Focus 40 Review Summary

This is an incredibly disappointing nootropic supplement. To read the advertisements for this product, you would think that it delivered unparalleled cognitive benefits. In reality, it is unlikely to deliver any benefits at all.

The proprietary blend has just over 600mg divided between 20 ingredients, some of which require a significant portion of the blend (over 300mg in some cases) to have any effect at all. In the case of glutamine, supplementation is pointless unless more than 500mg is taken daily. This is another weak proprietary blend and a bog-standard vitamin stack. If you want genuine cognitive enhancement, look elsewhere. 

Where To Buy Focus 40 Brain Booster

Salt Lake Supplements have their own website, but when you click ‘buy now’ you are taken to the Amazon merchant page. When a manufacturer doesn’t want to invest in their own fulfillment, we have a major problem. 

Full Focus 40 Brain Booster Review

You will have no doubt first come across Focus 40 Brain Booster on Amazon.

Focus 40 is made by Salt Lake Supplements, which explains the enormous “MADE IN UTAH” sign on all of their packaging. These guys seem to be quite a serious manufacturing outfit at first glance; they have a sleek website and numerous products. 

Yet they really don’t seem to put any money or effort into marketing their products, which is why most of you will only be here after seeing this stuff on Amazon. 

Salt Lake Supplements also apparently don’t want to spend any money on completing their own order fulfillment. If you try to buy Focus 40 through their official merchant page, you are re-directed to their Amazon store. 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that; it is a business decision which doesn’t affect the quality of the supplement itself. But it does tell us that they don’t want to take the risk of investing heavily in their supplement line  or their brand, and that is relevant. 

So what does Focus 40 Brain Booster claim to do?

According to Salt Lake Supplements, Focus 40 supports:

• Mental alertness
• Focus
• Concentration
• Memory

That is pretty much the full range of cognitive functioning. No claims are made regarding long-term brain health maintenance or long-term adaptations, but that’s fine. If Focus 40 can really deliver on all of these things, then we will have a truly great brain boosting supplement on our hands. 

So the question remains: does it deliver on all of these fronts? Does it do any of them for that matter?

What about side effects; is Focus 40 safe?

There’s only one way to find out. Here is our full Focus 40 Brain Booster review. As always, if you have any questions, please just post them in the comments section below and we’ll answer them as soon as we can. 

Focus 40 Formula

Here is the Focus 40 Brain Booster formula, as displayed on the label. This is the most important thing to look at when evaluating a supplement’s worth:

It might look like a truly “extensive” formula at first glance, but anyone with a good knowledge of nootropic supplements will know that this is exactly what we don’t want to see when we look at a label.

This is essentially a weak vitamin and mineral complex attached to a over-stuffed, under-dosed proprietary blend. The proprietary blend itself contains some questionable ingredients, and with a total blend size of just over 690mg, it is highly unlikely that any ingredient is dosed properly. 

Proprietary Blend Size

The Focus 40 Brain Booster proprietary blend is 692mg in total. This is split between over 20 ingredients. 

We’ll do the math for you: that’s about 30mg per ingredient. 

Dividing up a blend into equal parts doesn’t give us an accurate estimate of how each ingredient is dosed; not all substances require the same serving size, and proprietary blends are usually employed to disguise how under-dosed certain ingredients are. 

But knowing just how little of a blend each ingredient is allotted tells you how aggressively under-dosed every other ingredient must be for a single one to be dosed properly. 

We’ll use an example.

The blend contains choline bitartrate. This confers extra choline to the brain, which means greater acteylcholine availability, and therefore enhanced cognitive functioning. 

However, you are only likely to get any benefit from using choline bitartrate if you take more than 200mg per day. Many high quality nootropic stacks which use this cholinergic provide as much as 300mg per serving. 

So if we assume that this ingredient has been dosed on the conservative side, that leaves just 492mg for the other ingredients. Or to put it another way, 25mg per ingredient. 

You see, with such a small blend and so many ingredients, every time an ingredient ‘wins’, all of the others ‘lose out’. 

Many of the most effective ingredients in Focus 40 Brain Booster are only effective when taken in amounts in excess of 100mg. 

It is mathematically impossible for all of the listed ingredients to have appropriate serving sizes. One or two of them may do, but if they do then the rest simply can’t. 

-Learn more From Our Ingredient Guide-

Does Focus 40 Nootropic Use A Glutamine ‘Filler’?

Glutamine is a very popular choice among manufacturers who use proprietary blends. We think it is obvious why that is the case.

