When the wellness influencer Rhonda Patrick showed up on my X feed touting the virtues of creatine, I felt very tired.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This was no coincidence. I am the mother of two girls, ages 4 years and 6 months. The baby was teething and waking up wailing every two hours each night. The preschooler was being a preschooler, asking more questions in a day than I wanted to answer in a year. And suddenly here was this video, summarizing the results of a study that claimed that creatine, a supplement that athletes often use to sustain muscle energy during intense exercise, reverses the effects of maternity-related exhaustion. \u201cOne high dose (25\u201330 grams) of creatine rapidly reverses (and even surpasses) the cognitive deficits caused by severe sleep deprivation,\u201d Patrick tweeted<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The supplement is not snake oil, she said. It\u2019s backed by science: \u201cIn controlled studies, people given a high-dose creatine supplement after 21 hours of sleep deprivation not only recovered their cognitive abilities, they performed better than their baseline (fully rested) levels.\u201d Scores of moms replied to Daniel\u2019s tweet, saying that creatine is the mother\u2019s wonder drug.\u00a0<\/p>\n Like any mother who is even marginally online, I\u2019m no stranger to supplement trends marketed to women. Since my first prenatal appointment in 2021, I\u2019ve progressed from eating simple gummy vitamins to gulping down a rotating cast of iron, vitamins, Omega-3 fish oils, magnesium, probiotics, and more kinds of protein powder than I care to count. Many of them gave me unenviable gastrointestinal results and thus sit in the cabinet, gathering dust, to this day. A few seem to help, or at least not hurt, and I dutifully swallow them every evening before dinner.<\/p>\n But that gulp gets more and more reluctant with each new wellness fad. My cabinet of unused supplements is just my personal portrait of the massive online marketplace for female biohacking, the idea that with the right trick\u2014the right pill or powder or morning ritual or workout routine\u2014women can unlock perfect health.\u00a0<\/p>\n Creatine is just the latest in a long line of consumable biohacking products. It\u2019s popping up everywhere that probiotics were just months ago\u2014powders, gummies, bars, sodas, and mocktails<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Like many supplements, the anecdotal accounts are out ahead of research on their real benefits, and Twitter and health blogs are out ahead of the FDA\u2019s official recommendations. The posts on the subject due their due diligence and list<\/a> the caveats: \u201cThere are no high-quality human studies showing that creatine is unsafe for breastfeeding mothers or infants, but there is also a lack of direct research confirming safety during lactation.\u201d And then they launch into the benefits: \u201cneuroprotective effects\u201d that could \u201cbenefit moms experiencing \u2018mom brain\u2019 or postpartum fatigue,\u201d \u201cmuscle repair and regeneration\u201d to \u201caid tissue healing,\u201d and so on. It\u2019s up to you, the individual, to draw your own conclusions.<\/p>\n And when you, the individual, are an exhausted mother, the conclusion tends to look like this: \u201cBasically a dream for anyone who is pregnant, let alone a pregnant mom with young children,\u201d one mother responded<\/a> to Patrick\u2019s tweet. When another X user asked whether the mother used creatine during breastfeeding, she replied, \u201cI honestly cannot remember if I did because I feel like I lost all will to stay on top of supplements despite it being recommended, but I plan to do so this time!\u201d Both the amnesia and the good intentions are revealing: The fog that we derisively call \u201cmom brain\u201d is indeed induced by simple exhaustion. But it\u2019s likely worsened by the ever-growing proliferation of supposed solutions on offer, and the expectation that each individual keeps up with the latest fads as the price of good health.<\/p>\n In its endorsement of an ever-growing range of wellness boosters, female supplementation may not seem like a revolutionary trend, and it isn\u2019t. The gym bros have been mixing every imaginable kind of muscle-building compound into their workout recovery drinks for decades. Female influencers such as Gwyneth Paltrow have biohacks for the female wellness market with brands like Goop. The pitch goes like this: Biohacking, if you do it right, leads to gains that you couldn\u2019t have by eating normal food. You\u2019ll be stronger, or live longer, or emerge from a day of chasing small children around pulsing with energy.<\/p>\n Rather than a revolution, female biohacking is the extension of a fitness mindset to a sex whose health choices come with added responsibility: Take the right pill, find the right trick, and not only will you be healthier, but your children will be too, thanks to your increased energy, better fertility, richer breastmilk quality, and on and on. If you don\u2019t, or if, heaven forbid, you pick the wrong supplement, well, the logic isn\u2019t complicated. Your failure to find the right supplement regime is now not just a personal failure but bad parenting too.<\/p>\n Health-maxxing can just be another form of overwork\u2014and one fueled just as much by guilt as a desire for health or strength. So it\u2019s easy to see, following this line of thinking (read: marketing), why women get hooked on supplements. And it\u2019s just as easy to see why they get burned out. There\u2019s always fresh research or a new product selling the potential for not only personal wellness but bountiful motherhood. It would be foolish\u2014and irresponsible\u2014not to at least check it out, right?<\/p>\n As the female market for supplements grows, the lifestyle prescribed for its consumers expands from eating into action. The rise of the weighted vest describes the other side of biohacking: exercise, and the attendant products that serve as amulets not just to increase present wellness now but to stave off ill health later. Long used for military and police training, weighted vests have recently taken off among women wanting to get a better calorie burn out of their daily walks. The influencer Dr. Mary Claire Haver was one of the first to promote<\/a> them for older women, pointing to the importance of strength training in preventing bone loss during menopause. (Though as one doctor told the New York Times<\/a>, \u201cIt\u2019s not a trade for traditional full-body resistance training.\u201d)<\/p>\n The market for weighted vests reached an estimated $205 million last year, which is expected<\/a> to grow to $350 million within the next decade. Sixteen percent of millennial and Gen Z women in a recent survey said<\/a> they\u2019ve worn one, compared to 6 percent of Gen X women and 2 percent of boomers. Last month, a post<\/a> on Goop\u2019s website titled \u201cI Wore a Weighted Vest Every Day for a Month\u2014Here\u2019s What Happened\u201d finally explained to me why so many women were walking around Northern Virginia in what I had thought were bulletproof vests. It wasn\u2019t a political statement about the state of law and order in and around our nation\u2019s capital: They were protecting themselves against a more nebulous danger by buying into the latest biohacking trend.<\/p>\n So when Genevieve Howland\u2014aka Mama Natural, the creator of a popular online birth and parenting course for moms on the crunchier side\u2014started touting weighted vests in her newsletter, I wasn\u2019t as surprised as I should have been. This is the woman who taught me how to give birth at home without medication: no epidural, no drugs, maybe not even Tylenol. I clicked on a newsletter on exercise earlier this month to find that \u201cstrength training is a MUST for moms.\u201d So far, so natural. But then Howland added this advice: \u201cThink weighted vests, babywearing while walking, or traditional weight lifting.\u201d And later, she repeated: \u201cAdd resistance by walking with a weighted vest or babywearing as your little one grows.\u201d<\/p>\n At least one of these recommendations strikes me as not very natural. While Howland is right that strength is essential for mothering, often the mothering is the strength training. Here\u2019s a sample workout: Wrestle baby into fresh diaper, wrestle baby into car seat, wrestle preschooler into car seat, heft car seat onto stroller frame, cart kids and groceries around store, heft groceries into car, hold baby while unloading groceries with one arm, make lunch with one arm, clean up from lunch\u2014also with one arm. All of that amounts to about an hour in the life of a typical mom who, circa 2025, now apparently needs a weighted vest to attain sufficient strength for her current and future health. Give me a break.<\/p>\n