What Is Creatine?

Dr. Richard Kreider • 2025-11-04

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Dylan Carnahan:Welcome to the Simple Questions Podcast. This is your host, Dylan Carnahan. The question for this episode is, what is creatine? You will learn in this episode, the real health benefits of creatine, the most common myths, and the best form of creatine to take for results. Our guest, co-founded the International Society of Sports Nutrition, has been cited over 29,000 times and secured over $25 million in research funding and led major programs at Texas A&M University. I introduce to you Dr. Richard Kreider. I'm around nine years old when I overhear my parents having a discussion about my older brother. At that time, I think, I want to say he was in wrestling, maybe even football in high school, and the topic of creatine was a discussion amongst my parents about should this be something he takes. And at the time, I just remember kind of the emotions of being like, what is this? This is curious, like he's taking something. What does that mean? And so I'm curious, Dr. Kreider, how did you first hear of creatine?

Dr. Richard Kreider:Well, we saw some of the literature in the early 1990s that came out. And I had a colleague who started experimental and applied sciences. I didn't know him at the time, but they were the first group in the United States to put creatine monohydrate out as a dietary supplement. And so they contacted me. I was going to be speaking at an American Dietetic Association meeting in Atlanta. He contacted me, hey, can we have dinner? I want to talk about maybe funding a study on creatine that seems to have some promise. So that's how it started. It was in 1993 or so. And we did our first study when I moved to University of Memphis. I also did one at Old Dominion when I was there. And looking at how creatine affects performance. And so the initial studies showed that creatine increases muscle creatine and fossil creatine content. That's a primary energy source for explosive high intensity exercise. So the initial thought was that creatine would be something for performance of high intensity type athletes, power athletes, as we call them. And we had no idea how much health impact that creatine can have. So that's how we started. We did a number of studies since early 90s and continue doing our creatine research since.

Dylan Carnahan:Something I just want to call out. I mentioned before we started me being a layman. So I'm going to call this out for all the listeners because I know this is something that's come up which is creatine versus creatine. I want to make sure that we're on the right as far as the phrasing. So creatine.

Dr. Richard Kreider:Yeah, I've heard it both ways. It's creatine. Sometimes we just say creatine. So it's just used both ways. It's like tomato and tomato type of thing.

Dylan Carnahan:Okay. You know what? I appreciate you just even addressing that. I just want to make sure because there's some people that are going to be hearing that we're going to be talking about and how they're going to say. So something I want to drill down on that is Dr. Kreider, it is one thing to be in a profession. It is another thing to gain exposure to something in the early 90s and dedicate a large portion of your life. That's a lot different of a commitment. So can you talk about that? What made you commit so much time to this? I know you briefly hit on the whole power athlete being-

Dr. Richard Kreider:Sure. I played football at college at Liberty University and was interested in strength conditioning and nutrition. And it was just kind of developing as a profession, the strength conditioning and coaches. And there's a lot of interest in how nutrition may improve training adaptations. And so I had a passion for weightlifting and strength conditioning. And I knew that nutrition is a major player. As I was an athlete, but also when I got out, I got real interested in trying to find ways to improve performance and optimize training adaptations. So that was our initial forte. And so through the 80s, late 80s, early 90s, we were doing studies on things we call ergogenic aids, nutritional ergogenic aids, things that improve performance. And my thought was, if we can make athletes stronger, faster, more powerful, we'll improve performance. And so we had done studies in endurance athletes. And when creatine came around, it was something that was very interesting as a potential supplement for power athletes. I mean, if you go back to that point in time, the only thing we really recommended for athletes were sports drinks, and maybe carbohydrate loading. And we told athletes they didn't need protein, they didn't need amino acids, they didn't need any of this stuff, they just needed a good diet. And the athletes knew that that wasn't quite enough. And so, that kind of spawned my interest. And so, as I started becoming a professor and started doing research, I was always looking for new novel things that might have an impact, initially on training and performance, and then as we realized it has applications to health, now we're doing a lot of health and safety and aging studies. And so, it's kind of blossomed from that point in time, but I've always had an interest in performance enhancement, nutrition and exercise to optimize health, performance, disease and help manage disease and rehabilitation. And so, that was kind of my training and exercise physiology to see how I can use nutrition and training to optimize performance and health. And so, that's responded.

