen because they sound like people talking honestly, including the one that saw no difference.
The reviews are quoted exactly as they appear on the seller's page; the small portraits beside them are illustrations, not the reviewers themselves.
NeuroLogic is one of my go-to brain health supports. I will always have it in my health cupboard. I've tried many supplements - most I wouldn't buy again. This one I've bought several times, 3 or 4 bottles each time.
The product I purchased seems to be effective and works. So far so good. But need more time to feel how effective it actually is. But would buy this product again.
Mitchell's review is the one I read twice.
"Need more time" is exactly what an orchard man would say in the first year of a new tree, and he said it without being asked.
This is a great combination. Unfortunately, I am having a bit of trouble getting used to the taste. I do appreciate that they have tried to give this a good flavor; I am just not into it.
Taste is very tolerable. We have almost finished the bottle. Have not seen a difference that we can tell.
Horace's review is the one I trust most, and I say that as a compliment to the store for leaving it up.
One bottle is one month, and one month is bloom, not harvest.
Lisa's review points the other way: she has bought it again and again, three or four bottles at a time.
That is the review of someone living on the long clock, whatever she has or has not felt on it.
Four honest neighbors: one sure, one waiting, one bothered by the taste, one who saw nothing yet.
If you decide to try it, the plainest way is the way Lisa does it: buy by the season, not by the bottle.
Liquid Health, Inc., Mesquite, Nevada · 32 fl oz, 32 servings of two tablespoons · ships within the US
The Tree That Did Not Take
I should tell you about the one tree in this orchard I gave up on, because it taught me how to give anything a fair trial.
Twelve years ago I planted a young tree of a newer variety along the lower fence, one the nursery catalog praised in very large letters.
I set it in good soil, watered it every July and pruned it every January.
Before it went in the ground, I wrote down on the calendar in the barn how long I would give it: five growing seasons.
My father taught me that, and it is the most useful thing he taught me after how to hold a saw.
Why decide the length before you start?
Because a man who has not decided will keep extending it forever when he likes the tree, and give up in a month when he does not.
The first two years it grew leaves and nothing else, which is normal.
The third year it bloomed beautifully and set almost nothing.
The fourth year it gave me eleven apples, small and scabby, and the fifth year it gave me nineteen.
On the first day of the sixth January, I cut it down and planted a Baldwin in its place.
I did not hate that tree, and I did not feel cheated by the nursery.
It had a fair trial with a length set in advance, and at the end of it I had my answer.
A fair trial has a length, and you write it down before you start.
I would do the same with any bottle, including this one.
Decide on the season before the first spoonful, mark it on the calendar, and keep the habit steady until the date comes round.
Then judge it on the ordinary things you can see, not on a single good morning or a single bad one.
That is not a scientific trial, but it is an honest one, and it is more than most people give anything.
Judging a Bottle by the Season
November is when I walk the orchard with a notebook and decide which trees stay.
It is never a quick decision, and it is never made on one year's crop.
If I were starting on this bottle today, knowing what I know now, I would judge it the same way.
Not by the day, not by the week, and not by the first bottle.
Here is the plain arithmetic of a season.
Three bottles, about ninety mornings, two level tablespoons each, shaken first and kept cold after opening.
What would I watch for, honestly?
Not a change in my head that I could swear to, because the studies say that kind of change is small and hard to see even with a battery of tests.
I would watch the ordinary things instead.
Did I keep the habit, did I like the taste, and did the glass of water come out to the porch with the spoon?
Those are the things a man can actually see over a season.
They are also the things the research says matter most over years: the whole pattern, not the single addition.
There are two practical cautions I would not skip.
Ginkgo and huperzine A are both in the second blend, so if you take anything daily, ask your pharmacist before the first bottle and show them the panel. [13]
And the flavor divides people.
Jennifer could not get used to it, so the seller's page's suggestion of mixing it into a drink is worth trying before you give up.
The exchange window is thirty days, which is one bottle.
If the taste is wrong for you, that window is the time to say so, because after it the store owes you nothing.
What the Store Asks of You
Buying the bottle is simple, but the terms are worth reading once, the way you read a nursery's shipping page before ordering bare-root stock.
