A few weeks ago, my friends and I—women ranging from our mid-thirties to mid-forties—all started weight lifting.
This is for several reasons. In general, strength training and functional fitness are more popular. But also, women between the ages of 30 and 50 lose about 3 to 8 percent of their muscle mass per year, and the drop in estrogen that happens during menopause can accelerate this. I no longer care about bulking up; I just don’t want to collapse in a rickety bag of bones when I’m 50. Lastly, I’m not saying that my sudden desire to be able to, say, fireman’s carry a body across state lines has anything to do with the results of the US presidential election. Then again, I’m not saying it doesn’t.
Courtesy of Peloton
That makes the launch of Peloton’s latest app very timely. Today, the company launched Strength+, its first stand-alone app apart from the core Peloton app. It will be available on iOS devices with a limited number of introductory memberships for $1 per month for the first six months. After the introductory period, memberships will be $10 per month, and at no additional cost for All Access, Guide, and App+ Members.
Ambient Noise
The Strength+ app is designed specifically for use in the gym, so it may look slightly different from the core Peloton app or other apps with similar offerings, like FitOn, WorkoutWomen, or even Apple Fitness+.
I’ve been using Strength+ for a week. When you open it, you can select from several different types of workouts. A workout generator lets you customize a strength workout, with six different inputs that include how long you want to work out, which muscle groups you want to target, what equipment you have, or whether you want to include a warm-up.
You can also click to follow specific training programs. I’m currently enrolled in instructor Andy Speer’s Ignite Your Strength 4-week program, which is kicking my butt. You can also watch short instructor clips, which range from everything like gym procedures and etiquette—how to load and unload a barbell, or what a plyo box is—to watching Speer look at old pictures of himself. A progress-tracking tab gives you data about your journey, showing your total lifting volume, which workouts you did, and which weights you’ve lifted.
Every time I visit the Apple Park campus, my mind flashes to a tour I took months before construction was finished, when there was dust on the terrazzo floors and mud where lush vegetation now flourishes. My guide was Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. With a proprietor’s pride, he ushered me through the $5 billion circular colossus, explaining that committing to the new campus was a “100-year decision.”
Today I am returning to the Ring—pulsing with energy seven years after it opened—to see Cook again. The tech world is at an inflection point. The mightiest companies will either stumble or secure their dominance for decades. We are here to discuss Cook’s big move in this high-stakes environment: the impending release of Apple Intelligence, the company’s first significant offering in the white-hot field of generative AI. Some consider it belated. All year, Apple’s competitors have been gaining buzz, dazzling investors, and dominating the news cycle with their chatbots, while the world’s most valuable company (as I write) was showing off an expensive, bulky augmented-reality headset. Apple has to get AI right. Corporations, after all, are less likely than buildings to stand proud for a century.
Cook didn’t panic. Like his predecessor Steve Jobs, he doesn’t believe that first is best. “Classic Apple,” as he puts it, enters a cacophonous field of first-movers and, with a strong grasp of novelty versus utility, unveils products that make the latest technologies relatable and even sexy. Think back to how the iPod rethought digital music. It wasn’t the first MP3 player, but its compactness, ease of use, and integration with an online store thrilled people with a new way to consume their tunes.
Photograph: Joe Pugliese
Cook also contends that Apple has been preparing for the AI revolution all along. As far back as 2018, he poached Google’s top AI manager, John Giannandrea, for a rare expansion of the company’s senior vice president ranks. Then he pulled the plug on a long-running smart-car program (an open secret never publicly acknowledged by Apple) and marshaled the company’s machine-learning talent to build AI into its software products.
In June, Apple announced the results: a layer of AI for its whole product line. Cook had also brokered a deal with the gold standard in chatbots, OpenAI, so that his users could have access to ChatGPT. I’d gotten a few demos of what they were planning to reveal, including a tool to create custom emoji with verbal prompts and an easy-to-use AI picture generator called Image Playground. (I hadn’t yet tested the revivification of Siri, Apple’s lackluster AI agent.)
