A Better Choline Supplement: 5% Core Nootropic Brings Long-Lasting Focus and Clarity

5% Nutrition’s Core lineup of L-Citrulline 3000, ZMA, Energy, L-Glutamine 5000, and Vitamin C 1000 maintains Rich Piana’s philosophy, “Go big or go home” and it definitely shows in the final product of the lineup, 5% Nutrition Core Nootropic. This is a simple yet intelligent focus aid, going beyond what’s offered in traditional choline capsules.

More than just a choline capsule, 5% Nutrition’s Core Nootropic keeps your choline around for longer. Rich would stack it into his pre workout and approve.

This choline-packed nootropic supplement consists of two forms of choline (as choline bitartrate and Alpha-GPC) but also amplifies it with huperzine A, an ingredient that supplement brands far too often forget, despite its incredible synergy with the cognitive-boosting essential vitamin.

5% Core Nootropic: A better choline capsule

5% Nutrition’s Core Nootropic is bringing the most sought-after ingredients in 5%’s typical high doses to improve focus, mental clarity, alertness, and memory, all at an incredible cost point. It can be stacked with literally anything – your coffee, pre workout, multivitamin, or energy drink – and will add an incredible feel to the mix. You can read about the ingredients below, but first sign up for PricePlow’s 5% Nutrition news.

Before digging in, if you want to read about the rest of the products in 5% Nutrition’s Core line up you can take a look at “5% Nutrition Core Line Goes Beyond Single-Ingredient Supplements“.

Now let’s take a look at the ingredients that make up 5% Nutrition’s Core Nootropic, but first let’s talk choline.

An introduction to Choline

Meet choline a common focus booster that also has plenty other benefits.

Choline is an essential molecule in the body that’s required for the cells to function properly and at their peak.^[1] One of the major mechanisms of choline is to help synthesize phospholipids, which are critical to the structural integrity of every cell in your body.

Choline is synthesized naturally as phosphatidylcholine, but production typically can’t keep up with the body’s needs, which makes supplementation essential if your diet doesn’t provide the required amount. Since a majority of dietary choline comes from animal sources like eggs, seafood, and meat, the vegan/vegetarian demographic may be deficient.^[1,2]

Generating acetylcholine

Improved acetylcholine utilization provides for an ‘anti-blurring’ effect so that new and old memories do not get confused

For the sake of 5% Core Nootropic, however, it’s all about choline’s other effect: generating acetylcholine. Also known as “the learning neurotransmitter”, acetylcholine is important for learning, memory, cognition, and far more in the brain. Supplementing choline is a great way to cover for any dietary deficiencies (and beyond), and we’ve found that choline blends like the one in this supplement simply feel better.

However, taking choline alone sometimes isn’t enough. Our brains break acetylcholine down, and ideally, we’d like to keep it around a bit longer. Unlike most choline supplements, which are traditionally just single-ingredient products, 5% Nutrition has you taken care of.

Let’s get to the blend, and then talk about how we’re keeping our choline levels up.

The following dosages are in two capsules:

5% Nutrition Core Nootropic Ingredients

• Alpha-Glyceryl Phosphorylcholine 50% – 450mg

  

  Choline supplement user for your nootropic stacks? Then why use one without huperzine A?!

  The purpose of any nootropic is to help increase focus, which makes adding Alpha-glyceryl phosphorylcholine (alpha-GPC) an excellent main ingredient in 5% Nutrition’s Core Nootropic. Alpha-GPC, a trusted and highly-bioavailable choline source, has been shown to boost focus, mental energy, mind-to-muscle connection, and strength.

  Alpha-GPC is a precursor to acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that’s heavily concentrated in the body. It helps elevate acetylcholine levels by supplying the body with extra choline. And for the general public, several studies have shown that alpha-GPC supplementation can result in enhanced cognitive function and even physical performance.^[3-5]

  Note that many of the studies use 600mg alpha-GPC per day, so you may want to add a third capsule somewhere to get more clinically-backed benefits. However, we’re not done with choline yet!

• Choline Bitartrate – 100mg

  Choline Bitartrate is the most widely available form of choline, and is the least expensive too. It contains 41% choline by weight, which provides roughly an extra 41 milligrams of choline in 5% Nutrition Core Nootropic.

  

  The 5% Nutrition Core Line is out, and they’re not just single-ingredient formulas! Check out these simple yet unique spins on classic supplements.

  While it may be less bioavailable than alpha-GPC, the yield is higher, and for some reason, we simply get better effects with blends like these. This is anecdotal, but we’ve been a fan of choline blends for a long time, and are a broken record in stating this. With a blend, we see a best-of-both-worlds situation: high bioavailability from the alpha-GPC side, but a boost in actual choline yield from the choline bitartrate side.

  5% Nutrition does the right thing, however, by keeping the “expensive stuff” in Alpha-GPC at the higher dose. Now it’s time to see how they keep the choline around longer:

• Toothed Clubmoss (Huperzia serrata) (aerial parts) (1% Huperzine A)

  Toothed clubmoss is a plant also known as a firmoss that provides the cognitive booster huperzine A. This compound is indirectly responsible for the increase in acetylcholine levels by inhibiting acetylcholinesterase,^[6] the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine. With less of the enzyme attacking our “learning neurotransmitters”, we keep them around longer, making it incredibly synergistic with the two ingredients above.

  

  Acetylcholinesterase breaks down our acetylcholine. Huperzine A helps slow this process down.

  Huperzine is also beneficial because it prevents the neurotoxin glutamine from instigating premature cell death.^[7] It’s considered a neurogenerative compound due to its potential to create new brain cells.^[8]

  Most “choline supplements” forget to include this. Because of the added Huperzine A, we’d far rather have 5% Nutrition Core Nootropic than straight choline.

• Calcium (Dicalcium Phosphate)

  Calcium is needed for forming and maintaining strong bones and ensuring proper muscle firing. Calcium phosphate is known as tricalcium phosphate in supplements containing 39% elemental calcium. At 39%, its yield is just a fraction below calcium carbonate (40%), but well above calcium citrate (21%), calcium lactate (13%), and calcium gluconate (9%).

  Our carrier for Alpha GPC?

  Since it’s included in the label here, and we don’t know of many specific nootropic benefits for calcium, we believe that 5% Nutrition is using calcium phosphate as the carrier for their alpha-GPC. Reason being, pure alpha-GPC is a sticky mess that will gum up the capsule manufacturing equipment. It becomes far more stable with a carrier, and some of the best brands have been using calcium phosphate to do this.

Take away: A choline supplement done right

Stack it with 5% Nutrition Core Energy!

5% Nutrition Core Nootropic is simple and effective. It’s a choline supplement that actually provides both the “offense” and the “defense” for choline, by first boosting the vital nutrient, and then adding an ingredient to keep it around.

This is a fantastic stackable pill. Take it with your coffee. Take it with your energy drink. Take it if you haven’t had eggs for a while. Hell, take it with your pre workout if you think the choline is too low.

5% Nutrition continues to show that the 5% brand would make Rich Piana proud. 5% Nutrition’s Core Nootropic brings another solid formula which, as we stated before, pays homage to Rich’s original core supplement – the most interesting creatine on the planet in CreaTen. After all, why just have one choline source when you can have an amplified blend?!