Pieter Cohen

speaker

130 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 9 Jan

Pieter Cohen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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Freakonomics Radio · 658. This Is Your Brain on Supplements · 9 Jan 2026 podcast

And usually when you have just a few small studies, you can publish the ones that look promising.

But with creatine, even the very small studies are not suggestive enough.

Okay.

What about choline?

Choline makes a little more sense because it's a precursor of acetylcholine.

And that's something that gets low in Alzheimer's disease.

So it makes some sense that let's put something that can get converted in the body into something that you might be deficient in when you have memory loss.

But with choline, I know of no studies that have demonstrated at all that giving choline will improve memory or function.

Ginkgo biloba has been carefully investigated because it was probably the leading botanical supplement that was thought to potentially have cognitive benefits or prevent memory loss.

So a lot of NIH funds has been spent on trying to understand, you know, can ginkgo biloba preserve or improve memory?

And the studies are negative, basically.

There's no difference between ginkgo biloba and placebo.

The nice thing for a supplement manufacturer, though, is that you can take a study like that that definitively has shown that ginkgo biloba does not prevent memory loss.

and completely ignore it when it comes to your label.

So then you can just put Ginkgo biloba into your supplement and then sell it as memory enhancement.

This is how crazy the current advertising marketing environment is.

There's just a disconnect between how supplements can be promoted

and the proven benefits.

And that's because the law basically gives manufacturers a pathway to communicate just about any health benefit to consumers without having to demonstrate anything that their product actually works or even have studied their product in humans.

What about omega-3s?

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