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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Conclusion: Creatine supplementation improves sit-to-stand performance, muscle function, and lean tissue mass. It is crucial to conduct high-quality prospective RCTs to confirm these hypotheses (PROSPERO number, CRD42023354929).

'Give us funding pls'

I use creatine myself and think it helps build muscle, but this is a pretty weak result. I do think it's worth researching because it's a cheap supplement and could help an ageing demographic as part of an exercise program. OTOH I'm not sure it's necessary if you're not exercising intensively or actively trying to build strength. Consistent regular light exercise and reducing sugar in your diet seems like the best way for most people to deal with ageing.

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Small improvements in balance and strength is valuable to the older population. One fall can significantly reduce their movements, and that becomes a slippery slope to being sedentary and then death.

I mean, I think it makes sense and deserves funding. Creatine has a mountain of evidence in sports nutrition, as you are likely aware, so much that it’s kinda mind boggling to me that there hasn’t been more research into treating it more like a Vitamin for the general population. The evidence is clear that your body simply can’t produce as much creatine as it can utilize. As an adamant vegetarian I admit that this is extremely good evidence that being vegetarian is unideal for our species.

In athletics, creatine is basically the first thing after protein that gets recommended to supplement. As you get older muscle mass and strength become very critical indicators of vitality and independence. It also becomes harder to build and maintain muscle as you get older. The data is clear on this. During this stage of life, giving your body everything it needs is a no brainer.

Sports nutrition is pretty sus as a field though. Creatine gets recommended because it's cheap and tested. Problem is most of what creatine functionally does is flood your muscles with water, improve leverages somewhat to get a few more reps on medium-high rep ranges, which has a real training effect, provided you're at level where that extra stimulus helps. Which is to say intermediate-advanced lifters who needs to seriously periodize/plan stimulus recovery cycles to progress. Which excludes 99% of genpop that wouldn't seriously strength train past novice phase at all.

If anything deserves funding/destigmatization, it would be steroids that packs on lean mass merely sitting around. Would be nice if billions gets put into steriods that doesn't adversely effect heart etc. Gen pop needs ozempic tier solutions.

Yes absolutely: any supp. should only be reached for after an intervention to lifestyle through physical activity and diet.

I mean yeah, pretty much every meta-analysis says this, even when they produce high quality comprehensive evidence.

The reality is that labs employ people who have families to feed, and the PI's primary job is to keep money rolling in so people can keep being paid. We are now generations removed from scientists being largely upper-class hobbyists who seek to advance humanity or make a mark on the world.

Modern science is an industrial complex that produces research papers as a product.

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