As long as these products don't make claims about treating specific diseases, the FDA doesn’t require a strict definition of what that actually means. As a result, “brain health” can mean different things to a supplement company, a meditation app, or an actual neurologist. Meanwhile, consumers are left grasping at straws trying to evaluate these claims.
There's no set definition of "brain health." It varies depending on who’s using it. Brain health is, “one of the most commonly used terms in wellness and healthcare, but it is also one of the least precisely defined," says neuroscientist Dr. Ramon Velazquez. The phrase may refer to “cognitive performance, emotional well-being, stress resilience, sleep quality, neurological function, or long-term protection against age-related cognitive decline."
How is brain health measured?
Velazquez shares the main categories researchers and clinicians actually use to measure brain health:
Sleep quality. Polysomnography, the clinical gold standard, measures brain activity, eye movement, muscle tone, and respiratory function during sleep to characterize sleep stages and detect disorders. Consumer wearables approximate some of this with heart rate data, though their accuracy is up for debate.
Neuro-imaging. These tools are expensive and primarily used in research settings, but they provide objective, anatomy-level evidence of brain changes.
Any product making a brain health claim should be able to point to evidence of improvement in at least one of the domains above: cognitive test performance, sleep quality, mood or stress resilience, and neuro-imaging markers. (There's also research about blood-based biomarkers, but that's still pretty far from consumer products at this time.)
The “brain health” supplement market is enormous, and its marketing language runs almost entirely on vague, unverifiable claims. I’m not saying that the main vitamins and nutrients in these supplements don’t help your brain at all; studies show that omega-3 fatty acids can help increase learning, memory, cognitive well-being, and blood flow in the brain (though that’s mostly for older adults; effects in healthy younger adults are more modest). In the same vein, there are tentative findings that lion's mane mushroom (Hericium erinaceus) can help improve cognitive function and mood.
Health apps
Some research shows that “brain game” apps—like Luminosity and BrainHQ, for example—do show promise in improving cognitive function and mood. However, this promise is based on findings that these apps can lead to improvements on the tasks you practice within that app. That’s a pretty big leap from in-app games to real-world cognitive performance. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission has previously taken action against Lumosity for deceptive advertising—specifically for implying that the apps would protect against dementia and age-related cognitive decline without adequate evidence. That's an illustration of exactly why the definition of “brain health” is so murky in advertising: The marketing claimed total brain health while the evidence, at best, supported specific in-task performance. For the most part, all the broad claims about improving overall brain health or preventing cognitive decline are not supported for most of these “brain game” products.
Wearables
Discussion of your smartwatch is relevant here—specifically, your sleep score, as sleep plays a key role in your cognitive function. While sleep scores are cool number to consider, it’s important to remember that this number is an approximation, and each company has its own grading system for it. Still, tracking your sleep is useful, as long as it prompts real behavioral change to get better sleep over time. When in doubt, read up on the fundamentals of sleep hygiene.
The bottom line
The claim "this improves brain health" fails this test immediately, because it’s just not specific enough. On the flip side, something like "improved short-term memory recall on validated tests in adults over 60 in a randomized controlled trial" is a claim that can be evaluated.
The irony is that the interventions with the strongest evidence across the most domains of brain health—regular aerobic exercise, consistent quality sleep, stimulating activity, stress management, and a healthy diet—are not the ones supported by the largest marketing spend.
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