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Today’s Health Upgrade

• Will creatine make you lose your hair?

• Why tea hits different than coffee

• Foods are super: the $2 heart-saver

• Adam’s Corner: What are you training for?

Use It Or Lose It
Will Creatine Make You Go Bald?

The verdict: LOSE IT

This fear has survived two decades on a single thread. 

In 2009, a study of 20 college-aged rugby players found their DHT, the hormone tied to male pattern baldness, rose after a week of creatine loading. That's the whole origin of the myth. 

From there, the game of telephone took over, and people believed that creatine was tied to hair loss. 

But to set things straight, three things are rarely mentioned about the study that caused the fear: the study never measured a single hair, no one actually went bald, and the DHT levels stayed inside the normal range throughout. Not to mention, the loading dose in the study was 25 grams a day, which is 2.5 to 5 times the dose most people take. 

Maybe even more problematic is that when researchers ran additional studies, the hormone bump was never reproduced. And broader reviews of creatine and hormones have found no consistent change in DHT or testosterone across trials.

Then a 12-week randomized controlled trial tested the fear head-on. 

Researchers gave 45 resistance-trained men 5 grams of creatine or a placebo daily and, for the first time, examined hair follicles directly alongside blood markers for testosterone and DHT. 

The people taking creatine saw no changes to their hair. No difference in DHT, the DHT-to-testosterone ratio, or hair density, thickness, or follicle health.

If there’s any criticism, the study only ran 12 weeks in healthy young men and didn't screen for a genetic predisposition to baldness, the group most likely to worry. 

At the same time, creatine has been studied for more than three decades without anything other than one study — which didn’t even test baldness — to substantiate the belief that creatine will make you lose your hair. 

If you go by the research, there is no reason to believe that creatine will cause hair loss or damage your hair. 

As we caution all the time, if you take creatine, please make sure you purchase a product that is third-party certified and tests every batch. There is a legitimate issue with low-quality creatine or with brands posting misleading labels, where the listed amount of creatine is not what’s in the product. Certification through NSF Certified for Sport or Informed Sport provides proof that what’s on the label is in the product.

Together With Pique 
Why Tea Feels Different From Coffee (And It's Not in Your Head)

If you’ve ever had a cup of tea, it might have felt like it gave you a steadier kind of alertness than coffee. A focus that shows up without the wired, heart-racing edge. It's easy to write that off as a fancy ritual or wishful thinking. But there’s science to support the experience. 

That smooth, awake-but-not-jittery feeling is a real two-part effect: caffeine does the waking up, and L-theanine keeps the edge off.

Caffeine is the engine. It blocks adenosine, the molecule that piles up across your waking hours and tells your brain to wind down. Clear that signal and the drowsiness lifts. That part is pure caffeine, identical whether it comes from tea, coffee, or a tablet.

What makes tea different is the company the caffeine keeps. Tea pairs it with L-theanine, an amino acid that doesn’t show up in high quantities in most other foods. 

On its own, L-theanine is mild. Alongside caffeine, it appears to soften the rough edges and nudge the brain toward a relaxed-but-attentive state. 

In randomized trials, people given the two together did better at tasks like switching focus and tuning out distractions than those given a placebo, and a handful of studies found the pairing held attention better than caffeine alone. The caffeine still does the heavy lifting. L-theanine is what seems to make that lift feel smooth.

A 2025 review analyzed roughly 50 trials and found the attention benefit was real, arriving within an hour or two of a single dose. But like most things, the magic is in the dose. 

Most trials used amounts larger than a single cup delivers. One cup contains about 25 mg of theanine; studies found the benefits kick in at about 3 times that amount. So you're looking at roughly two or three cups of tea.

Those extra cups bring more than caffeine, too. Tea is rich in polyphenols, including the catechin EGCG in green tea, compounds studied for heart and metabolic health far beyond focus. 

None of this asks you to treat tea as magic. It's a pleasant, practical way to get your caffeine in good company. Pour a cup or two before the work that needs your attention, and notice how that calmer focus lands for you.

Before you start brewing, here’s one thing worth considering: Those extra cups only pay off if the compounds actually survive the brew.

When you steep a traditional bag or loose leaf, heat and oxidation degrade a large share of the active compounds — the L-theanine, the catechins, the polyphenols — before they ever reach your cup. Most of what made the leaves valuable doesn't make it in.

