Intelleral Review Summary

Despite the grand claims by the makers of Intelleral, it doesn’t look like this brain supplement is anything to get excited about. We explain in greater detail in our full Intelleral review why we don’t think this supplement is worth your money, but the main reasons can be summed up in a few words: shady website, unremarkable composition, poor reviews. 

Intelleral is essentially a green coffee powder. The fact that the makers of Intelleral are claiming that it can rival comprehensive, cutting-edge nootropic stacks in terms of effects strikes us as willfully dishonest. They cannot possibly believe that a simple green coffee powder can match some of the best nootropic stacks (some of which contain GCBE) when it comes to enhancing brain power. 

Where To Buy Intelleral

The Intelleral website looks like every other nootropic website of this kind. There are also some shady website copies that look like they were made in 1995. While we always recommend that people buy nootropic supplements directly from the manufacturer, we think this might be the one exception to the rule. There’s no need to pay this much for some green coffee bean powder. Check your local health food store to see what they have before buying.

Full Intelleral Review

This Intelleral review isn’t going to be like the other reviews on Natural Nootropic. That’s because Intelleral isn’t quite like most of the other products we look at here. 

Like most nootropics, Intelleral claims to deliver enhanced cognitive function; better memory, easier learning ability, improved focus, and so on.

However, Intelleral is not a nootropic supplement in the sense we normally use the term. 

Rather, Intelleral is simply a branded whole green coffee powder.

So while other products reviewed here will contain several naturally occurring substances which each contribute to improved mental performance in their own way, Intelleral contains just one ingredient; green coffee bean powder. 

Intelleral is therefore absolutely identical in composition to the green coffee bean powders you might see on sale in health food stores near you. 

The only difference is that Intelleral has substantial branding.

Intelleral is actually different to the green coffee bean extracts (GCBE) you might see in those same stores in one very important way; Intelleral is not a concentrate. it is whole bean powder. So the extract pills you will might come across are just a stronger, more refined version of Intelleral. 

Yet despite the simplicity of the formula (you can’t actually get any more simple), the makers claim that Intelleral can do phenomenal things:

These are some pretty impressive claims for a simple coffee powder.

While we are used to seeing this sort of stuff from natural nootropic stacks, these products will invariably contain many ingredients with their own brain-boosting properties.

Some supplements claiming to offer similar benefits to Intelleral do contain green coffee bean extract too, but they also contain other ingredients that contribute to enhanced cognitive functioning. 

So can Intelleral live up to these claims?

What is green coffee bean powder? Can it improve focus? Does it have any associated side effects?

Let’s find out. Here is our full Intelleral review. If you still have any questions at the end of the review, please post them in the comments section below. 

What Is Green Coffee Bean?

Green coffee beans are becoming immensely popular in the supplement industry right now. Their use is not limited to nootropics; a growing number of pre-workout supplements, fat loss aids, and general health supplements are all showing green coffee beans on their labels.

But you’d be forgiven for having never heard of these things before.

Of course, we’re all familiar with coffee and the effect it can have on how our brain functions. But green coffee beans; that sounds a little more mysterious. 

So what are they?

Green coffee beans are simply coffee beans before they have been roasted. 

The brown coffee beans we are all familiar with all used to be green. In order to make them more easily brewed, and to unlock most of their flavor, we subject them to roasting. The beans turn brown during the roasting process. As such, green coffee beans can be thought of as ‘raw’ coffee beans. 

Not so mysterious now is it?

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Just One Ingredient In Intelleral?

The Intelleral official website does not mention any ingredients other than Whole Green Coffee Bean Powder.

However, on Amazon someone answered the question “what is in Intelleral?” by saying this:

We don’t know if this was answered by someone with any affiliation to Intelleral. We don’t know if it is accurate, because we can’t find any accurate information regarding Intelleral’s ingredients on the official website. Nor can we find a lot of information anywhere else. 

When it comes to the ingredients in supplements, uncertainty is never a good thing. 

Manufacturers need to be up-front about their products. They should tell us on their websites exactly what is in each capsule, scoop, or whatever they use. There is no reason why some manufacturers can do this and others can’t. 

Do Green Coffee Beans Influence Cognition?

As explained above, today green coffee bean extract is found in a wide range of supplements, from fat burners to testosterone boosters.

But it is far rarer to see this stuff in a nootropic stack. 

This is no doubt because there is little evidence linking green coffee bean extract with any special improvements in cognitive function (beyond the usual benefits we see from mild caffeine consumption).

The Intelleral website is replete with claims about how green coffee bean powder has been scientifically proven to enhance cognition. 

Some of these claims are dubious to say the least.

Here is just one example of what we’re talking about:

We don’t need to tell you why we are always skeptical when we see things like this on a manufacturers website. 

For starters, there’s no reference point here. 

Spatial working memory has 32% tested proven power? What does that mean?

More importantly, there is no link to the study in question. 

We can only assume that the authors are referring to this study. We advise you to take a look at this for yourself. 

This study looked at how low and moderate doses of whole green coffee beans affected various aspects of cognitive function in participants aged 18-25. 

However, these benefits would have no doubt been observed in subjects given regular old roasted coffee.

None of the improvements seen in the cited study are particular to WGCP. Countless clinical trials attest to regular coffee’s potency as a nootropic. 

