Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
Taking betaine supplements doesn’t change your ‘good’ cholesterol or fat levels in your blood, but it does lower your ‘bad’ cholesterol and overall cholesterol — so it’s picky about which fats it affects.
Descriptive
If your body doesn’t have enough folate or has a common gene variation that makes it hard to process folate, taking betaine (a natural compound found in beets and spinach) can help lower a harmful blood chemical called homocysteine by giving your body another way to clean it up.
Mechanistic
Taking betaine supplements for a few months might raise your 'bad' cholesterol a little bit—about 5 points—which could cancel out the heart benefits you get from lowering another blood chemical called homocysteine.
Causal
Taking 4 to 6 grams of betaine every day for at least six weeks lowers a harmful blood chemical called homocysteine by about 1.2 points, which helps your body process proteins better.
Taking creatine might help your memory, but whether you take a little or a lot, for a few days or a few months, or whether you're male or female, doesn’t seem to change how much it helps your memory.
Quantitative
If you take creatine as a powder mixed in water, it might help your memory — but if it’s in a pill, it doesn’t seem to make a difference.
Taking creatine might help you remember things better when you're well-rested and calm, but it won't help if you're exhausted, sleep-deprived, or at high altitude.
Taking creatine supplements—no matter how much, how long, or whether you're male or female—doesn't make your memory any better if you're a healthy teen or young adult.
Taking creatine supplements might help older people (66–76) remember things better, maybe because it gives their brain more energy—but it doesn’t seem to help younger people (11–31) at all.
Some tiny studies suggest that taking creatine (a supplement often used by athletes) along with antidepressants might help women who haven’t improved with medication alone, but we can’t be sure yet because the studies were too small and haven’t been repeated.
Correlational
In mice and rats, giving creatine before a brain injury can cut brain damage in half by helping brain cells keep their energy and avoid toxic chemical overload.
In a small group of seriously brain-injured kids and teens, giving them high doses of creatine seemed to help them wake up faster, remember things better, and behave more normally after injury.
Taking creatine supplements might help you think a little better and stay in a better mood when you're tired from not sleeping enough, especially if you're also doing light exercise—based on two small studies.
Taking creatine supplements can slightly boost the amount of creatine in your brain—by about 3 to 10%—but not as much as it boosts your muscles, probably because your brain is harder to reach with supplements and makes some creatine on its own.
People who got the new shingles shot didn’t live longer or have fewer other health problems than those who got the old one — so the dementia benefit isn’t just because they were healthier overall.
Getting the shingles shot might help keep your memory sharper for a little while—like pushing back dementia by a year or two—but it doesn’t stop it for good.
People who got the shingles shot seem to have a lower chance of getting dementia than people who got the flu shot or the Tdap shot — and this isn’t just because healthier people tend to get more vaccines.
A newer shingles shot works better than the old one at preventing shingles, and people who get the newer shot also seem less likely to get dementia—maybe because both problems are linked in some way inside the body.
The new shingles shot seems to help women avoid dementia longer than men — women got about 22% more time without a diagnosis, while men got about 13% more, and this difference wasn’t just by chance.
Taking omega-3 supplements every day for six months doesn’t seem to help people with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s think better, no matter what their blood homocysteine levels were to begin with.
Older adults who got the newer shingles shot lived about 164 more days without getting dementia over six years than those who got the older shingles shot—suggesting the newer shot might help protect the brain a bit better.
If you have Alzheimer’s and your blood has high levels of a substance called homocysteine, taking omega-3 fish oil supplements might help your memory and thinking skills a bit—but only if you look at certain tests, not all of them.
For people with early-stage Alzheimer’s, taking a specific fish oil supplement for 6 months might help them think a little better and function more normally—but only if their blood has low levels of a chemical called homocysteine before they start.
This book about Russia's drug industry says it got its inside info from talking to dozens of people who worked in the business back in the 1990s — and no one else has used those same interviews before.