That's why we started drinking Pique. Their patented Cold Brew Crystallization process steeps organic tea leaves at low heat for 8 to 10 hours, long enough to pull the full spectrum of catechins without cooking them off. 

The result preserves up to 12x the nutrient content of conventionally brewed tea, with no bags, no steeping, no prep beyond adding water.

The research describes a benefit that shows up around two or three cups a day, and the easiest way to actually reach that is tea you can make in ten seconds. Every batch is also triple-toxin-screened for pesticides, heavy metals, and toxic mold and sourced from certified organic family farms. If you're going to build a daily tea habit, it's worth making it count.

As an APC reader, you get 20% off for life plus a free starter kit on subscriptions over $100. No code needed. Your lifetime discount applies automatically at checkout. Just visit piquelife.com/pumpclub to activate it.

Pour a cup or two before the work that needs your attention. Good caffeine, good company, nothing wasted.

Foods Are Super
The Best Longevity Deal in the Grocery Store

This feature (Foods Are Super) started because of the ridiculousness of “superfoods.”

Listen, we love foods that have health benefits. But the problem is that we reached a point in nutrition where rare, expensive foods became the holy grail of healthy eating, despite not being practical for most people (and with little research to support the dramatic claims). 

In reality, many affordable, easily accessible foods provide everything your body needs.

Case in point: one of the most reliable tools available sits in the bean aisle for about two dollars.

People who eat the most fiber are up to 30% less likely to die early or develop heart disease, stroke, or type 2 diabetes than the people who eat the least.

That number comes from a massive Lancet analysis that pooled 185 studies and 58 clinical trials, and was further validated last year in an umbrella review covering 17 million people.

When research this big keeps pointing the same way, you pay attention. It's association, not ironclad proof. But in nutrition, data this strong and consistent is about as close to a sure thing as you get.

And here’s why we’re really talking about it. And no, it’s not just because we dedicated years of R&D to create an original, research-backed fiber product. We made that product because of the problem we noticed.

Almost nobody gets enough fiber. The data suggest that 95 percent of people are deficient, despite the fact that fiber is as close to a “magic pill” nutrient that you’ll find.

The average American eats about 16 grams per day, while the target is 28 to 38 grams, with benefits extending beyond those levels. So roughly 9 in 10 of us are leaving these health benefits on the table every day.

Soluble fiber, the gel-forming kind in oats and beans, thickens in your gut and grabs bile acids on the way out. Your liver pulls cholesterol from your blood to make more, and LDL drops. 

The FDA backs it: about 3 grams of beta-glucan a day, roughly one solid bowl of oatmeal, is tied to up to a 10% dip in LDL.

And you don't need to buy anything expensive, make any dramatic changes, or buy a supplement.

Every extra 8 grams a day moved the needle in that research, and 8 grams is nothing.

You could hit that with a cup of beans. Or a pear and a handful of almonds.

Pick the foods you actually like and rotate them. Beans, lentils, oats, barley, berries, avocado, chia. Even popcorn can be a good form of fiber (just don’t let it swim in butter). These foods could be all you need.

If you won’t eat those foods, please don’t ignore your fiber needs. And that’s where one serving of Fiber+ will take care of 6 of those grams, while giving you three sources of fiber (including soluble and insoluble fiber) that will improve gut health, in addition to all of the other protective benefits. But again, you don’t need a supplement. You just need fiber.

A pro tip, especially for those of you who never eat fiber: add in new fiber sources slowly, maybe 6-8 grams at a time over a couple of weeks, or your gut might protest a bit (it will settle, but we don’t want that experience to deter you from making fiber a regular habit). Add more fiber, and you’ll see real changes from one of the original, affordable superfoods.

Adam’s Corner
What Are You Training For?

My phone greeted me at 5 am last week with a skull and crossbones.

Not a metaphor. An actual little icon, sitting supported by a “readiness score” buried deep in the red. It’s the tracker on my wrist’s polite way of telling me that, by its measure, I was somewhere between badly broken and recently deceased.

RIP, me.

There was a reason. I’d been traveling. My sleep had come in pieces, and I’d broken every sleep rule I keep for myself (never less than 6 hours, same bedtime, no food within 2 hours of sleep). I’d also eaten things I normally don’t.  And there was an Old Fashioned. Or, two. Who is counting?

