A: Yes! When you order a Plato subscription you’ll be invited to create an account. From your account page you can skip shipments, change how often they come, pause your subscription, and more.

Not sure how to access your account? This FAQ answer (how can I manage my Plato subscription?) should help!

A: You can manage your shipping and billing info on your account page.

Not sure how to access your account? This FAQ answer (how can I manage my Plato subscription?) should help!

A: The first charge occurs when you place your order. We’ll then charge and ship subsequent orders every 30 days to keep you stocked with Plato. If for any reason you need to pause, skip, or change your order frequency, you can do so from your account page.

Not sure how to access your account? This FAQ answer (how can I manage my Plato subscription?) should help!

A: We want you to be in control of everything in your life, including your Plato supply. You can always cancel your subscription from your account page.

If you’re missing days here and there and beginning to feel like you’re building a personal Plato stockpile, from the same account page you can skip orders, change your delivery frequency, and pause your subscription entirely.

Not sure how to access your account? This FAQ answer (how can I manage my Plato subscription?) should help!

A: Plato ships free in the continental US! Taxes are on us, too.

A: Currently, Plato is only available in the US, but we’re working on shipping to new markets. If you wish you could have Plato but we don’t ship to you, please drop us a line via the contact form and tell us where you live. Thanks for your interest!

A: If you aren’t completely satisfied with Plato, we’ll give you a no-questions-asked refund with return of the bottle within 30 days of delivery. Once we receive your return, we’ll send an email to notify you and then apply the refund to your original method of payment within 30 days of notification. Shipping costs for the return are non-refundable.

A: They are quite a bit more expensive, but we use them so that you know what you’re getting.

The very same suppliers we work with offer much cheaper products, similar to the ones we’ve used, but, for legal reasons, they can’t allow us to reveal our sourcing if we use the unbranded versions.

We’ve elected to pay more for our product in order to be able to share with you exactly what it’s made out of, and to allow you to *do your own research* in evaluating the quality and sourcing of our ingredients.

When it comes to quality of ingredients, if you don’t put tested, standardized supplements into your body, you’re better off not taking anything. This isn’t a game – it’s your brain. That’s too clunky for a slogan, but it’s something we really mean. As the great David Duchovny once said, ‘trust no one.’

There’s one more reason, and it’s a biggie — where possible, we tried to use the exact products used in the studies we rely on for our knowledge about the effects of these herbs. This is another sticky wicket – just because something has been studied it doesn’t mean it’s better than something that hasn’t, but it’s all we have to go on. We’re not interested in shooting in the dark.

Verdure, the company that makes Bacognize®, has done extensive studies. The most extensively-studied version of Panax Ginseng, G115 by Pharmaton, was unavailable for use in the US, so we used the closest analog we could find, down to the ratio of Rg1 to Rb1 Ginsenosides. Rhodiola has been predominantly studied as a whole plant rather than a standardized extract, so we picked the best branded, standardized version we could find, and one that has an accountability and transparency program that matches our values well.

To see the evidence in force, click over to the Ingredients page, peruse the summaries, and dive into the citations.

A: The easy answer is that branded extracts are more expensive. Another possibility is that the makers of other nootropics aren’t proud of (or not all that sure of) where they got their ingredients. Another possibility is they don’t want others to copy their formulation and sourcing. Another possibility is they have great stuff but it’s just not branded. The problem with that last one is — how can you, as the consumer, tell if that’s true?

A: Simply put, adaptogens are substances that increase resistance to stress. ‘Stress’, in this case, is biological stress.

By ‘biological stress’ we mean your body’s reaction to threats, challenges, or barriers – responses commonly known as the ‘fight or flight’ response and the immune response. In the long run, living with biological stress has been linked to all kinds of chronic issues.

There is no strict definition of the term adaptogen at this time, but adaptogens are often agreed to be substances that are nontoxic, nonspecific, and must have an effect on the physiology of the organism consuming them.

All four of the ingredients in Plato are, by these definitions, adaptogens.

A: The short answer is you that can’t patent a plant. Without a patent, drug companies have much lower incentive to spend the enormous amount necessary to even begin the process of making an approved drug out of an herbal ingredient, no matter how promising that ingredient is.

