В западной Сиднее растет интерес к проверенным добавкам: от железа до креатина

I have been writing about health and community in Western Sydney for about eight years, mostly for local publications and mostly with the background assumption that the wellness industry as it appears in the national media (Bondi, pilates studios, matcha shops, the sunrise crowd on the Bondi-to-Bronte seawall) has very little to do with how people out this way actually take care of themselves. That assumption has stopped being quite so accurate over the last eighteen months, and I noticed it properly for the first time at a Saturday morning parkrun in Emu Plains at the start of April this year, standing in the muddy grass at the pre-run huddle while an obstetrics nurse named Karen from Glenmore Park told me about the supplement she had started taking after her ferritin came back low in February. Karen is sixty-two years old, has lived in Penrith for thirty-four years, and had until recently been the kind of person who politely declined vitamins from her sister-in-law at Christmas because she thought they were mostly nonsense. She still thinks most of them are mostly nonsense, and she wanted me to make that clear. What had changed for her was the blood test her GP had ordered when she came in tired and vaguely miserable in late January and could not name a good reason for it. When the results came back with her ferritin at eleven, her GP told her that yes, she needed iron, and then quietly mentioned that if she was still doing the strength class at the community centre in Kingswood on Tuesday nights, creatine was probably worth thinking about too, which was the first time anyone had said that word to her in a medical context. “I did not tell her I had already been reading about it,” Karen told me, laughing, while we waited for the run director to blow the whistle. “But I felt very validated.” Coffee at the kiosk The Emu Plains parkrun on a Saturday morning is roughly two hundred people, sometimes more, and it fills up along the river path in a slow trickle from about ten to seven onwards. Most of the runners are locals, more of them are older than the parkrun demographic five years ago would have suggested, and I have been paying attention to the conversations in the after-run coffee queue at the small kiosk on the Nepean River path because those conversations are the closest thing I get to a monthly poll of Western Sydney’s actual health habits. Karen finished the run at just under thirty-two minutes, which she was quietly annoyed about because her personal best from the previous month had been thirty minutes and forty seconds. We stood at the kiosk queue afterwards and she introduced me to a physiotherapist named Rob who works out of a small practice in Kingswood, and Rob is not, in his own words, “the sort of physio who gets fussed about supplements”, but he had started paying attention to the creatine research about eighteen months earlier because he had a growing cohort of women in their fifties and sixties coming through the practice with bone density concerns and he had been looking for anything with a body of research he could actually stand behind. “I had opinions on the research for a while,” he told me, holding his coffee against the cold, “but I did not have opinions from personal experience, which felt like a gap I should probably close.” He started taking three grams of creatine a day in October last year, mainly because his teenage son had asked him whether he thought it worked and Rob had realised he could not answer honestly. When I asked him which brands he tends to point patients toward when they want to compare options without bouncing across six websites, he mentioned the Australian retailer EliteSupps as the catalogue he had settled on for older female patients over the last year or so, mainly because the range has moved well past the matte-black-tub era and treats older women as an actual demographic rather than an afterthought. He does not get a kickback. He just prefers not to send patients to websites that are going to try to upsell them into a subscription for something they do not need. A conversation in Penrith Plaza The following Tuesday I stopped in to see a pharmacist named Ellie who runs a chemist in Penrith Plaza. Ellie is thirty-eight, moved to Penrith from Parramatta four years ago because the house prices made sense and the community was, as she puts it, “more actual”, and she has been running her supplement aisle with an unusual degree of care ever since. She keeps a small clipboard behind the counter with notes on what her regular customers ask about, and she showed it to me while she was restocking magnesium glycinate on a shelf that used to hold hair vitamins. “I have been redoing this aisle for about a year and a half now,” she said, tapping her clipboard. “The questions have completely changed. It used to be gummies for kids and immune-boost stuff for winter. Now it is women in their forties asking me about creatine and magnesium and whether their GP will actually run a proper iron panel or just haemoglobin.” The three shifts she has watched most closely, she tells me, are the number of women asking about creatine (up roughly three times in twelve months by her clipboard count), the number of people asking specifically for glycinate as the magnesium form (up from almost none two years ago) and the number of women in their forties and fifties starting to ask about protein intake without any prompting from her. That last one, Ellie thinks, is the most useful shift. People asking about protein in the same tone they used to reserve for iron is not something she expected to see happen in Penrith in her career, and she thinks it says more about how information is finally reaching Western Sydney than it does about protein specifically. What I have been doing myself Since I am writing about this, I should probably admit what I take. I take vitamin D through winter, tested annually and dosed accordingly rather than guessed at. I take magnesium glycinate at night because I hit a stretch of poor sleep in early autumn last year and, on the advice of a friend I walk with in the Blue Mountains, tried 300 mg an hour before bed and slept slightly better within a fortnight, which may or may not have been the magnesium and I still cannot prove either way. I started taking three grams of creatine a day in March after the same set of conversations that ended up producing this article, and I have noticed that my recovery from Sunday long runs is measurably shorter, though I cannot separate that cleanly from the fact that I am also sleeping more consistently and have added a strength session on Wednesday evenings at a small gym in Emu Plains. For anyone in Western Sydney who wants a reliable, non-commercial reference point for what actually has evidence behind it and what is being oversold, I usually send them to Healthdirect Australia, which is the government-funded consumer health information service that most GPs quietly rate highly and which has decent short summaries of most of the supplements ordinary people are asking about. It is boring on purpose. That is what makes it useful. The friend who suggested the magnesium is a woman I have been walking with in the Blue Mountains twice a month for about six years called Suzanne, who works as a librarian in Springwood and has become the kind of person people ask about vitamins even though she does not particularly want the role. Her explanation for why the shift is happening in Western Sydney at all is that the podcast content that used to only reach the inner-city wellness crowd is now reaching everyone out here as well, and the questions are following the podcasts. I think she is largely right. I also think the local GPs are quietly ready for it, which was not true five years ago. Karen’s GP suggesting creatine on the spot is not a story I would have written in 2020. Back to Emu Plains The next parkrun after the one where I met Karen and Rob was on the Saturday before Anzac Day, and Karen was there again with her sister-in-law visiting from Katoomba, who had come along mainly to spectate but ended up walking the course in a windproof jacket and taking herself very seriously about it. She has since started coming to the run regularly. She is sixty-eight. She has told Karen she is thinking about the creatine question as well, though she wants to wait until after her next set of blood tests in July before deciding, which is exactly the approach the whole thing seems to have taken out here: quiet, cautious, based on numbers rather than marketing. That is roughly what has been changing in Western Sydney, I think. Not a wellness revolution. Not a matcha-and-mat-Pilates aesthetic import from the coast. Just people paying more attention to the boring foundations, asking better questions of their GPs and quietly taking a few supplements that used to be filed under “for someone else”. The parkrun at Emu Plains has become one of the few places I can watch it happening in real time, which is partly why I keep going even on the mornings I would rather be asleep, and partly because Karen has told me she will notice if I miss two in a row. Western Sydney is not becoming Bondi. That was never going to happen, and honestly, it does not need to. It has just become the kind of place where a sixty-two-year-old obstetrics nurse can talk about her ferritin and her creatine on a muddy grass patch in Emu Plains at seven in the morning, and nobody at the run thinks it is strange. Contributed by West Media on behalf of EliteSupps Partner Content The above article is partner content, and any information presented should be independently verified before making any decisions as a result of the content. This article does not constitute advice of any kind, nor does it represent the opinions of the website publisher.