We all know from our own experience that regular coffee is able to improve focus, support mental stamina, improve performance under stress, and so on. 

As far as we can tell, green coffee beans do not offer any benefits beyond those offered by roasted, brown coffee consumption. 

By that, we mean that we have looked through lots of available studies and found nothing hinting at special nootropic properties. 

The compounds found in large amounts in green coffee do certainly have some properties that make them useful in other supplements, but as far as cognitive enhancement goes, they seem to be pretty impotent.

We certainly don’t see any evidence for the kind of improvements promised by Intelleral’s manufacturers. 

Unknown Dosage

Intelleral’s makers repeatedly cite this Cleveland Clinic study to back up their claims about this supplement being able to boost cognitive function. 

However, if you actually read the study, you’ll see that dose size was a key determinate of participant performance. 

While moderate doses showed significant improvement (in some respects) compared with placebo, low doses actually returned worse results than the placebo group!

So taking sustained attention as an example, taking a moderate dose of WGCP helped participants hit more targets, but a low dose actually made participants miss more targets. 

So, how much do we get from Intelleral? A high, moderate, or low dose?

We have absolutely no idea.

Intelleral’s manufacturers haven’t deemed it necessary to tell us how much WGCP is in each serving. 

As such, it’s a little pointless quoting scientific research at us, especially when that research points out the importance of dose size.

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Time Release?

A claim made by Intelleral’s manufacturers is that green coffee bean has innate “slow release” properties. 

Here is a screenshot taken from the official Intelleral website:

They also provide an image representing the “slow release” mechanism in comparison to regular caffeine:

You don’t need a PhD to realize that this is terrible science. We have never seen this chart anywhere other than the Intelleral website. We think it’s fair to say that this was simply drawn up by the people who made the website; it does not represent the results of a scientific study as it clearly tries to make out.

Yet according to the manufacturers, this “time release” property has some serious scientific backing:

This is the same Cleveland Clinic study that keeps cropping up throughout their literature.

Does this study actually back up the claim that green coffee bean delivers a “time release”, sustained, sort of drip-fed caffeine boost?

Not as far as we can tell.

In fact, the authors do speculate that the particular composition of green coffee beans give them this slow release property. But this speculation is based on what it says on the supplement packaging:

“The nature and mode of delivery of caffeine may influence its effect on executive performance. According to the packaging label of Go Bean®, the delivery of caffeine using WGCP provides the “natural caffeine that is deep within the fiber of the bean”.”

The metrics used to measure the effectiveness of WGCP in the study do show that the effects of a moderate dose were longer-lasting. But this is no different to regular caffeine, or any other substance for that matter: more of it will make effects last longer.

We can’t find any other scientific literature supporting the notion that green coffee beans deliver a slow-release form of caffeine. 

Shady Websites

One thing we always look out for are shady copycat, sister or affiliate websites pushing a certain supplement. 

If a manufacturer allows websites to use its name in the URL, then we can safely assume that they are aware of this and that they are fine with the information being presented there.

Here is a screen shot taken from Intelleral Focus dot com (we don’t want to give them a backlink):

We don’t need to explain to you why we hate this sort of thing.

Do a quick Google search for this image and you’ll see for yourself. This image is apparently also showing what the brain looks like before and after a walk, before and after meditation, and much, much more. 

Allowing a site, which uses your brand name, to use such underhand, cynical, manipulative marketing is totally unacceptable in our opinion. 

What Are Others Saying – Intelleral User Reviews

It is increasingly common to see nootropic supplements being reviewed on YouTube. Intelleral is not different; it has a handful of reviews posted online. 

As you might expect, some are of dubious quality. Here we have an official-looking one, but which has clearly been made by a free video production platform. It actually looks quite a lot like it was made on Biteable:

Another good place to look when reviewing supplements is Amazon. While these supposedly “verified customer” comments are always of questionable validity, they still give us an idea of what we can expect from using a supplement:

It is important to bare in mind the fact that we don’t know how these people were using Intelleral, whether they stuck to the recommended dose, their particular circumstances and so on. Take all of this with a pinch of salt. 

Intelleral Review Conclusion

After doing a thorough Intelleral review, we can only say that we are incredibly disappointed with this supplement. 

It seems that Intelleral is just another supplement set up to make a quick buck.

There is very limited information on the product itself on the official website, so we have done our best with the data we had.

It seems that Intelleral is just a branded green coffee bean powder.

Not extract, powder. 

It is not the best compounds found in green coffee beans, but the whole powder.

After reviewing the available scientific literature on green coffee beans, we have to conclude that they have limited nootropic potential. 

GCBE seems to have some properties that make it useful for fat loss and blood sugar control, but we can’t find a lot of evidence saying that it supports cognition. 

The one study attesting to its status as a nootropic not only found benefits that can easily be obtained by drinking regular coffee, but also that dosage is key. 

And the dosage in Intelleral is something we simply don’t know.

There are a lot of claims made on the Intelleral website that we simply can’t find evidence for. There are plenty of suspect sites that use the Intelleral brand which also make some pretty outrageous claims.

If you think you stand to benefit from using green coffee bean powder, we highly recommend that you purchase some generic, own-brand capsules from your local health food store. It will probably be a strong extract, and it will no doubt be much cheaper than the exorbitantly-price Intelleral. 

The post Intelleral Review – Can It Really Boost Brain Power? appeared first on Natural Nootropic.