[Project Credo Monthly Broadcast] July/August 2026

If you're new here, say hello and reach out to the team at [email protected]. We've been hard at work improving all aspects of the site so we put our best foot forward for anyone new to the site.

Community

A few new boards have been created to help us fill out the types of conversations we want to read about.

• Podcasts We Love | Project Credo covers a ton of interesting factoids and discussions across all the podcasts we've been listening to

• Impact of Social Media on Society | Project Credo will be a vital place we have conversations about how social media has been reshaping our lives, important for us to catalog research to keep our users safe and happy

• Influencer Science-Check | Project Credo gives us a community to do one of the biggest asks we get, fact check all the crazy things we hear on the internet!

• Parenting | Project Credo is a space we know people have a lot of questions, somewhere we want to bolster more information for parents looking for good science based content

Features and Bug Fixes

• Reference summaries before you post! Now before you hit post, you can read the summaries and metadata for the papers and links you add.

• Model benchmarks. To help ensure we're providing the best quality across Project Credo, we're running benchmarking across different models to test the accuracy of our summary feature. More of this to come for all the AI powered features on the site.

What we're working on

• Board agents: We want to enable more automation to make boards even more valuable. We're testing soon!

• Live Chat: We've heard across different groups that they mostly get their research information from peer chat groups. We're looking into enabling this functionality to bring over more power users.

Shingles Vaccine Protects Against Dementia

A flagship study came out in Nature in 2025 that solidified a long observed finding, that the Shingles (Herpes Zoster) vaccine can protect against dementia.

Previous studies were classic observational cohort designs which can fail to show causation or account for confounding factors. This 2021 study found "a combined analysis estimated a 31% lower risk" and indicated the need for stronger research.

In comes the 2025 Nature study, this time a natural experiment arose:

To provide causal as opposed to correlational evidence, we take advantage of the fact that, in Wales, eligibility for the zoster vaccine was determined on the basis of an individual’s exact date of birth. Those born before 2 September 1933 were ineligible and remained ineligible for life, whereas those born on or after 2 September 1933 were eligible for at least 1 year to receive the vaccine.

The finding:

We show that receiving the zoster vaccine reduced the probability of a new dementia diagnosis over a follow-up period of 7 years by 3.5 percentage points (95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.6–7.1, P = 0.019), corresponding to a 20.0% (95% CI = 6.5–33.4) relative reduction. This protective effect was stronger among women than men.

Interestingly, the newer recombinant vaccines seem to be ever more effective than the live-attenuated vaccines (the ones tested in the Nature experiment), though more studies are in the pipeline to deepen this finding.

The mechanism for why the protective effect happens is still TBD, though some hypothesize that detrimental impact of getting Shingles on the brain may cause long term damage that leads to dementia.

Either way, the impacts seem clear, the Shingles vaccine seems like a must-get in a full range defense against dementia.

Social Media and Child Safety

It was recently reported that Meta was ordered to pay $567M in additional fines for an abatement program in New Mexico due to its failure to warn the public about its platforms' risks to children. The fines were in addition to $375M ordered against Meta for a similar earlier claim in New Mexico. This marks the largest child safety ruling against Meta and will have reverberations for social media companies in the future.

The court case ruled Meta acted as a public nuisance infringing on the health and safety of the public "knowingly" and "without lawful authority". The state built its case around these 10 components:

1. New Mexico is experiencing a youth mental health crisis.

2. Problematic social media use is a cause of the youth mental health crisis.

3. Meta’s platforms are widely used in New Mexico.

4. Meta implemented platform features that were designed to maximize engagement and time spent on its platforms, for all users and for teenage users in particular.

5. Meta’s engagement features encourage and facilitate problematic interactions between adults and children.

6. Harm caused by Meta’s products affects a significant number of people in New Mexico.

7. Although many social media platforms compete for the attention of New Mexico’s youth, Meta’s platforms rely on methods for optimizing engagement that disproportionately impact education and interpersonal relationships

8. Meta and its platforms provide a valuable service in New Mexico despite these harms, and it is not the only social media company impacting youth.

9. Meta knowingly designed its platforms to maximize engagement, including in ways that are harmful to teenagers, and does not adequately disclose the risks of harm to its users.

10. Meta’s conduct is a cause of and significantly contributes to the youth mental health crisis in New Mexico.

Deep dive into evidence of harm towards youth

The court case itself didn't provide any specific papers as far as I can tell, only references to HHS advisories, reports, and internal Meta research. The evidence was built on expert testimony, which the court found strong enough to state:

Even without the evidence and testimony that certain percentages of youth ... would not have those conditions but for social media use, the highly probable result of Meta's engagement optimization practices ... is that such practices would increase anxiety, depression, and sleep deprivation among teenagers.

The experts on both sides provided counter testimony on their view of the connection between social media and harm to youth. Dr. Jean Twenge testified that

most longitudinal studies confirm that adolescents’ social media use leads to depression ... and that experimental studies show that people who eliminate or reduce social media are less lonely and depressed, which further confirms the causal path between social media and teen mental health harms.

