Table & Thyme

Denise, this is easily the question we receive most often, and the honest answer is more interesting than a simple yes or no. There is something real underneath the honey advice. It just isn't quite what the videos say it is.

Honey is genuinely full of plant compounds with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory behaviour. A 2023 review in Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity went through the ones with the most promise for supporting the brain.¹ So the premise isn't invented. Where the advice thins out is in the specifics: which compounds, and how much of them a spoonful really delivers.

Follow the colour

When researchers look at plant foods and mental sharpness, one family of molecules keeps turning up: anthocyanins. They are the pigments responsible for the deep purple of a blueberry, the near-black of a blackcurrant, the dark amber of certain wild honeys.

A systematic review examined how berry anthocyanins relate to cognitive performance and healthy vascular function and found the signals consistent enough to merit more work.² A study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry followed older adults drinking wild blueberry juice daily for twelve weeks, and saw better scores on learning and word-recall tasks.³ A meta-analysis pulling together randomised clinical trials reported favourable effects on short-term memory, verbal learning and executive function.⁴

So is your spoonful working?

Here is the part the videos leave out. The honey on most supermarket shelves is pale, blended and filtered, and carries only a trace of these pigments. The amounts used in the research are a good deal higher than anything a single spoon provides.

The habit isn't wrong. It's simply diluted.

That gap is what a small group of researchers set out to close. Rather than asking people to eat more honey, they went looking for honey that already carried more of what matters.

One island, richer hives

They ended up in the mountains of Ikaria, a modest Greek island in the eastern Aegean. The bees there work wild, mineral-rich terrain, and the honey comes out dark and heavily pigmented.

Ikaria is already well known to people who study longevity. It is one of a handful of places labelled a Blue Zone, where reaching ninety while remaining active, sociable and quick in conversation is unremarkable rather than exceptional.

Nobody sensible claims the honey explains the island. But if you are hunting for a richer source of these pigments, it is a rather good place to start looking.

Why the brain cares about any of this

The brain is a demanding organ. It is a small fraction of your body weight and takes roughly a fifth of your daily energy, nearly all of it as glucose.

That fuel has to travel there through healthy circulation and then be used well once it arrives. Sleep, movement, a varied plate and plenty of colourful plants all have a hand in it. Anthocyanins are studied on two of those fronts: antioxidant activity at the cellular level, and support for the healthy blood flow that does the delivering.²

What ended up in the bottle

The formula those researchers built is called MemoFlow®, and it is deliberately short on ingredients — two, both from Ikaria.

It comes as sublingual drops rather than capsules: two under the tongue each morning, absorbed through the tissue there. The whole routine takes about ten seconds, and there is nothing to swallow, mix or measure. No stimulants, no hormones, no powders.

What other readers have written in

Every one of these is a personal account rather than a study. What stands out is how closely the themes — ease, clarity, focus — sit alongside what the published work on the ingredients explores.

If it doesn't suit you

Orders come with a 90-day money-back guarantee, and the refund is complete with no explanation required. Three months is a deliberately generous window: food habits work slowly, and you deserve enough time to reach your own verdict.

Two more questions we've been sent

Should I stop having honey on my toast?

Not at all. It's a lovely, natural food and there's no reason to give it up. It simply tends to be low in anthocyanins, which is a different matter from whether it's worth eating.

What exactly is lithium orotate?

A naturally-occurring trace mineral, present in drinking water, grains and vegetables, which nutrition researchers have studied as a dietary nutrient for decades.⁵ The amount used here reflects what turns up in mineral-rich spring water.

Where do both ingredients come from?

Ikaria, in both cases: the pigments from the wild mountain honey and the mineral from the island's natural springs.