Perhaps what most distinguishes Apple’s AI—at least according to Apple—is its focus on privacy, a hallmark of the Cook regime. The AI tools, which are rolling out through software updates on the latest iPhone and relatively recent Macs, will largely run on the device itself—you don’t send your data to the cloud. The computation for more complicated AI tasks, Cook assures, occurs in secure regions of Apple’s data centers.
Another thing I’m reminded of on my return to the Ring is how skillful Cook is at touting the results of his big decisions, from the Apple Watch to his bet on custom silicon chips, which unleashed innovations that boost Apple phones and laptops. (And not mentioning decisions that didn’t pan out, like that multibillion-dollar smart-car project.) When he strolls into the conference room where we’re meeting, I know Cook will be meticulously cordial, displaying manners honed during his Alabama boyhood, while calmly hyperbolizing the virtues of Apple’s products and fending off criticisms of his very powerful company. (And when asked for comment on the election results, which came in after our talk, he chose to keep his views to himself.) Steve Jobs would come at a journalist like the rain in Buenaventura, aggressively pitching his message; Cook envelopes his interlocutors in a gentle mist and confides awed assessments of his company’s efforts.
The ultimate assessments, of course, will come from users. But if 40 years of covering Apple has taught me anything, it is this: Should this first iteration of AI fall short, an unrepentant Cook will show up at a future pretaped keynote hailing a new version as “the best Apple Intelligence we’ve ever built.” Despite all the pressure, Tim Cook never lets you see him sweat.
When Mark Cuban is feeling spicy, he’ll always let you know. The billionaire businessman, basketball owner, and Shark Tank empresario lit up WIRED’s The Big Interview event on Tuesday, dropping hot takes about Elon Musk, the pharmaceutical industry, and why he thinks “couch fucking” and Gary Gensler’s crypto policy cost Kamala Harris the election.
Chatting with WIRED senior writer Lauren Goode, Cuban touted the trajectory of Cost Plus Drugs, the pharmaceutical company he cofounded in 2022. By offering transparency on costs and pricing policies, Cuban says his company has been able to disrupt the drug industry, offering consumers drugs like Droxidopa for something like $20 per month versus the more than $3,000-a-month uninsured patients were being quoted.
“We’ve lowered the price of [one of our 2,500 medications] every single weekday for 18 months,” Cuban boasted, saying the company has also found great success in publishing its entire price list, something that’s always been incredibly hard to obtain from other drug providers for consumers and researchers alike.
Now, Cuban says, studies have come out showing that if Medicare bought, for instance, nine specific drugs from Cost Plus Drugs instead of their other sources, the government would save billions of dollars, something that not only shows the bloat of the healthcare system but also the tangible effect that one well-funded company can have.
It’s not that Cuban’s not making money on Cost Plus Drugs, either, because he is. He could be making more, he told Goode, but as he put it, “How much fucking money do I need? I’m not trying to land on Mars.”
The crack, presumably directed at Elon Musk, was just one of several remarks Cuban made about the billionaire X owner. For one, he spoke about his own move from X to Bluesky in recent months, saying that he thinks it’s an overall “existential moment” for Musk’s platform.
Because of Bluesky’s troll-blocking capabilities and what Cuban calls more engagement-friendly policies, he says he’s found it much easier to engage there, whether it’s Kamala Harris, cryptocurrency or the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, in which he owns a minority stake. “If you want to know what Elon thinks, Twitter’s amazing,” Cuban joked, but added that he thinks Bluesky is more of a true “social network” in comparison.
Mark Cuban and Lauren Goode at The Big InterviewPhotograph: Tristan deBrauwere
“If you are a student and you live on $700 as a monthly budget, $200 extra is nice,” says Bernow. “If you work 10 hours for me, I don’t mind paying $200. They should be paid more, but we’re not allowed to do that, and we adhere to all the frameworks.”
Many countries have rules that prevent people from being paid for donating their tissue. In the UK it’s illegal to pay people for providing blood, plasma, or other tissues, although donors can be reimbursed for expenses and loss of earnings. In Sweden—as in several other EU countries—donors may be compensated for their time, but they are not allowed to be paid.