Dylan Carnahan:And looking at your personal journey, again, you alluded to kind of this blossoming, right? You have this transition. And again, this topic in, you know, 1991, you may not have, you know, someone hit you up for a podcast regarding that, right? So things have changed. There's a level of popularity. There's a level of public education there. As someone that has been a part of that journey, you know, as an individual, I guess, what would you say to younger people or people in different professions, you know, kind of staying with something that's kind of blossomed this large? I guess, do you have any personal advice regarding that?

Dr. Richard Kreider:Ian, when I talk to folks that are coming up in the field, I have to say, find your passion. And if you find your passion, it's not work. It's when you make your profession, your passion, it then automatically gives you the motivation to try to make an impact on your field, on society, or whatever you're working with. And so, that's why I usually say, find your passion. For me, it was combining nutrition and strength training, try to optimize health and performance that became my passion, became my research, became and became my focus of my professional career as a scholar and a researcher. But as far as changing them, when I first started, we didn't have computers, really. We had old first computer, you can enter data and do analysis on with the old Apple 2E or whatever it was. And I remember going back and forth with a TRS-80, 64K memory, big old computer, walking back and forth to the office. That was my laptop. I just brought it back and forth to home. And he had a boot up with a floppy. So we've come a long way, both from the technology aspect, but then how that's impacted on science has really been amazing. And so part of the journey is applying the latest technology, the latest ability to assess really fine things going on in the body, to then understand how things are working. It's really been an amazing career at this point in time.

Dylan Carnahan:No, I appreciate you acknowledging that and talking through that. And I think our listeners can abstract that and apply that in many different ways outside of just this domain. So I just wanted to learn a little bit more about you and how you got to where you were. Well, we talked about your career. I'm going to hit you with one of the very interesting question here, which is, where is Creighton found?

Dr. Richard Kreider:So people need to know this because they have a lot of misconceptions and lots of myths and they'll read stuff that's on the website, on the Internet that's not really clear. So Creighton is a naturally occurring compound. It's a nitrogenous compounds, not really amino acids, kind of like amino acid though that people are familiar with. And it's important because it binds with something called phospho, or phosphates, and it serves when they're bonded together, it's Creighton phosphate. It's a high-energy bond that the body uses to break down for energy to fuel muscle metabolism, sprinting performance, etc. And so Creighton is naturally found usually in meats and fish. The body has a normal amount of Creighton it stores based on your diet. Your body also can synthesize a little bit of Creighton per day in case your diet's a little deficient. And so the whole idea of Creighton supplementation is to increase the amount of Creighton in the diet so that more phospho-Creighton stored in the muscle, I have more energy for explosive exercise, recovery, and we're now finding that that extra source of energy is critical in a lot of the disease states when oxygen is not available and become kind of ischemic situation like in stroke and chronic concussions and TBI, all these types of things where there's a limit. And so what it does is it increases energy. And that energy is vital for every cell throughout the body.

Dylan Carnahan:No, that was a very concise and well-worded explanation. Some of the things that come to come to mind is, you know, again, misconceptions, right? That's why I think education is so important. You know, there are a lot of different mediums in which creatine can be consumed. Can you talk about, are there different types of creatine? What do these consumption methods, what impact do they have?