While the evidence wasn't listed, a 2022 study Social Media and Mental Health backs this testimony showing that the arrival of Facebook on college campuses lead to worse student mental health. The HHS advisory on Social Media and Youth Mental Health also listed this 2019 JAMA Psychiatry study.

Meta on the other hand pointed to a 2024 consensus report on Social Media and Adolescent Health which pointed to other factors causing overall mental health decline and a complex role social media plays in society.

My take

There does seem to a slew of evidence pointing to correlation between social media and declining mental health with teens and adolescents. Additionally, the ability for online predators to connect to underage minors is also blatant. Arturo Bejar, who worked as Meta’s Senior Director of Engineering in charge of the Protect and Care team stated:

the product is very good at connecting people with interests, and if your interest is little girls, it will be really good at connecting you with little girls.

But I agree with the primary conclusion from the Social Media and Adolescent Health report. There are benefits that are associated with social media including connection to friends and combating isolation, civic engagement, learning, and self expression.
The issue arises when we try to simplify the debate to net benefit or harm. Instead, its better to consider the piecemeal impacts and combat clear harms while retaining clear benefits. I don't think its helpful to see social media as a pure harm, just the same I wouldn't categorize screens and screentime as a pure harm.

[Project Credo Monthly Broadcast] June 2026

If you're new here, say hello and reach out to the team at [email protected]. We spent the last month reviewing how to stretch our organic reach across different platforms to integrate more users onto the site. We saw mild pickup of new users, but we're definitely struggling to pull in new consistent users.

Community

We are trying a few new board styles and trying to see how well smaller posts do. This is so new users feel less activation energy to create their first post. We are also reviewing new post styles that can be both engaging but also smaller action cost for users.

Features and Bug Fixes

• Paper detection: We've built identified more fluid ways to identify paper links so we can automate URL to paper lookups where possible.

• Improved references: We've just pushed a new layout for references to make absorbing the high density information more easily.

What we're working on

• Board bots: We are testing the ability for board owners and contributors to utilize board bots to find papers and auto generate summaries giving board owners super powers in better paper understanding.

• More layout improvements: We want to streamline our UI/UX a bit more to make all interactions easier.

GLP-1s, Dementia, Alzheimer's, and Type 3 Diabetes

The suite of new GLP-1 agonists (GLP-1RAs) have shown a cascade of fascinating impacts, but the one that I have my eye on is this new idea that GLP-1 drugs may be preventative of brain aging diseases like Alzheimer's and Dementia.

GLP-1 is a naturally produced hormone in the human gut that regulates appetite and insulin secretion. The GLP-1 agonists drugs that have made a splash the last few years like semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy), liraglutide (Victoza/Saxenda), and dulaglutide (Trulicity), were originally developed for type 2 diabetes management.

But a 2026 Systematic Review found:

This study contributes to the clinical understanding of GLP-1 RAs and their effect on cognitive dysfunction. Findings from this study indicate GLP-1 RAs as potential therapeutics targeting cognitive function and neurocognitive disorders in persons living with T2DM.

This finding was echoed by a 2025 review which stated:

preclinical evidence has consistently shown the neuroprotective effects of GLP-1RAs, including reduced amyloid and tau pathology, improved synaptic function and enhanced neuronal survival

And a 2025 meta-analysis found that:

(GLP-1RAs) were associated with a statistically significant reduction in dementia

This finding was paired with a null result for the alternative cardio-protective glucose lowering agent sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitors (SGLT2is), suggesting the the GLP-1RAs are either using a unique pathway or are simply more effective. Contradictorily, a read world study released on the same day found benefits for both GLP-1RAs and SGLT2is; the meta-analysis may have been underpowered to detect SGLTis' benefits.

The link between Alzheimer's or Dementia and Diabetes is well known, with diabetes cited as a major risk factor. This is important to remember when contextualizing these findings as the population for the studies were almost all individuals with Type 2 Diabetes. That means we don't know if these neuroprotective effects can be generalized to people without T2D.

Interestingly as pointed out by the 2025 review, Alzheimer's and Dementia may be thought of as Type 3 Diabetes, as these diseases may be symptoms of underlying insulin dysregulation in the brain and damaged blood vessels. The tie between dementia and cardiovascular health echoes what we've heard in the past, that what's good for the heart is good for the brain. GLP-1 is naturally boosted by exercise and may point to the same correlation we see with exercise and brain health.

Excited to see how these findings pan out over the next few years, GLP-1RAs still require long term trials and reviews against the general population. The results for major trial targeting adults with early onset Alzheimer's released in March 2026 failed to show efficacy of oral semaglutide in reducing Alzheimer's. Note this study was funded by Novo Nordisk.

Oral semaglutide was not efficacious in slowing clinical progression in participants with early Alzheimer's disease.

This could be due to several reasons like the drug being more preventative than capable of reversing symptoms, weaker impacts of older generation GLP-1RAs or effects not being generalized outside of TD2 patients. But this is the strongest clinical result yet and points to the need for more trials before comprehensively marking success.

