Neuro Bliss and Neuro Codeine

Lindsay Lohan drinking Neuro Bliss.

NEUROBRANDS®, LLC is a company that markets a series of colorful and attractively designed "nutritional drinks", known as Neuro® Drinks.

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For a company that has great product placement (with many celebrity endorsements), carefully crafted packaging, and regularly issued press releases, they sure are modest about their marketing efforts:

"Neuro Drinks® offer consumers an alternative to products that perpetuate our self-medicating caffeine-dependent society. Designed to sustain and enhance your active lifestyle with natural ingredients, each beverage is packed with essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids and botanicals at dosages backed by scientific research. Just real results — no marketing hype."

I recently purchased NeuroBliss® from a local store. As with other Neuro products, it's difficult to tell from the packaging what sort of flavor one should expect. From the white milky color it looks like it might be coconut, but smelling the brew yields a citrus-like odor (from citric acid). The taste is vaguely like grapefruit, or rather like grapefruit-flavored fizzy codeine.



The NeuroBliss® bottle claims there are no artificial colors or flavors, but I'm not sure which flavor is actually natural (other than chamomile and the generically listed "natural flavors"). There are a lot of vitamins along with chemical stabilizers and preservatives (gum acacia, ester gum, sodium benzoate, potassium sorbate), plus the unproven active ingredients that purportedly make you blissful.


Nutritional information for Neuro Bliss.

These unproven active ingredients include:

"L-Theanine, an amino acid found in green tea which has been clinically proven to help reduce stress, works by altering brain waves, shifting them from the beta spectrum to the alpha spectrum — where a person is focused and alert, but calm.

In contrast to this claim, a study by Gomez-Ramirez et al. (2009) found that a 250-mg dose of L-theanine significantly reduced background alpha power during a demanding attentional cueing task. There were no alterations in the cue-related, anticipatory changes in alpha activity. In other words, this compound may be considered activating but not calming. L-theanine is an analog to glutamate, an abundant excitatory neurotransmitter that crosses the blood-brain barrier.



Testimonial from consumer Sandra Kiume: "It did make me more alert and aware of the foul taste of the beverage."


Reference

Gomez-Ramirez, M., Kelly, S., Montesi, J., & Foxe, J. (2008). The Effects of l-theanine on Alpha-Band Oscillatory Brain Activity During a Visuo-Spatial Attention Task. Brain Topography, 22 (1), 44-51 DOI: 10.1007/s10548-008-0068-z


Origin Of The Term Fight Or Flight With Neuro Bliss

-with Marina Orlova!