Dr. Richard Kreider:Sure. So the best source of creatine is called creatine monohydrate. That's what 95% of all the studies have been done on. And the purest source comes from Germany. And most of the studies have used that source. It's called Creapure. And basically, that's the purest source of creatine made. It's from a plant that's basically only dedicated to creatine development. So there's no potential for transfer of different compounds and things that can be in it and to get tainted. So that's the best source. Now, because it's very popular and it works, a lot of companies have been trying to find ways to optimize, come up with a different type of creatine, put it in fluids, surround it versus other things. And so you see a lot of advertisements about new forms of creatine. And reality is very few studies have documented that they have been done on them. Or if they have, none of them has showed any greater benefit than creatine monohydrate. And creatine monohydrate is pretty inexpensive. We're talking two, three cents a gram. And so it's hard to improve upon that. But the different forms out there that have been touted as better or comparable, things like creatine citrate, creatine in fluids, like in a liquid version, creatine with buffering that add to a little buffer to it. And so a lot of it creates a magnesium. So you look at all these, we did a very large paper a few years ago on looking at different forms. And what are they supposed to do? Does it really increase blood and muscle creatine content to a greater degree than creatine monohydrate? Does it have for any advantage? And when you look at all those, most of them are more expensive and haven't been shown to be as effective. And so creatine monohydrate is still the gold standard out there for creatine. You don't need anything additional. Consuming carbs and some protein is not bad. It's okay. It can maybe enhance a little bit. But the bottom line is you need good quality creatine in your diet. You get that from meat and fish or supplementing with a creatine monohydrate.

Dylan Carnahan:As a researcher, when we talk about the consumerism aspect and the products that are available, I think that's a very excellent good advice to hear. I guess, what is your perspective on that? You say, hey, I've done a lot of research on this specific thing. I could tell you Germany, you're throwing all that, and then it gets to the public and it's, hey, take this, can you elaborate on that?

Dr. Richard Kreider:It's a little frustrating to see claims being made about things that haven't been studied yet, when there is things that have been studied very extensively. On the other hand, we see ourselves in our labs as a myth buster type of thing. Something comes out, we want to see if there's anything to it, do the dosages and types of things that are purported as something to get improved performance, training and health from a supple and or nutritional standpoint, does it really match the claims? If it does, wonderful. If it's safe and effective, great, like create the monadrid, but you find a lot of things that we study don't quite pan out as much. That doesn't mean everything doesn't work. We found a number of things that are helpful in lots of different applications now. But a lot of times, the more they tap the superiority over another, it's usually a clue that they're trying to sell something rather than really get something out there that's effective for people. I was looking at people and said, show me the data. Remember the old movie, show me the money, show me the data. If I see the data and there's good studies to support those claims, then it's something to look at and then it's something that maybe could be thought about being recommended. But when you look at a lot of these newer things, they just haven't been studied. They theorize, they borrow the science from creatine monohydrate, for example, and make lots of claims. But then have they done the study to show that their form causes more storage of creatine in the muscle than creatine monohydrate? No. Have they shown that their forms are better for performance and training than creatine monohydrate? No. Then when they have done the studies, you find that creatine monohydrate works better, as good or better than those more expensive forms. For the public, it's like, why pay for more when you can get the good, what you know works a lot cheaper?

Dylan Carnahan:Yeah. No, that's a very good point. I want to touch on something very briefly, which is this statement regarding these two buckets, which is the nutritional aspect of getting creatine from consuming meat, and then supplemental aspect. Can you delve in to, I think the distinction is pretty clear, but I guess what would make someone take this as a supplement and maybe talk a little bit about onboarding and kind of what all goes into that?