The REAL Dementia Risk Factors Doctors Won't Tell You

Dr. Gil Carvalho of Nutrition Made Simple reviews the latest research on preventing and combatting dementia risk that he says have changed the way he thinks about the inevitability of dementia. The 2024 Lancet Commission report as mentioned by other users, provides 14 modifiable lifestyle factors that could prevent 45% of dementia cases, including 2 new factors that were added due to the recent weight of evidence: Vision Loss and Plaque buildup as measured by High LDL Cholesterol.

In addition to the Lancet report, he also reviews a two year Finnish landmark trial that gave high risk dementia individuals a targeted program to prevent cognitive decline. The intervention included a healthy diet, both cardio and weight lifting exercise, cognitive training exercises, regimented social activity, and measuring and managing health parameters through a nurse and doctor. The the intervention group saw cognitive performance improved by 25% versus the control group including 83% improvement in executive function and 150% increase in processing speed.

Even better, a follow on study found the effects lasted 7 years after the intervention if the lifestyle was maintained. And the groups that benefitted the most had the greatest genetic risk!

The biggest takeaway to understand was given by one of the overseeing researchers:

What is good for your heart is also good for your brain

-Professor Miia Kivipelto

This means that associated risks for heart disease and other CVD diseases are also risks for dementia. That means getting things like your blood pressure, blood sugar, and APOB checked and managed have the double impact of preventing dementia.

Dr Carvalho summarizes his personal list of things he does personally as his own checklist to combat dementia.

1. Check blood pressure often - consistently high blood pressure overtime damages your blood vessels

2. Regular Exercise - incorporate cardio and weight lifting regularly, 3 to 5 times a week

3. Healthy Diet - especially monitoring diabetes and blood sugar risks

4. Blood Work - get a lipid panel, measuring your LDL, APOB, and LP(A) which are signs of plaque buildup

5. Hearing and Vision Check - even if you're young, hearing loss and vision loss have high association with dementia risk either due to additional cognitive strain or social isolation

6. Cognitive Activity - keeping the mind healthy with continued learning and puzzles

7. Social Activity - Social isolation adds to your personal stress which may triggers cortisol that damages your brain long term. Dr. Carvolho says that this is one of the beneficial and underutilized factors for preventing dementia.

[Project Credo Monthly Broadcast] May 2026

Welcome new visitors to Project Credo. We're making a push to connect more people to our content. If you're new here, say hello and reach out to the team at [email protected]. The last two months, we've finalized our MVP and have been doing initial broad targeting adoption to get more eye balls to our content. We look forward to getting the great material the community is producing to more eyeballs.

Community

We're regularly posting content on instagram and facebook pages to share what we're working on and drive users to our site. Our goal is to get to 500 active users on our site by end of this half.

Features and Bug Fixes

• Advanced Permissions: You can now select specific roles for contributors on your board, making easier to customize boards to fit your needs.

• Post Relevancy: Each post has an auto generated relevancy summary to help our community quickly understand the value of the footnotes to the author's post.

• Paper pages: Each paper has a canonical page now, making papers easier to share.

• Paper detection: We've built out connectors to Arxiv, pubmed, and DOIs to make paper detection streamlined in posts.

What we're working on

• Non-paper URL summaries: We want all footnotes to have near parity with paper footnotes, so users can quickly obtain the key facts for any footnote.

• Board bots: We are testing the ability for board owners and contributors to utilize board bots to find papers and auto generate summaries giving board owners super powers in better paper understanding.

[Physionic] Resistant Starch is OP?

www.youtube.comI watched this great video from Physionic on the scientific literature on resistant starch and its impact on visceral fat and liver health. Very compelling evidence via placebo controlled RCTs on resistant starch's ability to treat Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) or fka NAFLD and weight loss plus 6 more studies as provided by Physionic. He states that compared to placebo, the studies show 300% relative or 20% absolute improvement in reducing visceral fat.

Visceral fat, the fat that surrounds internal organs, can put people at higher risk for several diseases like cardiovascular disease and specifically contributes to fatty liver disease, even when compared to other fat types.

The most common type of resistant starch (RS3) is formed when the starch in foods like rice, pasta, and potatoes is cooked and then cooled allowing the starch to crystallize in a process called retrogradation. The starch becomes undigestible for humans but becomes fuel for our gut microbiome. Raw starch (RS2) found in potato starch, green bananas, or high-amylose maize acts similarly and is most commonly used in supplements.

The theoretical biological mechanism for this improvement is via the reduction of a harmful bacteria that is crowded out by other bacteria that thrive on resistant starch. Even more interesting, Physionic found that 70% are hyper-responders to resistant starch.

Resistant starch, because indigestible, packs significantly less caloric and carbohydrate punch than its non-resistant version. But these studies show that it goes beyond harm reduction. Resistant starch can have positive effects especially with supplementation to reach minimum effective doses.

A great read on advances in colorectal cancer detection. I mentioned in a comment that the global rate of CRC is dramatically increased for young adults for seemingly unknown reasons. It's important to get screened earlier now and for the technology to become more accessible.