A helping hand

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. Combining GLP-1 drugs could minimize muscle loss, exploring the creative hangover, and what we can learn from a far-flying birdie 💪

Let’s get into it!

Millions of people are taking GLP-1 drugs like semaglutide for weight loss, but a study published by Eli Lilly this week suggests the combination of semaglutide and bimagrumab could be even more effective for both losing weight and minimizing muscle loss.

Bimagrumab is a synthetic antibody that inhibits activin receptor type-2B, a protein that limits muscle growth. For some older adults taking GLP-1 drugs, there concern that rapid weight loss can lead the body to draw on muscle for energy, ultimately reducing muscle mass.

To explore the connection, researchers at Eli Lilly conducted an experiment with four groups: one taking neither, one taking only semaglutide, one taking just bimagrumab, and one taking both.

After 48 weeks, the group taking both medications had lost 20% of their body weight, compared to 15% for those just on semaglutide.

The combination group lost 45.7% more fat specifically, compared to the 27.8% lost by the semaglutide-only group. They also lost just 2.9% of their lean body mass compared to the 7.4% in the semaglutide-only group.

While there are proven methods to lose weight while retaining and even building muscle, the combination of semaglutide and bimagrumab seems to be another option. Participants lost more weight, lost more fat, and retained more lean body mass.

A study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology found artists typically feel negative emotions the morning after their most creatively productive days.

The term for the experience is “creative hangover,” and its existence was identified in part through the analysis of 13 days of journal entries for each of the 355 adult artists recruited for the study.

The participants were divided into a group of 202 creative practitioners and 153 “comparison participants,” each of whom engaged in creative activities at a more typical frequency.

The researchers measured the psychological wellbeing of participants using what’s called the PERMA model: Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment. They found both groups experienced relatively similar and positive levels of all the markers on days when they achieved creative success and productivity.

The days after, however, professional artists tended to feel drained and melancholy after expending more intense creative fuel to produce their work.

“Creativity is usually framed as a straightforward path to feeling better,” study co-lead author Katie Smith said in a statement. “What surprised us is that for creative practitioners, there can be a next-day emotional cost, even when the same-day effects are positive.”

One of the hottest trending Canadian cultural exports in the world today is poutine, and in response to its international fame, a group representing Quebec’s dairy industry is seeking a special designation for the region in which those delectable cheese curds are produced.

Similar to the status assigned to France’s Bordeaux region, the protected geographical indication would assign a special cultural recognition to the region where “Quebec poutine cheese” is made.

This type of designation is awarded when a product "possesses a particular quality, a reputation or another characteristic that is attributable to its geographical origin," said Marjolaine Mondon, a project coordinator at the Conseil des appellations réservées et des termes valorisants, which handles the process of awarding these designations.

Charles Langlois, the head of the Conseil des Industriels laitiers du Québec (the group seeking the region’s protected status) says the application comes at a time when Canada’s national dish is exploding in popularity.

He says the designation will help ensure the dish can only officially be served internationally if it’s made with the proper ingredients—most notably, Quebec poutine cheese curds.

If you’re ever feeling burned out and convinced you just can’t go anymore, remember there’s almost always more left in the tank than you think. Just ask the bar-tailed godwit that was just four months old when it flew 8,425 miles without stopping once.

The juvenile bird—simply named B6—was one of several fitted with small solar-powered tracking devices and metal band identifiers ahead of the long journey from Nome, Alaska to Tasmania, Australia.

Bar-tailed godwits typically weigh no more than a pound and are migratory wading birds that can miraculously shrink the size of their internal organs in order to store more fat as energy reserves for their trans-Pacific flights.

The incredible expedition of B6 was documented to better understand the flight habits of birds coming out of Alaska, which serves as home to 37 migratory species.

What the researchers couldn’t possibly have anticipated was that B6 would fly for 11 days straight without taking a single breather.

"We used to think they stopped en route," Sean Dooley of BirdLife said at the time. However, even though there are plenty of places for a pitstop, they "are generally not good feeding places for these birds.”

In a world filled with common cuckoos, we could sure use a few more bar-tailed godwits.

How odd

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