Dr. Richard Kreider:There's about a gram to two grams per pound of red meat. Fish might be a little bit more, maybe two to three grams per pound. You need to consume about 10 to 20 grams per day of creatine from your diet or from supplement to get the type of loading effect that we talk about. It means you have to have 5, 10 pounds of meat per day, depending on the type of meats and fish. It's not doable, it's too expensive. You look at meat prices and fish prices today, pretty expensive source of creatine. Plus it has lots of calories, lots of fat, things you don't need. Creatine monohydrate is a very inexpensive alternative to supplement your diet. You should always have high quality proteins in your diet. You're going to get one, maybe two grams on a normal diet per day. You typically need minimally about two to four grams of creatine per day, just to provide a base level of creatine for function. What you don't get in your diet, your body can actually synthesize a little bit. But you think of this as like a gas tank. On a normal diet that doesn't have any creatine supplementation, that is a diet that includes fish and meat, your creatine gas tank is about 70 percent full. If you're a vegetarian and don't have a lot of meat and fish in your diet, it can be down to 40 to 50 percent. You really rely basically on what the body can produce, which is minimal. Creatine loading and supplementation is a more cost-effective way to increase the creatine stores in the muscle and the brain and other tissues that store creatine. You're only talking 20, 30 cents a day at the most. It's a very inexpensive way versus going and consuming 6, 8, 10 pounds of meat per day. Now, back in the day, believe it or not, in the old Olympic days, there are reports of athletes consuming 10 kilos of meat before competition. And they didn't know it, but they were basically creatine loading, but getting a lot of calories, they're bulking up and getting calories. When I was playing football, there was no creatine. So we had two steaks a day type of thing. Man, my parents, man, it cost them a lot of money to be a college football player. I mean, I ate and ate and ate. Now, it's like, man, I wish we had creatine back then. I could have just took a teaspoon and that don't need two pounds of steak. So there's a cost-effectiveness aspect to it and efficiency. Not every athlete can make fish and meat throughout the day, and they can make it and eat it, consume it and things like that. It's a little more difficult to cook and all that type of thing. So it's just an easy, more effective way to get creatine in the diet.

Dylan Carnahan:They're very helpful to, again, kind of looking at the challenges that others had to face in the past and kind of see how things have gone now. It's very interesting in bringing on kind of the amount consumed and talking about what could be within your nutrition based upon kind of your diet. Again, we hear people talk about loading and kind of this onboard phase. Could you speak on what that is and what significance that has?

Dr. Richard Kreider:Yeah, so kind of like carboloading for endurance athletes before a marathon, you eat extra carbohydrate in your diet to load the muscle up. Creatine loading is the same concept. And so if you take about 20 grams per day of creatine monohydrate, that's four doses a day of five grams a teaspoon, and you do that for five to seven days, you will go from about 70% gas tankful, now to get all the way up to 100%. So you store and you maximize the muscle creatine. We know it now takes a little longer for the brain to kind of get those benefits. You have to kind of keep those higher doses going longer. We can talk about that later. But the point is that the quickest way to increase your muscle creatine content is to have about 20 grams per day for about five to seven days. Then, to maintain muscle level, you typically need about.1 grams per kg, the bigger folks a little more. And so, if you're a 100-kilo athlete, that's 10 grams a day. If you're a 50-kilo athlete, 110 pounds or so, then you need about five grams per day. We used to think all you need is two to three grams a day to maintain. Well, that's okay if you're not really training heavily. But our studies in athletes showed that the larger the athlete and the more training they need, they need to be in that higher range of 5 to 10 grams per day. Okay, so that's the base. Now, for the brain is a little bit different. It takes longer for creatine to get in the brain to get these brain effects. You actually can increase energy in your brain and improve cognitive function. We think it takes about 10 grams per day continually in middle-aged and older folks to have this kind of cognitive benefit. There's even studies where if you're sleep deprived, like a military person or student cramming, and you load creatine the day before, you have better cognitive function the next day. You don't have as much deleterious effects of the sleep deprivation. So there's all these looking at the brain. And my point is, the muscle we know loads pretty quick and can maintain. We're learning that other tissues like the brain may need a little bit more longer to get these benefits. So the loading aspect, I still recommend the load because it's the quickest way to increase your muscle concentrations. That's the quickest way to notice training and muscle performance effects. But also, higher dose is actually better for the brain over time.

Dylan Carnahan:In making this distinction between talking about the muscle versus the brain, and this also changes the demographic of the utility of this information. You referenced your athletic career. I also had an athletic career. We're not on the field right now. So, I want to pivot a little bit and just generalize this, which is, what benefits does creatine have?