“Should they be getting paid anything?” asks Hank Greely, a law professor at Stanford University who specializes in ethical and legal issues in the biosciences. “Depending on who you ask, that may or may not be a sin. But it’s a venial sin, not a mortal sin.” In the US, people can get paid for donating sperm, eggs, and blood.
What might make stem cells different is the sheer cost of treatments. Bernow says that each donation yields about 50ml of tissue containing the mesenchymal stem cells that are used in its therapies. These cells are then purified and duplicated in Cellcolab’s laboratory space, eventually yielding around 200 treatment doses of stem cells per donation. Assuming that each treatment costs $16,500, that means that a single donation could be used in treatments worth more than $3 million. Bernow says that he currently has between 15 and 20 donors per year.
Of course, cells aren’t the factor contributing to the cost of stem cell treatments. Bernow says that for an intravenous treatment at $25,000, around $10,000 of that cost goes towards running the clinical trial and the rest partly finances the cost of extracting, duplicating, preserving, and transporting the stem cells. The whole focus of his startup, he points out, is to bring down the need for donors and the cost of stem cells by producing more from each donation.
“This is super-easy economics of scale,” he says. “Our goal is to really slash prices over the next decade. We want to find a step change to be able to get more cells produced from one donor.”
For Greely, the biggest issue with stem cell therapies are the treatments themselves. “My main concern is the efficacy,” he says. The FDA has warned people about stem cell treatments that are not approved in the US. “There is a lot of misleading information on the internet about these products, including statements about the conditions they can be used to treat,” the agency warned in a post from 2020. “FDA is concerned that many patients seeking cures and remedies may be misled by information about products that are illegally marketed, have not been shown to be safe or effective, and, in some cases, may have significant safety issues that put patients at risk.”
As for the donors paid $200 for their contribution to treatments that end up costing millions of dollars, Greely is less perturbed. “Welcome to capitalism.”
Updated 12-2-2024 2:00 pm GMT: The figure quoted in the headline was changed from thousands to millions, to more accurately reflect the potential retail value of a single dose of donated stem cells.
Beliefs and practices about music’s ability to heal the mind, body, and spirit date back to the Upper Paleolithic period, about 20,000 years ago. Music was widely used by shamans and other healers to treat a variety of ailments, from mental disorders to injuries and illness. Only recently have we separated healing and music; we tend to see healing as the province of doctors and music as entertainment. Perhaps it is time to reunite two of the most intimate parts of our lives.
Scientific advances in the past 10 years have provided a rational basis for this reunification. An emerging body of research allows us to take what had been anecdotes and place music on an equal footing with prescription drugs, surgeries, medical procedures, psychotherapy, and various forms of treatment that are mainstream and evidence-based. In the past two years alone, more than 8,000 papers have been published on the topic in peer-reviewed journals.
Across millennia, music has been used to relieve a variety of ailments, from chronic pain to depression, anxiety, and simple boredom. It serves as a social lubricant, an intoxicating part of courtship, and in life-cycle ceremonies through birth, birthdays, marriage, anniversaries, and even death. It was 2024 that saw the culmination of years of scientific research and conferences focused on a deceptively simple question: Is music capable of delivering proven medical effects? The answer is a resounding and artfully reverberating yes.
We have now demonstrated the efficacy of music therapy and musical interventions for improving a variety of health outcomes and for promoting wellness. From the treatment of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s to the management of chronic pain and depression, music is no longer relegated to the fringes of modern medicine. Major health care companies now have procedure codes for the use of music in hospital, clinical, and outpatient settings.
The year 2025 will see a renewed and reinvigorated use of this age-old remedy based on evidence from rigorously conducted studies. We will begin to see more sophisticated and nuanced uses of music for specific ailments, as well as for improving immune system function and overall wellness.