There was also a dessert I’m still, with no shame whatsoever, thinking about. On top of it, my work schedule was non-stop, so training wasn’t what it normally was. 

Despite my recovery score suggesting my demise, I got up, went downstairs, drank some water, and started reading research for this newsletter like I do every morning.

And then it hit me. 

I felt good.

I waited to feel the way the wearable had promised I would. Wrecked. Depleted. A step behind my own life.

But it didn’t come.

The reading said “skull and crossbones.” But I was ready and sharp. Like a man who’d actually lived for a few days instead of managing his life like a spreadsheet.

And it’s a good thing, too. I was able to work for approximately 27 minutes before my 10-year-old son came bouncing downstairs at 5:27 am. I greeted him the same way I do every morning. “I’m happy to see you, Bode.” 

About 15 minutes later, his younger brother followed. “Happy to see you, Asher.”

In less than 30 minutes, my 1-year-old daughter was calling, “dadadadadada.”

What’s the point? Later that day, I saw a post on social media that made me think of my morning.

Bryan Johnson, the man who has spent a fortune (he openly says he invests millions every year) trying to never die, was describing how travel had increased his biological age by 13 years. His strength was sapped. He felt like a different person, and questioned the “cost” of travel.

He traveled abroad. So it was different. Harder on the body. And yet, it was very similar. Travel. Disruption. A body knocked off its schedule. 

I stopped scrolling, but didn’t stop thinking about it. Because Johnson’s post highlighted something I’ve become worried about in the age of optimization. 

Is Optimization Creating Better Health Or Less Resilience?

Let me be fair, and this might surprise you.

I think Bryan Johnson does some good for the wellness industry. I have referred to him as the vampire because he is so set on not dying that he’ll try nearly anything to stay on this side of the dirt. 

But I like people who ask questions. I like people who push on what we assume about the body and refuse the standard answer. We need more of them, not fewer. Do I agree with him on many things? No. Do I see value in some of his work? Definitely. 

And when it comes to what works, he has provided very practical, accurate advice.

So this isn’t a takedown. It’s closer to concern.

Bryan has a big following, and I’m worried about the message he’s sharing.

When I look at the program, the sealed routine, the day measured to the minute, a world arranged so nothing unplanned can reach him, I can’t shake the feeling that all that armor is quietly doing the opposite of what he wants. 

That a life built to never break has become a life that can’t survive a bump.

All that effort. All that money. To build the human version of the boy in the bubble.

Bryan’s life is his. No one should tell him how to live. But he tells others how to live. So I’m worried about the cost to them.

A lot of people listen to his advice, and the lesson they could extract is that health means control; that the goal is a life so optimized nothing can disturb it. And that a great trip might not be worth the “cost” of temporary (potentially meaningful) biological aging.

That lesson, however good the intentions behind it, will most likely make you more fragile.

And that led me to a question I wanted to ask all of you. 

It’s a question I couldn’t stop thinking about as I functioned better than normal on a day where I had no business feeling good at all.

The question for you is the thing the wearables can’t track. 

It’s a question often overlooked or forgotten by all the non-athletes (like myself) whose game day doesn’t come with a crowd, attention, or fanfare. 

What are you actually training for?

The Real Benefit Of The Weight You Lift

We toss around “survival of the fittest” like it crowns the strongest, the leanest, the most controlled. It doesn’t. It never did.

The fittest isn’t the one who built a flawless environment and never left it. 

The fittest is the one who can get dropped into any environment — any season, any setback, any disruption — and find a way not only to survive it, but to keep moving.

The point of optimization was never to control the world around you. It’s to make sure you don’t have to because you can’t.

That’s what the work is for. Not the photo. Not the score.

The hard reps are there so the next hard thing lands a little easier. 

The weight you lift is the reason your body is slower to break when life shoves it. The dessert doesn’t crush you because you’ve built something underneath it that knows what to do. 

You can’t dodge every illness, but you can show up to that fight better armed. The chaotic week stays chaotic. You just stop going under.

And here’s what took me years to see: it was never only about the body.

The thing that makes you harder to break in the gym makes you harder to break everywhere else.

The discomfort you choose is rehearsal for the discomfort you don’t. 