Dr. Richard Kreider:As we age, it's probably more important to have creatine in your diet than when you're younger. Even though we know now that kids that have not enough creatine diet, as they're growing, don't grow as fast, they're shorter, have more body fat, less muscle mass. So it's important throughout the lifespan, actually. But as you get older, what happens? We get less active, we lose muscle mass, we gain body fat, and then we start having memory issues as we're getting older. So there's a shift in sports nutrition to active nutrition, because people are trying to stay fit, active throughout their lifespan. And we know that there's application. So as I'm getting older, creatine supplementation can do things like help me keep my muscle mass, my strength, my endurance, prevent falls, which often happens as you're aging, give me more stamina to withstand doing more physical activity. There's also some health benefits we can talk about that may be helping control blood glucose and helping control beginning of diabetes with the training. And there's all these effects on general health markers and menstruation and postmenopausal and bone, all these things as we age become a problem in men and women. So a lot of the research now is focused not just in the athlete, the younger athlete, but really in that middle age and older individual as they're 45, 55, 65, 75, when they notice their muscle strength goes down, they notice their muscle mass goes down, and they're noticed they're starting to forget things. And so this may be a way to actually prevent that normal decline or at least delay it a little bit. We're actually doing studies now looking at how creatine in older individuals helps them maintain muscle and lose more body fat while on a diet and training and how it affects cognitive function. We're just presenting data about to come out that shows that, yes, if you take creatine in your older and you go on a diet, you don't lose muscle mass, you actually gain muscle mass and strength. And then you also have these beneficial effects on cognition that in older folks is really important. And so we're looking at that and then we're looking at adding the precursor of creatine, which is something called guanidinoacetic acid. Big term, but GAA is its summary. That gets in the brain better. So we're actually just presenting data showing that if you combine creatine and GAA, you get muscle effects from creatine, you get brain effects from GAA, and even better cognitive benefits. And so there's a lot of research now taking creatine from the athlete in training and younger populations, now applying it to middle-age and older populations and getting these overall effects on strength, muscle, cognition, and health benefits.

Dylan Carnahan:You know, I think you've highlighted this with the research as well as kind of like the general benefits about this really transition, if you will, from, you know, you mentioned earlier, power athletes to kind of just athletes in general, to, you know, which is kind of my exposure, right? To now, you know, it's blossomed, as you said earlier, you know, in those demographics, you know, as an athlete, taking a supplement makes, you know, that may be something that you're well accustomed to. Maybe the general population, not as much. I guess to someone that is kind of newly hearing about this and newly think about supplementing their nutrition and they hear you say those things, I guess, what would you say directly to that person?

Dr. Richard Kreider:If they've never started or used creatine in their older individual, they should start. We recommend taking at least 5 to 10 grams per day, just for general health benefits, as well as for the cognitive benefits and strength benefits to accompany. We actually just did a study. We're coming out now, just looking at the data now. We took people that didn't do any exercise training, gave them creatine, and compared those to people taking creatine while training. These were 45 to 65 year old individuals. Beginning, you start noticing the declines in the 50s and things like that. Creatine alone, without any training, had some cognitive benefits. They also had more muscle endurance than without any training. Then we had the training in that, then you were able to increase more muscle mass, you were able to work more strength, and you also get these cognitive benefits. Creatine in that middle age is probably more important. What I tell folks, it's more important as you age to take creatine, especially when you're getting 65, 75, 85, 90. Because this can help maintain strength, prevent falls, and older folks, if an older person falls and fractures their hip, their prognosis is very poor, like 18 months later, they're usually not around. If I can prevent the fall and keep strength and keep muscle mass in older individuals, I improve their quality of life. There's lots of applications now. We have a website called creatineforhealth.com, and it goes through all the potential medical applications where creatine is being studied now in heart patients, in diabetes, and people with mitochondrial dystrophies that will metabolize oxygen as effectively, and the list goes on and on and on. In women, for example, women during menstruation seems to help them have more normal menstrual cycle. But now what's happening is we've had all these studies on looking at the effects. Now they're looking at the NHANES database, and people have had higher creatine diets throughout the lifespan. And guess what we're finding out? Kids who don't have as much creatine in their diet, they'll grow as quickly, have more body fat, less muscle mass. Women as they start menstrual cycle, have less problems if they have higher creatine in their diet. As you age, people who have creatine in their diet, higher creatine in their diet and they're older, they do in cognitive function, do better on cognitive function studies than people who have not had much creatine in their diet throughout the lifespan. And there's even a data showing now that mortality is improved if you have a diet higher in creatine, like one to two grams a day, that's it. And so it doesn't take a lot to get these kind of general health benefits. But we now know that adding more on top of that, you get this better performance, physical strength, cognitive function, and some health benefits overall. There's even some studies in NHANES that as you age, you have kind of a neurofilament that kind of accumulates and causes brain dysfunction as we age. That was lower if people had a hard creatine diet. So there's a lot of health benefits of creatine, as well as performance. And so the word is, and that's why it's getting so popular, it's more than just for athletes, it's for men, women, older individuals because of these potential benefits.