Beyond that, and broadly speaking, the exact mechanisms of action of these herbs aren’t well-enough understood to allow a synthesized or patented version of these herbs to exist as a drug product. In many cases, the whole plant, or in some, a handful of compounds, are as close as studies have come to pinpointing the actives in a given herb.

Now, that might be a chicken or the egg thing. The pharmaceutical industry have major upfront costs in bringing a drug to market and it’s possible these herbs don’t meet any number of criteria they have for deciding what avenues to investigate and what compounds to develop into prescription drugs. On top of that, these herbs aren’t to be used to treat a condition, which is what prescription medicine is all about.

To clarify that last point, the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 is the law that stipulates that the FDA regulates food separately from drugs. Under this rule, drugs are defined as products used for medical purposes, whereas foods have nutritional purposes, and food is the category supplements fall under. Drugs are for treating, preventing, diagnosing, or curing diseases, and thus, by exclusion, supplements can’t be marketed with claims to do any of those things.

For more on this topic, check out Integration of botanicals in contemporary medicine: road blocks, checkpoints and go-ahead signals. (Chugh, et al 2018)

A: Believe it or not, we don’t fully understand the way a lot of medicine works. Acetaminophen and penicillin are among many common medicines that work, are known to be safe, and yet are not fully understood.

Much of modern medicine is based on the same cause and effect evidence-gathering that was informally done over centuries by humans exploring their environment, albeit with the results confirmed with the rigor of actual science. That’s the standard we’re looking for in our ingredients as well.

A: Absolutely it does. With that said, almost everything that fits the bill is accompanied by a significant risk of side effects.

If you were our mother, we’d recommend you take Plato (actually we already did that), but we’d try to talk you out of taking Modafnil or Aderall unless you were treating a disease – and that’s the rub with prescription drugs. They have to be prescribed to treat a condition.

Plato is not meant to treat any conditions – it’s just meant to help you be a more effective, productive, calm person.

A: How right you are!

A: The short answer is that racetams lack the kind of evidence necessary to prove their effectiveness and safety for cognitive enhancement in healthy adults. There is strong evidence for their ability to reduce the rate of cognitive decline, especially in older adults and those with early-onset Alzheimer’s, but not enough studies have been done to prove them safe and effective for the young, healthy people Plato is made for.

A: Caffeine is a cheap way to make a nootropic feel like it’s doing something — you take the supplement and – pow! – you feel a surge of energy. But, really, odds are you know how to get caffeine when you want it, you know how much works for you and when, and you probably like the way you get it. Coffee is delicious, right?

We don’t want you to have to choose between taking Plato and drinking your delicious coffee. We also don’t want to force caffeine teetotalers to abstain from Plato.

A: As of this writing, there’s only one major form of branded L-Theanine – it’s called Suntheanine. The claim by Suntheanine’s manufacturers is that their L-Theanine has been isolated from any D-Theanine, L-Theanine’s opposite enantiomer. The thinking is that D-Theanine can block the uptake of L-Theanine and may itself have a weaker, or no, effect.

The jury on this is very much out, and not much human research has been done on the topic, so we’ve decided not to jump to conclusions. The fact is, D-Theanine is present alongside L-Theanine in green tea, a natural source of L-Theanine (as green tea extract), and both are used in many of the L-Theanine studies that prove that it works.

A: Good eye! So here’s the deal — Bacognize® is the extract used in many of the important studies on Bacopa, and its formulation hasn’t changed since those studies were done. Previously, the bacopa glycoside concentration in Bacognize® was listed at 45%, which was verified via UV-VIS but was difficult to replicate.

The same product is now listed by the manufacturer at 12%, verified by HPLC, which is more consistent, more accurate, and thus a better standard.

TL;DR: the same amount of the active ingredients is found in the 300mg dose of Bacopa in Plato as the amount administered in the studies cited as evidence that Bacognize® is an effective nootropic. Same great product, new, more accurate, label.

A: There are a number of reasons a manufacturer might choose to include an ingredient in their supplement.