The future of music in health care extends from hospital to home, from illness to neurorehabilitation, mindfulness practices, and wellness. AI will help here—not in writing music, but in selecting the songs and genres that meet both an individual’s tastes and the desired therapeutic and wellness goals. By extracting key features from music and matching them to an individual’s preferences and needs, we can usher in a new age of personalized music medicine. In the same way that an individual’s DNA can guide decisions on treatment and which drugs are likely to be most effective, AI may one day extract the DNA of music to identify precisely what music will help meet an individual’s therapeutic needs
Consider all the information about you in the cloud—your search history, location, who you are with, calendar, contacts list, and the kinds of things you view on social media. Certain companies also know a lot about your music tastes—what you listen to, what you skipped, the time of day you listen, and where you are when you’re listening. Smart devices that read your biometrics know your heart rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygenation level, respiration rate, skin conductance, body temperature, blood pressure—as well as how they fluctuate as a function of time of day and what activities you’re engaged in.
And they know about those activities, too—whether you’re running, walking, climbing steps, driving in a car, or sleeping. Of course, when you are sleeping, they know what sleep stage you’re in and how long you’ve been asleep. (They know if you’ve been sleeping, they know if you’re awake, they know if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake!). Soon, you’ll have the option to subscribe to music on demand where the “demand” comes from your own biometrics, serving you music to calm you down, invigorate you for an exercise workout, help you focus at work, or treat ailments such as chronic pain, depression, Parkinson’s, and even Alzheimer’s.
“I remember in Geneva, two months ago, we said, ‘Pay attention, because on this specific week there is a risk of shortage if there is any problem with one of the active reactors’—and that’s what happened,” recalls David Crunelle, a spokesman for Nuclear Medicine Europe (NMEU), an industrial association.
Because of their very nature, it’s impossible to stockpile these radioactive substances—they are fleeting. Technetium-99m works as a radioactive tracer because, as it decays, it flings out gamma rays with a photon energy of 140 KeV. This is “fairly ideal” for detection using a gamma ray camera, says Cathy Cutler, chair of isotope research and production at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US.
But technetium-99m has a very short half-life, just six hours or so. Hence why radioisotope-producing facilities send miniature generators containing molybdenum-99 out to hospitals. These generators, sometimes called “moly cows,” produce the desired technetium-99m as the molybdenum-99 decays—a bit like a portable vending machine for technetium-99m, which runs out after about two weeks, once the molybdenum-99 has completely decayed.
Glenn Flux, head of radioisotope physics at London’s Royal Marsden Hospital and Institute of Cancer Research, says the thing that makes a technetium-99m scan different to, say, a CT or MRI scan, is that it reveals how patients’ organs or a tumor are functioning—for example by revealing blood flow to the area in question.
“The CT will show you if there’s a tumor, but the technetium or other isotopes will tell you whether it’s active or aggressive,” explains Flux.
The recent radioisotope shortage caused a few thousand appointment cancellations in the UK alone, estimates Stephen Harden, vice president of clinical radiology at the Royal College of Radiologists (RCR). Health care staff swung into action to distribute the remaining radioisotope supplies around the UK, in order to ensure that the most urgent patients—those with cancer, for instance—were still able to attend their scans. “If there hadn’t been a nationally coordinated policy, there would have been significant regions in the country with no supply at all,” says Harden.
Crunelle and colleagues at NMEU continually monitor medical radioisotope production at key reactors around the world. They learn about maintenance schedules well in advance, and, as such, NMEU will often advise reactor chiefs to push these dates back slightly—for example, in order to help minimize the risk of multiple shutdowns occurring at the same time. NMEU staff use software, a kind of reactor maintenance calendar, that allows them to forecast production levels. But sometimes unpredictable events occur, such as the problem with the pipe in Petten.
We humans may be the only species that is aware of our mortality. We are obsessed with how to postpone the inevitable and, failing that, how to make the most of our lives. For much of our existence as a species, there was little we could do about either aging or death. In fact, for most of history, most of us died long before we actually aged. In the last few decades, molecular and cell biologists have made advances in understanding the underlying causes of aging, which raises the possibility of tackling aging itself.