Dylan Carnahan:That's very exciting to hear. And it's good to hear too that the level of awareness has grown. I think that's one of the reasons I hit so hard in this conversation, to really have credible information and dispel notions that aren't true. And to that point, we've talked a great deal about benefits, but what are some side effects of creatine? And what might give someone pause?

Dr. Richard Kreider:Well, what gives them pause is what they read on the internet that's non-factual. So we just did a study, had a huge study, looked at over 600 clinical trials that evaluated creatine in all type of populations, healthy, diseased, young, old, male, female, different types of chronic conditions. And creatine has no more side effects than the people who took the placebo. In other words, it was no different than they think they're taking something, and if they get a cold or some type of thing, it's just random type of impact. And so it's completely safe. And the word is, unfortunately, some companies will say, take our new form of creatine because it doesn't cause X, Y, Z problem. And the things most commonly heard is, well, it causes cramping, it causes bloating, it causes, and no study has ever shown any of those effects. In fact, through the years, there have been researchers, we've done some studies where we looked at specifically does this happen in people who take creatine, and none of those studies show an effect. In fact, it's usually opposite. For example, in the early late 90s, there were concerns that creatine causes dehydration, and it got on the internet because creatine pulls that water in the muscle, it causes dehydration, cramping and all these things. And so a bunch of people did studies on thermoregulation during exercise and was completely opposite. Creatine causes a hyperhydration, which makes it easier to exercise in a hot and humid environment. Creatine reduced the incidence of cramping and those types of issues compared to athletes who were not taking creatine during the same level of training. So unfortunately, there's a lot of myths out there and a lot of it's around the side effects, which has caused people some pause. And so a lot of the research over the last few years is, let's look at the safety profile and all the evidence suggests that it's safe and there could be some definite advantages on strength and endurance and maybe some cognitive effects that could have a lot of application as we age. And there's really no reason not to take creatine. Studies have looked at creatine for high dose levels, 20, 10, 20, 30 grams a day for the lifespan of some patient populations and showed no effect. And so it only seems to be somewhat positive.

Dylan Carnahan:Now, this is a very important part of our discussion. I greatly appreciate you going in depth there. I just want to allow you some space to, you know, I know that dehydration, that's something that anecdotally I've heard as well. You know, what are some other misrepresentations of creatine that you would like to address with your time with the public?