The seller is Liquid Health, Inc., at 783 Cimarron Court in Mesquite, Nevada.
Its phone line is 1-800-995-6607, with people answering on weekdays from 11 to 7, Eastern time.
It ships only inside the United States.
Standard shipping takes a day to prepare and three to five business days to arrive, and it costs nothing on orders over $75.
The page offers one bottle, two or three, and a subscription at a discount.
The prices are set by the store and can change, so I will not print them here.
The thirty-day exchange or store credit covers only bottles bought directly from the seller's site.
The seller's page also says the bottle is sold elsewhere, but those purchases are not covered by the same policy.
And it is a dietary supplement, not a medicine.
Its statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, and the full wording of that notice is at the foot of this page.
Every ingredient on this bottle's panel, with what it is and what its research found, is set out in the ingredient guide linked at the foot of this page.
That guide also carries the cautions, the references in full and the disclosures this page is required to make.
A quart for the long clock, two tablespoons at a time
A liquid blend of vitamins, choline and eleven botanical and amino-acid ingredients, poured out two tablespoons at a time from an amber glass bottle.
SEE THE QUART ON THE SELLER'S PAGESold by Liquid Health, Inc., Mesquite, Nevada · 32 fl oz, 32 servings, about a month · shake well, refrigerate after opening · ships within the US; orders over $75 ship at no charge · thirty-day exchange or store credit on direct orders, not a refund
Short Answers From the Porch
Seven questions, answered briefly
How long does one bottle last?
Thirty-two servings of two tablespoons, so about a month at one serving a day.
How long before I should judge it?
A season at least; the shortest studies behind its ingredients ran an afternoon and the long ones ran years.
Does it have to be refrigerated?
Yes, after opening, and the label asks you to shake it well first.
What does it taste like?
Berries and pomegranate, sweet without sugar; if it is not to your taste, the seller suggests mixing it into a drink.
Can I get my money back?
No; within thirty days of a direct purchase the store exchanges the bottle or gives store credit.
Does it ship outside the US?
No, the seller ships only within the United States.
I take something every day. Is that a concern?
Ask your pharmacist first and show them the panel, since the bottle contains ginkgo and huperzine A. [13]
Back to the Ladder
It is January again as I finish writing this, and this morning I was back in the Northern Spy with the saw.
The tree is sixty-eight years old, and it still sends up water sprouts every summer as if it were young.
I cut them out, and I thought about the bottle one more time.
Everything I learned about it came down to one question: how long, and measured how?
The label does not say.
The studies do, and they say it in afternoons, weeks, months and years, and the long ones mostly came out even.
That is not a reason to scorn the bottle.
It is a reason to buy it, if you buy it, the way you would plant a tree: with patience, with a season in mind, and with the rest of the orchard kept up around it.
My son-in-law asked me at Thanksgiving whether the bottle had been worth reading about for a whole year.
I told him it had, though not for the reason he expected.
It made me put a number on a phrase I would otherwise have let slide past.
And once I had the numbers, from the afternoon studies to the ten-year one, I could see the whole year at once, the way you see a tree in January.
What would my father have made of it?
I think he would have read the panel, found the folate line, frowned at it, and then asked how long I meant to give it.
He would have wanted the answer in seasons.
And he would have wanted to know what else I was doing for the orchard while I waited.
The glass of water still comes out to the porch every morning.
The blueberries along the fence are pruned and waiting, and the cellar still has Spies in it from October.
Old apple trees keep slow time, and so do the studies of everything in this quart.
A man who has waited nine years for a bushel basket can wait a season to judge a spoonful.
Two tablespoons a morning, judged by the season
A liquid blend of vitamins, choline and eleven botanical and amino-acid ingredients, poured out two tablespoons at a time from an amber glass bottle.
SEE THE QUART ON THE SELLER'S PAGELiquid Health, Inc., 783 Cimarron Ct, Mesquite, NV 89027 · 1-800-995-6607 · ships within the US · thirty-day exchange or store credit on direct orders
P.S. If you keep one thing from this page, keep the envelope question: how long, and measured how?
The front of the bottle says "over time."
The studies say how much time, and a fair judge gives it at least a season.