Researchers are exploring many mitigators: the beneficial pathways triggered by caloric restriction that improve health markers in old animals; targeting the inflammatory-compound-secreting senescent cells we accumulate as we grow older; boosting our stem-cell numbers; and revitalizing the energy-metabolizing mitochondria in our cells.
These are all promising, but it will take some time before they are proven to be effective and safe in humans. While we wait for the biomedical establishment to come up with powerful ways to tackle aging itself, there are three simple measures that use our understanding of advances in biology and medicine to keep us in good health as we age.
Eat Less
A calorically restricted diet means consuming the bare minimum of calories while still getting all the nutrients we need. Such a diet is difficult to follow for most people and has been reported to slow down wound healing, possibly make you more prone to certain infections, cause you to lose muscle mass, feel cold, and suffer a loss of libido. However, a moderate diet that is balanced should provide many of the benefits observed of a calorically restricted diet. Michael Pollan said it best: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Keep Exercising
Physical activity turns on many of the pathways that stimulate mitochondrial production. It also helps maintain muscle and bone mass, a serious problem as we age; counters diabetes and obesity; improves sleep; and strengthens immunity. Aerobic exercise improves cardiovascular health; load-bearing exercise helps maintain muscle mass. Both are important.
Get Adequate Sleep
All animals have the equivalent of sleep, because it is essential for life. Sleep is involved in repair mechanisms that prevent the buildup of damage to our cells, and sleep deprivation increases the risk of many diseases of aging, including cardiovascular disease, obesity, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease. We need to ensure that we get an adequate amount of sleep.
Embrace the Synergy
The trio of diet, exercise, and sleep will together be more beneficial than any therapy currently. These three measures are all synergistic. Each of these will make it easier to carry out the other two. For example, exercise will help you sleep better. Moreover, they will all help with other things that can help with healthy aging, including preventing obesity, which is a serious cause of many diseases of old age.
Also Watch for These Factors
Stress. It is known that stress has widespread metabolic effects that are harmful for health and accelerate aging. Reducing stress is always difficult, but the trio of activities mentioned can also help to reduce stress.
Isolation. Many population studies point to loneliness resulting in poor health in old age. In an increasingly fragmented society, it’s important to maintain and nurture our social connections as we age.
Purpose. People with a strong sense of purpose were healthier and less likely to die. One study found that one effective way to acquire a sense of purpose was to volunteer in activities that provide social interaction and bring benefits to the community or society.
And Have Routine Checkups
Beyond these measures, there are some simple health precautions we should all take as we age. It is important to have routine and early checkups for blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes. All of these conditions can easily and cheaply be treated to increase our chances of good health in old age. In addition, good markers for early diagnoses are becoming available for a range of treatable diseases including some types of cancer. Early detection of breast, cervical, colorectal (bowel), skin, and prostate cancer can all improve clinical outcomes.
In the real world, we have more than a century of experience figuring out how to share the world with children in order to keep them safe while still allowing adults to engage in adult-only activities, particularly those involving sex, violence, and addictive substances.
In 18th and 19th century America, there were essentially no restrictions on children’s consumption of alcohol. However, following the temperance movement’s efforts to publicize alcohol’s harmful effects on families, women, and children, and after the failed experiment of Prohibition, states took on the responsibility of regulating alcohol. Each state eventually passed laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol to those under a certain age, usually 21. This established the principle that enforcement responsibility falls to the bars, liquor stores, and casinos profiting from alcohol sales. The idea that parents alone should manage their children’s access to alcohol would have struck most people as absurd.
Likewise, it will soon seem absurd that we once allowed children of any age to go everywhere on the internet that adults go, doing everything that adults do, without the knowledge or consent of their parents. The year 2025 will be the one where humanity remembers children are different from adults and that they need protection and age-gating in some parts of the digital world.
The dangers are now undeniable. From the dawn of the internet through to 2024, any child who knew how to lie about their age could open an account on nearly any platform used by adults, except for those that require a credit card. This included hardcore pornography sites such as Pornhub, and the now-defunct site Omegle—where children could video chat with strangers, some of whom were naked masturbating men. It also included social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, all of which are full of content that is wildly inappropriate for children, and all of which incorporate design features that harm children in a variety of ways.
