Newsletter #032: Exploring the Link Between Creatine and Glucose Tolerance, Probiotics and Bone Density 💊 🦴
Hello Friends!
Welcome to the latest edition of the humanOS newsletter! We hope everyone has had a productive and healthy week, as winter sets in across the Northern hemisphere. 🍵❄️
This week, we took a little break from the blog due to a bunch of exciting projects that are keeping us busy (and that we are super hyped to unveil in the near future 👀). Here, we’ll share with you some of the cool studies and media that we reviewed this week, and that found their way onto social media channels.
This Week’s Research Highlights
💊 Creatine supplementation improves glucose tolerance in people with type 2 diabetes.
Researchers randomly assigned 25 subjects with diabetes to receive either creatine (5 g per day) or a placebo. All subjects were simultaneously enrolled in an exercise program. After 12 weeks, the creatine group showed significantly reduced HbA1c from baseline (dropping from 7.4 to 6.4), compared to the placebo (7.5 to 7.6). The creatine group also exhibited decreased glycemia during a meal tolerance test, as well as increased GLUT-4 translocation (meaning sugar was being shuttled to skeletal muscle, rather than hanging around in circulation).
🏋️♂️ Exercising on a regular basis may keep your body decades younger.
Researchers examined maximum oxygen consumption and aspects of skeletal muscle in lifelong exercisers in their seventies, and compared them to health non-exercising people of the same age. They found that septuagenarians who had been exercising for decades exhibited heart and lung capacities and skeletal muscle health comparable to healthy people in their early forties.
🫀 Small doses of resistance exercise might make a big difference in heart health.
Researchers in Shanghai analyzed 12591 subjects who received clinical examinations between 1987 and 2006. In this population, the researchers found that participation in resistance exercise for less than an hour per week was associated with a 40-70% reduced risk for total cardiovascular events. These benefits were independent of aerobic activity.
🦴 A widely used probiotic increases bone density in healthy mice.
Normally, as in humans, removal of the ovaries results in bone loss in female mice. However, when researchers treated ovariectomized mice with the probiotic Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG, bone formation increased. This appears to be mediated by elevations in butyrate, which in turn activated bone-enhancing immune cells. Supplementation failed to increase bone mass in mice raised in a germ-free environment, further supporting that the probiotic works indirectly through the metabolic activity of the gut microbiota.
Podcasts We Loved This Week
- Chris Smith: eLife episode 50: Inside Your Microbiome. Via eLife.
- Valter Longo: Fasting For Longevity. Via the Rich Roll Podcast.
The humanOS Bookshelf
The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease by Daniel Lieberman.
Ginny says: We naturally tend to think of our species as exceptional, but humans really are quite unique among primates and within the animal kingdom. How and why did we evolve to become what we are now? And what implications does this have for us in the digital age? Okay, this is probably a familiar theme to most of you, but this book approaches these questions in a different (and more rigorous) way than any other popular science book I’ve seen.
The book starts by highlighting some of the major physical adaptations that occurred over our evolution as a species (bipedalism, enlarged brain and body mass, modified teeth) as well as some of the crucial cultural changes that also shaped us physically (hunting, migration, agriculture, etc). Most importantly, he demonstrates how this odd blend of genetic adaptations is - at least in some respects - mismatched with our modern environment, resulting in a wide array of diseases and dysfunction. Many of these conditions are fairly obvious, like obesity or type 2 diabetes. But he also illuminates some evolutionary mismatches that are more subtle and that you might not appreciate as being mismatches, like myopia, allergies, arthritis, and flat feet. Dr. Lieberman’s proposed solution is apt to be somewhat controversial (and frankly unrealistic here in the US), but his assessment of the larger problem that all of us face is fundamentally sound, and might make you view some aspects of your own daily life in a whole