Cleaning up the aging brain: Scientists restore brain's trash disposal system

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.

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.

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 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.

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 them 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.