Concern among parents and educators is now widespread.
In 2023, a survey on children’s health conducted by the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital showed that the issues that most concern parents—ranked above school violence, drugs, and bullying—were the overuse of smartphones, social media and internet safety. Another 2024 survey of school principals showed that they were similarly alarmed by the effect of smartphones on students, with 88 percent stating that they were making children tired and distracted, and 85 percent believing it was amplifying violence and bullying in schools.
No wonder that, in 2023, a major Unesco report considered the overwhelming evidence that excessive phone use was correlated with lower school performance and poorer mental health, and called for the ban of smartphones from schools. In 2024, France, Italy, Finland, and the Netherlands followed through on those recommendations, banning digital devices in classrooms. In the US, the states of Ohio, Indiana, Oklahoma, Virginia, and Florida have also imposed restrictions on smartphone usage in schools, while the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for warning labels for social media platforms. Bipartisan legislation addressing these concerns—the Kids Online Safety Act—has also passed the Senate. This new law would, for instance, force tech companies from targeting kids with personalized algorithms designed to hook them.
In 2025, parents will no longer be alone in tackling this problem. They will be assisted by concerned politicians and by phone-free schools. Social media companies, on the other hand, will finally acknowledge—or be forced to acknowledge by juries and legislatures—that they now own childhood, and they bear at least some responsibility for what they are doing to children.
Creatine supplements are commonly available in powder form
Shutterstock/RHJPhtotos
Creatine is one of the most widely studied performance-enhancing substances in the world. Once dismissed as just a bodybuilding supplement, its public popularity has grown hand-in-hand with interest from scientists.
The supplement is generally associated with improved strength and muscle mass, but evidence suggests that it actually has a role in everything from growth in children and adolescents to brain health.
“After 20 [to] 30 years of research on physical performance, we’ve noticed a lot of health benefits,” says Richard Kreider at Texas A&M University. “It’s a remarkable nutrient, which helps our cells in a variety of ways, not only for exercise performance.”
What is creatine?
It is a compound that is produced naturally in our bodies and those of other vertebrates. Primarily found in muscles, it also shows up in the brain, blood, testicles and other tissues and organs.
Our bodies synthesise creatine, with 1 to 2 grams created each day by the liver, kidneys, pancreas and the brain. People who eat protein-rich animal products get roughly the same amount from their diet.
“Any time you consume protein, those proteins are made up of amino acids, and if you put three particular amino acids together, it forms this molecule called creatine,” says Scott Forbes at Brandon University in Canada.
What does creatine do in the body?
It plays a critical role in the complicated way that our bodies produce energy at the cellular level, says Forbes. “It’s converted and stored into a molecule called phosphocreatine, which can then be broken down into energy rapidly.”
Forbes says creatine is particularly useful when you are stressed or if your tissues are lacking oxygen, which can be brought on by conditions such as asthma or anaemia. “Any situation when you might require more energy,” he says.
How does it affect physical performance?
Creatine has been available as a sports supplement since the early 1990s, and has long been credited for helping athletes increase their strength and speed.
There are thousands of studies to support this, says Kreider. “An athlete that has higher creatine stores will sprint faster, recover faster, do more total work – a 10 to 15 per cent improvement in performance and training adaptation. It’s not modest at all.”
Supplementing with creatine also leads to rapid increases in muscle mass, which is why it is popular among bodybuilders. “We have shown that trained athletes can have as high as a 3.5-kilogram increase in muscle mass within a 5 to 10 week period,” says Kreider. “That is profound. Compare it to a control, where somebody is just training and having a normal diet, you may gain half a kilogram per month.”
Creatine supplements may also be particularly beneficial later in life. “We recommend creatine for active ageing to reduce the decline in muscle [and] to maintain muscle performance,” says Kreider.
But researchers stress that this isn’t an elixir that can replace a healthy lifestyle. “You only really get the benefits, particularly from a muscle-growth perspective, if you combine it with exercise or resistance training,” says Forbes.
