Melatonin also has been found to have a stimulating effect on the glymphatic system, though we need better trials on that.

I tried it because I'd been getting 4-5 hours of broken sleep due to peripheral neuropathy from a congenital spinal disorder for the past four or five years, and I finally feel like I'm healing. It's wild being able to fall asleep and stay asleep.

From everything I've read, creatine is as close to being a "free benefit" as it gets. I didn't experience any overt improvement just from taking it, as in, no extra energy or motivation. However, I'd stalled on all of my exercises for about a year, and after a week of "loading" 10g/day, I started back and instantly hit my max reps in a single set. I didn't want to hurt myself and was scared of DOMS, so I waited another week before trying again (I had a single day of soreness). After a light warmup, I immediately did it again. The results of that have been highly motivating, and I've remained excited to push myself.

The only side effect is that I enjoy my tea slightly less. Creatine doesn't have a flavor, but it makes everything taste 20% less delicious, somehow.

The main downside is that the effects are small - most of the research is in strength and endurance training and it seems like at most there's a 5-10% increase in lifting endurance (IIRC, it's been a while since I researched this).

It's one of a very few supplements that I personally feel should be generally taken by most people (unless you eat a lot of red meat).

The others are omega 3 (unless you eat fish several times a week) and possibly magnesium as the western diet tends to be low in that.

If you want to read more about effects of creatine on the brain this is a good paper:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7916590/

The consensus seems to be that supplementation of creatine is less clearly linked to increases in the brain than it is for muscle (although there have only been limited studies done), however, if you've ever suffered from depression, sleep deprivation or other neurological issues it's likely to be beneficial. For people without those issues, there's less evidence yet, but they would still get the benefit of more energy overall if not specifically more cognitive energy.

At least assuming 20ng/mL is a reasonable minimum. Some people suggest that’s a little low, but there’s real issues with excess vitamin D.

I don't know your dosage and use case but under creatine loading (5+ grams/die), water weight and bloating becomes a very, very noticeable side effect (in responders).

It's hard to know where to go for the right kind of supplement. I've taken it as an exercise supplement in the past with no seeming downsides, but in a few hours search, I couldn't find a supply that doesn't have dozens to hundreds of these complaints against it.

I'd put any one of those ahead of "creatine made me go bald".

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7871530/

other then that, creatine is considered the only supplement (protein not considered a supplement) that has virtually no side effects and known gain.

caffeine is behind that with some side effects.

beyond that, most other supplements havent been either to have proven benefits and proven no side effects

They went with the premise of "a little a day seems to help, what happens if we feed ridiculous quantities once". The sort of medical research that appeals to the engineer in me and something you can only really do with compounds that are already known to be unlikely to kill your patient if you exceed the usual dose. Also I strongly suspect they did this to students given the age range.

There's more literature out there than this. That paper's references are probably a reasonable start point. But as creatine is very cheap and has been widely consumed by athletes for ages now it's about as low risk a gamble as any out there.

I take a mix of L-Theanine and Magnesium Threonate before bed and sleep way better now (feel more rested with fewer hours of sleep, and the FitBit confirms I get more deep and REM sleep).

Personally I didn’t have good luck with melatonin. It puts me to sleep fine, but I tend to wake up exhausted after ~4 hours and unable to fall asleep again.

Here is a short video for the back of the neck: https://bornfree.life/images/neck-lymphatic.mov

I’m convinced we are going to discover that “qi work” is moving lymph through the connective tissue (a phenomenon we only just discovered a decade ago). The proscriptions against doing these exercises or massage during an illness is my clue/circumstantial evidence and I hope it gets studied more.

Not entirely accurate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25427090

We're all part of the Euarchontoglires clade

This is especially true for cancer, brain, and inflammation research. Mice just don't make good models for that.

Mice gave us a very solid understanding of cancer genetics. Cancer was initially thought of as an almost purely environmental disease. Thanks to “in mice” we learned that genetic susceptibility is a major factor.

Transplantation biology and immunology have profited enormously from mouse models—-and more “recently” everything from monoclonal antibodies to CAR-T cells.

And when you say “brain” who could been a dozen different things. I can assure you that mouse models are highly useful and translationally relevant to many neurological, behavioral, developmental, and physiological studies of the mammalian brain.

I worked in cancer research-adjacent area (on computational biology). The problem with mice was that cancers in mice necessarily contain fewer cells than human cancers.

So a lot of treatments can simply clear these cancers completely, without giving it a chance to evolve resistance. Yes, you can try to compensate for that, but it just is not reliable.

In addition, mice are notoriously naturally susceptible to cancer. So their cancers, counter-intuitively, are often less evolved as a result.

> And when you say “brain” who could been a dozen different things.

I basically mean "degenerative brain diseases", very much including aging.

They are a good initial test for viability because of the overwhelming genetic similarity.

This is why mice and rodents are used to test initial viability before then moving on to theraputics development.

You can read some sources if you want [0][1][2]

[0] - https://www.jax.org/why-the-mouse/excellent-models

[1] - https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/research-at-cambridge/animal-...

[2] - https://www.genome.gov/10001345/importance-of-mouse-genome

They are used because they're the _only_ way to test drugs early in development. Animal cruelty laws make it nearly impossible to use non-murine species for initial drug tests.

Additionally, mice are easy to breed and to keep, and there's a great variety of specialized genetic lines.

Idk why you are trying to die on this hill. I've provided decently authoritative sources (The Jackson Institute, Cambridge University, and the NIH)

Unless you have a PhD in Systems Biology or Genomics, I'm going to trust them over you.

Edit: an actual OG in the field of genomics just commented - listen/chat with him, not me.

But mice make really bad models for anything to do with brain, aging, inflammation, and cancer. That's why comments "in mice" are appropriate in these areas.

And it's not at all controversial, here are my citations:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1222878110 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6615039/

Mice studies are not useless, for sure. But they're almost always are not directly translatable to humans.

> But mice make really bad models for anything to do with brain, aging, inflammation, and cancer

If mice is really bad for research in the fields you mentioned, why do scientists around the world continue to use it? Wouldn’t they know it’s a dead end?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3074346/#:~:tex....

At least when using rodent you can control the environmental factors in a randomized controller “clinic” trials. Compliance not so hard to ensure.

Made me lol

About half of my best food experiences came after a stressful physical experience. I know that food wasn’t as amazing as my brain was telling me it was, but I still enjoyed the experience. The other people in that Dairy Queen were absolutely not having the transcendental experience my friend and I were enjoying.

“Brain swelling” sounds like it would put a lot of things into a new perspective.

Not that I recommend it for anyone, the drug has terrible side effects.