There is an element sitting in your brain right now, and nobody has established how much you are supposed to have. It may shape how you think, how you act, and whether your mind holds up as you age. Last year a Harvard lab placed it near the center of Alzheimer's, arguing that running short of it may be one of the first things that goes wrong in the diease. It is already sold as the next longevity compound, the thing that finally protects the aging brain, and the people selling it have a real paper behind them. This investigation takes that case apart study by study to find out how much of it holds. The question sounds simple. The answer, as always, is not.

00:00 – Intro: Lithium and the Brain
01:57 – Lithium's Origin as a Bipolar Drug
04:55 – The Brain Growth Claim
10:10 – Where the Evidence Breaks Down
12:12 – The Harvard Brain Study
15:36 – Should You Take Lithium?
18:04 – New Trial Starting This Fall

Creatine is one of the most-studied supplements in the world, taken by millions of people who have been told for years it is about as safe as anything on the shelf. Then, within weeks of each other, two peer-reviewed studies reached opposite conclusions about what it does to cancer. One found that creatine helped cancer spread faster through the body. The other found that creatine helped the body fight cancer off. Same molecule, serious labs, and results that cannot both be simple. This investigation starts with the alarming study, published only days ago, and takes it apart: what it actually measured, what it measured only in mice, and what it never measured in a human at all. Then it does what the headlines will not, setting that study against the wider body of research to answer the only question that matters for the person taking it. Is creatine feeding cancer, or is something more ordinary going on?

0:00 – Introduction

1:04 – The New Study on Creatine and Cancer

3:22 – Other Studies Findings

6:38 – The Real Explanation

8:41 – A Study on Cancer Patients

9:54 – What's Still Unknown

There are tests now that claim to measure how old you really are. Not the number on your birth certificate, but your biological age, the idea being that two people born on the same day can be aging at different speeds, and that a blood or saliva sample can tell them apart. It starts with a discovery from fifteen years ago, that chemical marks on your DNA shift as you get older. Since then, the clocks built on it have moved fast, from reading your age, to forecasting how long you have left, to scoring each organ, to scoring individual cell types from a single vial of blood. So what does one of these numbers actually measure, how good have they become, and would one handed to your doctor change anything about what happens to you?

0:00 – Can You Really Measure Your Age?
1:04 – The Cheek Swab That Started It
4:00 – Reading Death, Not Birthdays
5:45 – The Hidden Flaw
7:51 – Your Organs Age Differently
8:36 – 11 Ages, One Blood Draw
10:06 – 40 Clocks, One Vial
11:36 – The Missing Proof
14:15 – The Verdict

*Citations can be found on my website