When it comes to health and wellness products, there are countless options available to consumers: health bars, juices, supplements, and nutritional shakes – just to name a few. The real challenge isn’t finding the products, but rather figuring out which products are or aren't a waste of money.

But there’s something most consumers don’t realize; it's even more of a challenge for the wellness companies making good products to prove they work.

Take the most rigorous study possible – a large double blind clinical trial. It can cost tens of millions of dollars to conduct such a trial, and (depending on what assessment is being conducted) take years of bureaucratic wrangling to complete.

This creates (some would argue by design) a “monopoly of proof,” leaving billion dollar companies among the few who can (quite literally) afford to prove their products work.

So how does a new wellness product company provide solid evidence that their products are the real deal?

Smaller studies tend to offer less reliability, and the results may not directly apply to the customer buying the product. Therefore, the best a small startup could do, until recently, was to provide citations on large studies conducted on ingredients in their products.

For example, if a product contained grape seed extract, a small company could cite studies performed on the health benefits of grape seed extract, even if the study was funded elsewhere such as a university, or by private funder.

That’s better than nothing, but it doesn’t answer the question of how a product with many ingredients affects the body as a whole.

Understanding The Citizen Science Movement

In recent years, there has been an explosion of wearable technologies, apps, and online tools that give us our health information in real time unlike ever before. This is allowing young startups with less funding a way to bypass the ridiculous costs of the old guard health bureaucracy, and give consumers clear evidence that a product not only works, but works for them specifically.

An organization leading this charge is San Diego neuroscience startup Neurohacker Collective.

They are the makers of Qualia Mind and Qualia Focus, two mental performance products loaded with ingredients for brain nourishment (known as nootropics). These products are designed to improve mental and emotional capacities like focus, mood, memory, creativity, problem solving, and more.

And to prove their products work, they’re taking out the middleman, and bringing the assessment tools directly to you.

Neurohacker Collective recently partnered with Cambridge Brain Sciences to conduct a pilot study on their product Qualia Mind. Cambridge Brain Sciences’ assessment tools have already been cited in over 300 academic publications.

After just 5 days of use, participants showed significant increases in cognitive function across a host of areas: from verbal fluency, to episodic memory, to concentration (a link to the pilot study appears at the bottom of this article). These products aren’t designed to treat or cure medical conditions. Instead, they are designed to take a healthy brain and optimize it with premium nourishment, to enable extraordinary mental capacities.

Instead of waiting on millions in funding to conduct a larger study, Neurohacker Collective recently decided on a clever alternative; they’re gifting the ability to see if their products work for you personally, using objective testing.

Every purchaser of Qualia Mind or Qualia Focus gets free access to the assessment tools from Cambridge Brain Sciences used in the pilot study so consumers can test their personal mental performance before and after use to see if the products work for them.

This is a growing trend in millennial wellness companies, commonly termed the Citizen Science Movement.

Testing and diagnostics are moving from the doctor’s office and gym, and into the home.

Neurohacker Collective is an early adopter of this new trend, bringing personalized, objective test results of their products direct to the consumer, free of charge. Neurohacker Collective offers a 100 day 100 percent money-back guarantee on all their products, so if a consumer isn’t satisfied for any reason, they get a full and easy refund.

More importantly, this approach moves the results from the averages of a group, to the personalized benefits a product achieves with your unique physiology.

To try Qualia Mind or Qualia Focus and to receive free access to before and after cognitive testing tools used in hundreds of academically published studies, GO RIGHT HERE. In addition, readers are being offered an additional 15% off their first purchase when you enter code FUTURISM at checkout.

Neurohacker Collective recommends testing your mental performance before use, and then 3 weeks later to notice maximum differences. If you’re like most, the tests will yield clear mental performance benefits. And if not, no worries. Just take advantage of the 100-day easy, full refund guarantee.

Billion dollar companies in the health industry have long held a testing advantage over smaller, less-funded startups. But now, the playing field is becoming more level as startups create new methods to demonstrate their products objectively work.

For makers of ineffective health products, it will get harder and harder for slick marketing to make up for consumers who have the ability to objectively test products themselves. And for makers of effective health products, the ability to affordably demonstrate their product's effectiveness will be a game changer.

For more information on the Qualia Mind Pilot Study, go here.

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