The hard thing coming for you might be work. It might be your family. It might be illness, or grief, or the small voice at 2 a.m. that tells you you’re not enough.

You can’t schedule those. You can’t optimize them away. But you can become the kind of person who stays on their feet when they arrive, and gets up faster when they don’t.

Because getting knocked down was never the part you got to vote on.

You will get knocked down. What you do next is the only part that was ever yours.

Where Living Happens

If you're lucky enough, or rich enough, to bend the world to your schedule, then good for you. I mean that with no disdain. I love when people can choose how to live, and I'd wish that freedom on everyone, as long as the choice doesn't harden into selfishness and disconnection.

But most of us don't get that deal. We live inside real lives, with real interruptions, and the job was never to erase them. It was to get strong enough that we don't have to.

You can't control it, so you learn to live in it. To enjoy it. To build the kind of grit that lets you thrive in the rooms you didn't get to design.

Because none of us, in the end, gets measured by our sleep scores. No one tallies the perfect mornings or the optimized minutes. Those habits matter, and I'm not throwing them out. They're how you earn the strength to take the hit. But they were never the destination. They were the training for the moment you'd need it most.

And here's the part that gets lost in all the talk about fitness, nutrition, and health.

It was never only about surviving the hard times. It's about making the most of your life. It's about living.

The living is in the dessert you can still taste with your eyes closed. The late night your friends are still texting about years later. The trip that wrecked you and was worth every wrecked hour.

I don't know about you, but I don't want a life so curated and polished around readiness and recovery that I miss the moments that put those scores to the test in the first place.

Life happens in the margins. Erase them in the name of control, and you don't lose the mess; you lose the moments that gave the whole thing its texture.

So build the habits. Hone the routine. Take care of your body. Please. You only get one. But do it for the right reason. 

Not so you can control your life. So you can live it.

The bad night was never my story. It was the exception. 

Most nights I sleep. Most days I train, eat well, and do the boring, unglamorous work. Not to control what's coming, but so that when it comes, and it always comes, I can take it and come back.

As I type these words, I’m on a layover in Frankfurt on my way to Budapest and then Austria for a Pump Club event. It’s 2 am in my brain, but 10 am locally. Wifi was down on the plane, so I have 2 hours before the newsletter needs to go out. I could complain or worry about the effects of the red eye, or I could be thankful for the journey I’m on.

Bryan Johnson built a movement around two words: Don't Die. He has arranged a life so airtight that a morning like mine could never reach him. And then a few days of travel reached him anyway, and wrecked him.

Some people think the win is always feeling good. The green check mark. The morning that never lies to you. I'd argue it's something else.

The win is being able to bounce back.

Real life doesn't care about your perfect scores. There's no prize for them.

Some mornings we wake up feeling like we died in the night. But like the living dead, we rise again.

Getting up and getting on is part of the prize. And the fact that we get to do it again — the good days, the bad days, and the ones that knock us flat — that's all the reward.

So the next time my phone tells me that I can’t, I'll remind myself I can.

And maybe that's the immortality worth wanting. Not a life that never ends. Not a body nothing can touch.

Just the strength to keep rising, and the appetite to keep enjoying the things we love most, even on the mornings we should be dead. -AB

-Adam Bornstein is the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Arnold’s Pump Club

The Positive Corner of The Internet
About Arnold’s Pump Club Editorial Standards

We do things a bit differently here, starting with transparency.

1. The Content: All APC emails are researched, written, and fact-checked by the APC editors (see bottom of the email), with written contributions from Arnold (noted with “Arnold’s Corner”). Links take you to original studies (not second-hand sources).

2. Does AI play a role? Not for the primary content, but it is used in two ways. The main items are original content written by the APC team. The summaries at the end are AI-generated based on the human-written content above. We also use an AI tool to review our interpretations of the research and ensure scientific accuracy. We don’t assume AI is right, but we use technology to hold ourselves accountable.

3. Yes, we have partners (all clearly noted by “Together With”). Why? Because it allows us to keep the APC emails free. We first test products, and then reach out to potential partners who offer ways to help you improve every day. The bar is set high, and to date, we have turned down millions in ad deals. (Example: we will not partner with any non-certified supplements or those without evidence in human trials). If we won’t buy the product, we won’t recommend it to you. And if there’s no evidence it works, then there’s no place for it here.

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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger​

Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell