Brain Candy: Boost Your Brain Power with Vitamins, Supplements, Drugs, and Other Substances: A Comprehensive Guide

by Theodore Lidsky, Jay Schneider

Where Are My Keys?
Keep forgetting where you put your keys? Wish you could get through the crossword faster? Experiencing too many "intellectual pauses"? Then this is the book for you.
Brain Candy is an authoritative, comprehensive, and above all, cutting-edge look at what you can take to rev up your brain -- enhance memory, think faster, sharpen creativity, focus better. The only authors yet to tackle this subject who are experts in both brain function and drug action, Theodore Lidsky and Jay Schneider explain in plain English what the effects of these substances are on the body. Do they really work? Are they safe? Are they readily available? Topics

Genres: Health

234 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2001

Reviews

[Monica Willyard Moen]

This book provides a sort of tour of currently available supplements, vitamins, and over the counter drugs that are sold as being useful for older adults who need to improve memory or energy. The authors provide detailed risk and benefit analysis for each supplement mentioned in the book, and they report studies they could find related to that supplement as well. They provide recommendations about safety and also include information about drug interactions and diseases that would be contraindications for the supplements. I especially appreciate that the authors of this book are scientists, not people who are selling a product.

[Dylan Goldstein]

Brain Candy is organized into two sections, The first is a non-technical explanation of smart drugs, brain chemistry, and the origins of with memory defects and age-related cognitive decline.

The second has entries for the most common products sold as smart drugs. Each entry has a brief summary, an overview of the beneficial claims made for the product, the research that has been done on the product, a list of possible side effects and medical problems, an authorial take on how good the product is, and finally numeric ratings from 0 to 5 of Benefits and Risks.

Brain Candy's tone stands in stark relief to many of the books and articles published about smart drugs by being skeptical and yet not entirely dismissive of claimed benefits. It is one of the most sober view points for this class of psychoactives. They examine commonly advertised nootropics, generally finding a lack of evidence to support the claimed benefits

Readers who are well versed in pharmacology will be disappointed by the lack of references for the research discussed.

This is an amazing book for anyone that's passionate, or just curious, about understanding how the brain works, the ways we can "boost" it!

[Heath]

An excellent introduction and reference guide to nootropics, smart drugs, and other memory- and brain-enhancing supplements. Weighs the pros and cons of each and offers synopses of research done to date.

[Mooncalf]

The second half of this book is short entries on different nootropics that consider the pros and cons of each drug. It is exactly what I wanted from a book like this.

[Enrique]

Intro portion is good, unfortunately the reference section is noticeably biased and inconsistently conservative.