How does creatine affect the brain?
A number of papers have shown that creatine supplementation can improve aspects of cognitive performance. One small study published earlier this year found that a single dose of creatine improves memory and processing speed within 3 hours in sleep-deprived people, compared with a placebo.
But not all research has produced consistent results. In 2023, the largest randomised placebo-controlled study of creatine’s effects on cognition to date found only a small beneficial effect, equivalent to a 1 to 2.5 point increase in intelligence quotient (IQ) .
“Most of the research shows that it might impact your brain, but in young, healthy individuals, it doesn’t seem to play a big, big role unless your brain is stressed with sleep deprivation or mental fatigue,” says Forbes.
And while the research on this is still in its infancy, there may also be a protective effect against neurodegenerative conditions – for instance, people with Alzheimer’s have lower amounts of creatine in their brains – or even physical brain damage.
“For example, if you get a concussion, you basically have an ischemic event: lack of oxygen to an area of the brain that limits its ability to function and causes swelling and inflammation,” says Kreider. “We know, at least in animals fed on creatine, the concussion damage is reduced by about half.”
How does creatine impact our wider health?
Creatine works at the cellular level, so researchers believe that its positive effects could be widespread in the body. “We’re finding that increasing the energy availability in the cell is critical, especially when there’s a lot of limitations in providing energy,” says Kreider. “If you have a heart attack or stroke, for example, [creatine] reduces the size of the damage because it’s protecting those cells.”
An analysis of data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey also suggests that creatine could be beneficial for children. “Kids that grow up with less creatine in their diet have less muscle, they’re shorter and they have a higher body fat,” says Kreider. “Adolescent girls who have higher creatine have fewer menstrual cycle issues.”
An emerging consensus among scientists is that creatine supplementation is beneficial for pretty much everyone. Kreider predicts that, in time, this will be recommended for certain groups, including older or pregnant people, and anyone who doesn’t eat meat, fish or dairy.
He also thinks certain food will one day be fortified with creatine. “It’s going to start in the plant-based space, adding creatine to plant-based protein powders and veggie burgers, those types of things,” says Kreider. “That would offset the deficiency they may have in their diet.”
Does it matter when I take creatine?
The time of day may only matter if you are an athlete trying to win a race or beat your personal best. “We know that if you take it in close proximity to your training, the results are a little bit better,” says Forbes.
But creatine is also stored in the body as an energy reserve. “Think about endurance athletes where there’s changes in pace in a race,” says Forbes. “Suddenly somebody breaks away and you’re like, ‘whoa, how’d they do that?’ Well, they changed their power output quite substantially and I think creatine plays a role in that.”
The effects of supplementation can be relatively long lasting, but it still needs repeating. “If you stop taking creatine, it takes four to six weeks to return back to baseline,” says Forbes. “Some people will cycle on and off creatine, but there’s never been a study to compare cycling on and off versus just taking it for long periods of time.”
How should I take it?
Creatine is available in powder form, pills or gummies. In terms of efficacy, there doesn’t seem to be any difference between them, although pills and powders have been around for longer so tend to be the formulations that are tested in studies.
There are also different types of creatine available, but creatine monohydrate is the most widely available and the best studied.
Does creatine have any side effects?
The supplements are generally considered safe at the doses most people take them, which is around 5 grams a day, according to Forbes. But some people report dehydration or muscle cramps. “There are a few people that have GI [gastrointestinal] distress,” says Forbes. “They take creatine and it just doesn’t sit well in their stomachs. For those individuals, I suggest taking a lower dose of creatine.”
You may need to consult a doctor before taking supplements
Much of medicine today focuses on extending life by no more than several months. Drugs for cancer and Alzheimer’s disease that are touted for their effectiveness often do little more than give people a bit more time. What if we could send terminally ill people forward to be saved by the medicine of the future, asks Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston.
It is an interesting question, and one that Zeleznikow-Johnston, a neuroscientist, poses in his book, The Future Loves…