First, it’s not illegal or very closely regulated – according David Kessler, commissioner of the FDA when the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) was approved:

“The 1994 Dietary Supplement Act does not require that dietary supplements (defined broadly to include many substances, such as herbs and amino acids, that have no nutritive value) be shown to be safe or effective before they are marketed. The FDA does not scrutinize a dietary supplement before it enters the marketplace. The agency is permitted to restrict a substance if it poses a ‘significant and unreasonable risk’ under the conditions of use on the label or as commonly consumed…Congress has shown little interest in protecting consumers from the hazards of dietary supplements, let alone from the fraudulent claims that are made, since its members apparently believe that few of these products place people in real danger. Nor does the public understand how potentially dangerous these products can be.”

Other common reasons for including risky or unproven ingredients:

• They’re hot – like anything, supplements have fads of their own, and by including the latest ‘hot’ ingredient, supplement makers can ride the buzz (pun intended).
• It’s cheap – some ingredients may have little to no proven effect but are cheap to source and include in a supplement. To some consumers, more ingredients is better. Often, they’ll just include a tiny amount of the ingredient — just enough to claim it’s in there as part of a ‘proprietary blend’. If you don’t see a quantity or potency on the label, you should be looking for more information.
• They work for a short time – some ingredients do have an immediate and noticeable effect, but then you’ll quickly develop a tolerance, requiring the whole supplement to be cycled in order to remain effective, or to avoid developing a dependency(!)
• They sound good on a label.
• Lastly, to quote Upton Sinclair, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’ It may be good intentions mixed with a little bit of willful ignorance, as it is with a lot of the world.

If you want to know more about the history of the issues surrounding the lack of regulation, safety standards, and oversights in the supplement and vitamin industry, we recommend the book Do You Believe In Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine by Paul A Offit, MD.

A: Let’s talk about it! Get in touch and let us know what you’re thinking. We’ll always be looking for new ways to increase the effectiveness and value of Plato. Reach out via the contact form and tell us what you’re thinking.

A: It’s tough to be specific when you redact the name of the product like that, but on top of all of the answers above, which are the real story, we’d encourage you to look at the quantities and concentrations of each ingredient on that product and ask yourself why each one is in there, and why at the quantity listed.

A: No GMOs.

A: We didn’t see that movie, but probably not.

A: There are four ingredients on our label that aren’t the active ingredients in Plato:

1) Rice flour – Plato’s is formulated to match the amount of active constituents used in the best research available for each ingredient. As it happens, with those quantities of Plato’s four ingredients, the actives don’t perfectly fill two capsules, and empty capsule space can lead to breakage. For that reason, we use rice flour, an effectively hypo-allergenic, inert filler, to fill up the caps so they don’t get damaged in transit.

2) Hydroxypropyl methylcellulose (HPMC) – sounds crazy, right? This is the chemical name for plant fiber, and it’s what our veggie caps are made out of. Ours comes from birch and spruce trees.

3 + 4) Magnesium stearate and silicon dioxide – these two are present in tiny quantities in Plato as what are known as ‘excipients’.

Excipients are commonly used in the process of encapsulating herbal extracts to prevent them from clumping or becoming airborne as a fine herbal dust rather than sliding into the capsule like we want them to.

Magnesium stearate is a salt that adds negligible amounts of magnesium to the formula, and silicon dioxide is a naturally-occurring compound found in many foods (like beets and brown rice) and is frequently used to prevent foods like salt and protein powders from caking.

We cover this and some other formulation topics in more depth on our blog post titled, appropriately, Formulation.

A: Always talk to your doctor before beginning any new supplement, Plato included.

With that said, the mechanisms of action of multiple ingredients in Plato may work on the same pathways [PDF] as those of SSRIs, SNRIs, and MAOIs, which may cause complications.

For that reason, it is best to abstain from taking Plato if you’re taking any kind of anti-depressant.

A: Always talk to your doctor before beginning any new supplement, Plato included.

With that said, Plato’s three herbal ingredients have all been shown to slightly reduce blood pressure in some cases.

For that reason, you should be careful if you already have low blood pressure or are taking medication to lower your blood pressure. Discuss a treatment and monitoring plan with your doctor before beginning Plato.

A: Always talk to your doctor before beginning any new supplement, Plato included.

With that said, there is not currently enough research into this topic to know for sure what, if any, interactions there might be between the ingredients in Plato and various types of cancer. For that reason, it’s best to bring this up with your doctor or to just play it safe and abstain from taking Plato.