Creatine Found to Boost Brainpower

Eric Ass Raymond writes "According to this BBC article, researchers from the University of Sydney and Macquarie University in Australia have found that the dietary supplement creatine - a natural compound found in muscle tissue - can improve not only your athletic performance, but also your intelligence and memory. One of the side effects, however, is an unpleasant body odour."

Comments

Sensationalism

[Fungii]

This is just another in the long series of sensationalist stories about studies that show *** increases ***, or doing X makes you better at Y.

What annoys me about these stories is that they are always based on small (eg 45) groups and they basically amount to pseudoscience and they give a bad view of the scientific community in general.

For example, how many times have you read stories about either possible cures or causes of cancer? Journalists should stop coming out with this crap and cover real scientific stories.

Re:Sensationalism

[nanojath]

Thank you. Keep in mind also that 45 is the full test group - comprising both those receiving the active agent and those receiving placebo. So basically you've got these results on the basis of a couple dozen people.

There are other issues. Because Creatine occurs naturally in meat, they used only vegetarians in the study. While I understand their motive to reduce unknown variables in the active agent, it still boils down to using a non-typical population for the sample. Is there an impact? Who knows, unless you go the full distance, using a general population and finding some way to meter and account for their meat intake. Suffice to say, a lot of preliminary studies run afoul of the sample population they use - claims for particular foods made on the basis of a genetically discrete population's traditional diet is the classic example. Is it the diet or their genes creating the particular effect? You don't know until you test a general population.

This isn't to say this is bad science. It's just very preliminary. Unfortunately, the media judges the newsworthiness of science by how interesting, not how significant or reliable, they think the results are.

Re:Kids these days

[Eric Ass Raymond]

I for one welcome all methods, biomechanical and biochemical alike, that help me to improve myself with the least amount of effort. Why? Because then I can put effort into improving myself in areas where artificial means are not (yet) available.

What you're saying is similar to dismissing cars, trains and bicycles because" they're for the sick and injured not for the lazy and impatient - just walk to work like the God intended."

Re:That reminds me.

[Anoraknid the Sartor]

So ask the men "this pill shrinks your penis by an inch, but makes you way smarter - would you take it?"