A dozen women.

The pressure to offer brain-boosting pills to baby boomers (and their parents) seems to have gotten to Shaklee, a leading multilevel marketer that has long claimed to be a champion of "solid, scientifically backed product choices rather than 'risky' trends."

According to the company, its Memory Optimizer "combines Bacopa and Vinpocetine, two clinically proven ingredients that provide dietary support to enhance memory and cognitive function."

The clinical proof boils down to three inconclusive trials of the plant extracts.

In one of two Australian studies of healthy adults who took bacopa for two to three months, the extract helped 37 people remember one more pair of words (four instead of three out of six) than the 39 people who got a placebo. (1) But bacopa had no impact on their "everyday memory," according to journals kept by the volunteers.

In the other study, 23 bacopa takers scored higher on four of 15 tests for attention, learning, memory, and problem-solving--but only when the researchers set the bar for statistical significance too low. (2) When they used the proper cutoff, bacopa had no impact on memory.

And while vinpocetine is used in Europe to treat dementia, it has only been tested in one tiny study in healthy people. Twenty years ago in France, 12 young women who took 40 mg of vinpocetine for two days (the Memory Optimizer bottle recommends half that much) were able to recognize a number they had previously seen faster than they could after taking a placebo. (3) When the women took Memory Optimizer's recommended dosage of vinpocetine for two days, they did no better than when they were given the placebo. No one has ever tried to repeat the experiment.

(1) Neuropsychopharmacology 27: 279, 2002.

(2) Psychopharmacology 156: 481, 2001.

(3) Eur. J. Clin. Pharmacol. 28: 567, 1985.