Glutamine is very cheap to buy in large amounts. It can be taken in relatively large quantities with no risk of side effects or intestinal discomfort. 

We believe many manufacturers use glutamine as a ‘filler’ ingredient for their proprietary blends.

They buy smaller quantities of the more exotic, expensive ingredients, and then use them sparingly in their formulations. They then bulk out the formula with glutamine.

They can use as much gluamine as they like to create a proprietary blend size that seems convincing enough. Gltuamine is regularly taken in amounts of up to 5g per day; so long as the blend stays within 5g, there’s nothing stopping manufacturers using glutamine to fill up almost all of their product.

They can then claim that their proprietary blend contains all of these amazing substances, which it indeed does, but in reality customers are paying for little more than an outrageously over-priced glutamine supplement. 

There is no reason why a proprietary blend cannot be 99.9% glutamine; the label would not be lying so long as trace amounts of the other ingredients were in there too. 

Questionable Ingredients

We can question some of the ingredient choices in the Focus 40 nootropic blend.

The blend contains both DMAE and choline bitartrate.

Our regular readers will know how skeptical we are of DMAE.

For one thing, it is simply not as effective as other cholinergics. Choline bitartrate is your run-of-the-mill cholinergic, and DMAE doesn’t seem to be as reliable, as potent, or as predictable as this stalwart of the nootropics industry. 

DMAE also seems to have a higher associated risk of side effects and the development of intolerance.

We have looked at plenty of user reports, and the inconsistency is striking. 

Some people have evidently used DMAE for long periods without any issues whatsoever. They seem to find that it works well, helping with focus, clarity and mental energy. 

Others have found that it either did nothing at all, or that it produced quite pronounced side effects. This LongeCity thread really gives you an idea of how unpredictable this stuff can be. 

There are some incredibly potent cholinergics available these days. That Salt Lake Supplements have used two of the least effective in Brain Booster Focus 40 is really disappointing. 

By far and away the two best cholinergics are Alpha-GPC and CDP-Choline. We wrote a full article on these two compounds, why they are the safest, most effective cholinergics, and why the best natural nootropic stacks use them. Check it out if you are interested in learning more on this subject. 

On top of these cholinergic worries we have some really strange ingredients.

Licorice root extract, bilberry fruit extract, cinnamon bark extract; you get the idea.

We’ve done some research and we can’t find any evidence that these substances provide any benefits whatsoever when taken as supplements. That’s any benefit at all, let alone nootropic benefit. 

We hope that these extracts do not command too much of the Focus 40 formula, but because it’s a proprietary blend, hope is all we can do. 

-Pills That Make You Smarter? The Myth Of The Limitless Pill-

Focus 40 Side Effects

The main problem with Focus 40 is that the proprietary blend is too small to allow for more than one of the potent ingredients to be dosed properly.

It is highly unlikely, in our opinion, that any of the potent nootropics in Focus 40 Brain Booster are dosed above our minimum recommended dose. 

That said, we are still dealing with a total unknown here.

Brain Booster Focus 40 doesn’t list every ingredient’s individual serving size. All we have is a proprietary blend with a total size of 692mg.

While it is unlikely that this is the case (in our opinion), it is true that any one of the ingredients could be dosed as high as 691mg, with the remaining milligram split between the remaining ingredients. 

As we said, this is unlikely, but we cannot say for certain that it is not the case.

Manufacturers don’t like it when we speculate like this, but we think they should stop making mystery pills if they think this unfair. If you don’t want us to think about what your formula could be composed of, either tell us what it is composed of or find a new industry. 

Manufacturers in any industry would like a totally compliant, non-thinking customer, but that doesn’t mean we have to give them one. 

Brain Booster Focus 40 Review Conclusion

Those of you who have read our whole Brain Booster Focus 40 review up to this point will know that we are not overly impressed with this supplement to say the least. 

It is simply a (weak) vitamin stack combined with a pretty pathetic proprietary blend of over 20 ingredients. The total serving size of the blend is 692mg. 

We have explained above how that means you are almost certainly going to get far too little of the ingredients that matter. 

Even if the blend size were bigger and the ingredients fewer though, we’d still have reservations.

Why do manufacturers use proprietary blends if not to hide the fact that their formula is cheap, under-powered, or dangerous?

If manufacturers don’t want us to assume that their proprietary blends are mostly glutamine and very little else, they should tell us how much of each ingredient we get in each serving. Plenty of manufacturers do this and they make plenty of money doing so. 

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