Dr. Richard Kreider:Yeah, we've had a couple of papers on misconceptions about creatine that have been very popular, published in the Journal of the International Society of Sport and Nutrition. And we kind of go through them. You know, things like creatine causes a steroid because it builds muscle and has no relationship at all to steroid. I've heard things like creatine causes baldness. No studies ever show that it causes baldness in any study. Creatine can cause renal problems, can hurt your kidneys. This kind of comes from the myth that too much protein in the diet can cause renal function. Well, those studies were in renal failure patients, okay? Not in healthy people. And there's actually been a number of studies now to show that creatine has no effect on renal function. In fact, it's actually being used for dialysis patients now that they give it during dialysis to try to help improve creatine availability and energy. And creatine is a precursor to something called homocysteine. And people who have or blocks homocysteine, so people who have renal disease often have high homocysteine, which is a risk factor of heart disease. And so they're using it to try to slow down and block the homocysteine effect. The studies we just looked at, we're just finishing and just presenting in a couple of weeks, show a lowering effect on homocysteine with creatine. So these are all beneficial effects. And so you see some of those things out there. It's not good for women. It's only for people with weights. There's lots of studies showing benefits in women. In fact, in women who are menstruating, creatine metabolism and needs change around the period. And so there's times where you need more amino acids and a little bit more creatine to help the body adapt and handle this change that's occurring in the female during the menstrual cycle. So even hormone regulation could be improved. And so we're finding that there's lots of applications. As you age, a lot of times people lose bone densities, particularly in women. And we're finding that if you lift weights as you're aging and you take creatine, you can kind of slow down the decline in bone loss. So all these things are benefit, but you hear a lot of things that are, well, it does this or that. And when you look at all the literature, it's not supported by any of the research. It's only found in popular internet things. And it's usually, unfortunately, companies trying to get market share advantage by saying, ours doesn't cause this. And you look at, well, when did any study ever show that? Well, we've heard. Well, and you go back in the day, the first time this was mentioned about side effects with create, then it may be my fault. And I say that, well, we had heard some things and saw things in the newspaper and those types of things. And in around 2000, I was asked to write a paper for sports science. And I addressed this anecdotal claims about some of these side effects. And one of the reviewers, Dr. Paul Greenhoff, who was one of the initial people to create Tent on Muscle, said, you know, I don't know if we should talk about this, because it kind of provides substantiation to that there's discussion about these problems. And my point was, well, these have been talked about in the popular literature, but no scientific data shows a problem. And that has been kind of sighted. See, even Dr. K says there are side effects. No, all the studies show it reduces it or has no impact. And so, unfortunately, that kind of gotten out and you see this perpetuated. And part of this is the media. I mean, I don't want to go on a rant here about media. But here's what happens. I get a call, hey, we saw this paper on creatine and some reporter calls up, has no clue about anything about creatine. And I usually will send them a list of papers. We'll read this before we talk. That way you kind of get a background. And yet they're on deadline. I only got two days to turn this around and publish this out because it got hit. And they end up just picking up what's on the Internet and making quotes from people that don't know. And so it kind of perpetuates the common myths out there. And so what we always tell writers and scientists, don't put in there things that aren't substantiated and have data to support it. And just don't, you know, back in the day, well, we heard it cause cramp. We talked to the people at such and such a university. They said they had three people cramp in their last week's game. It had to be the creatine, right? No, it had to be the excessive heat and not quite being trained, et cetera, right? I'll give you a perfect example. I'm at the University of Memphis. We're doing studies on creatine. This is right when we first started doing studies and we heard about some of these side effects, we said, well, let's give it to our football team, have half on it, half off it, and monitor all the training conditions, all the injuries, all this stuff. This is one of the main papers on safety that we did. Going to the second year, we did 21 months, 21 months of safety analysis. Second year, we have a bunch of athletes and our coach decided to do three sets of eight 110s. And usually, as a fitness test, the beginning of training in the fall, you do two sets. But they heard that Penn State did three. So we're going to match Penn State. We're going to be showing. And so we do the first set, no problem. The athletes were really well-conditioned. Second set, people start falling out, right? Because even the bigs had to do like 18 second per 110 and only had like 30 second recovery. And it was hard. Get to the third set, man, and they were all over the field. It was like a mash unit. Okay. And they were down. I mean, people running around, getting water and cramping and, and the coach like, see, I told you we weren't in shape. This is, we're going to have to get better and all this type of stuff. And the coach, how many people are taking Crete? And a bunch of people who lift their hand up. Oh, I don't know. Doc says, it's not a problem, but let's go ahead and just for a few days during camp, let's just go get off it. Wait a minute, wait a minute. How many people who are cramping are taking Crete? Two. And they're all looking at each other, give me some of that Crete. It's because the myth is, you know, it's not always managed. So the perception is Crete and all the people were taking Crete and weren't having cramping problems. And the studies had subsequently showed that. Actually that study showed that there was a lower incidence of cramping among Division I football players taking Crete in hot and humid environments for 21 months. So the point is that sometimes we hear stuff, we perpetuate it on myth, and then it kind of gets circulated and it's like, oh, well, I guess that causes this or that. And it's like, where's the data? Show me the data. And then when you look at the results of these studies, there's nothing to support it.

Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, you know, I want to take a, go back to kind of a personal level, right? You talked about kind of a sense of frustration earlier. And I could see, right, this is just, you know, it's going to keep going on. It's going to come from different, you know, attack vectors, if you will. And you talked a little bit earlier about myth busting. You know, Dr. Kreider, what do you think your role is? As a researcher who's having reporters call up, who's having people, you know, falsely believe things, what is your role?

Dr. Richard Kreider:My role is to point people to the actual science and the actual data and to help them understand what the research shows. And as long as people make an informed decision, then they know what the science is and they then can make a decision whether they want to try something, great. But also to dispel some of the myths out there that have been perpetuated. And so we've kind of done a lot of that. I think we're getting over that. But you still, every once in a while, somebody, you know, it happened the other day. We had a golfer was at the FedEx Championship and supposedly had an old batch of what they said was creatine that was clumped, drank it, and then had a terrible round. And he had had a practice of always drinking like 10, 20 grams of creatine because Rory and other people have been doing this for a long time. And for, had to be, cause GI upset and all this. It's like, no, you probably were taking something else because creatine doesn't clump ever. And why would you take it half hour an hour before your competition? We never, nobody ever said that. And so you then find out, well, it's probably something, oh, probably was more of a pre-workout that had caffeine and other stuff in it. And so it happens still because sometimes people want to point to figures if they don't do well. Or if coaches, I mean, this happens in strength and conditioning all the time. If there's an athlete on your team that gets a hamstring pull, they blame the strength coaches. What are you doing back there? You know, and what kind of exercise are you causing? All these people have these hamstring pulls. And it's like, you know, it may have been those three sets of 110s that you just did, right? They were like, what are we doing? And so all that kind of comes to play. And so, you know, you hear these things. My role is to help educate people. Here's what we know. Here's how you can use this information if you want to use it. And these are the potential benefits. And here's the potential side effects right now, create things in a very safe profile.

Dylan Carnahan:Well said. I appreciate you covering that. And I think we're all grateful, right, to have someone that's kind of looking at things from an objective lens. And again, I know, you know, being an athlete in the past, you know, everything's performative based. And that's just maybe, unfortunately, another thing that could get pointed at to in a domain where performance is so important to kind of shirk maybe some responsibilities.

Dr. Richard Kreider:What type of sport did you play?

Dylan Carnahan:I was a baseball player. I was a pitcher.

Dr. Richard Kreider:Baseball. Yeah. Baseball is fantastic for hitting power. When we were starting to create, then one of the first schools really picked up on this in baseball was the LSU team. They call it grill ball, right? If you remember back in the day. Yeah. And they were just slamming home runs left and right. And it improves power. I mean, if you're in the box, it's swing, it's reps, it's recovery, right? Or if you're pitching, a lot of pitchers will use it, because man, it's high intensity pitch. You got to recover between pitches. Long inning wears you out. And so, yeah, baseball has a lot of application for it.

Dylan Carnahan:No, I'm sure a lot of my former teammates and parents that are listening enjoy hearing that. We've talked about a lot of different areas, and we mentioned earlier kind of about that maybe that stacking, right? Or like a prerequisite. You know, what can we still learn about creatine?

Dr. Richard Kreider:Well, we're learning about the health benefits and the applications in older active populations. So a lot of the studies were done in athletes initially, and then we started figuring out, oh, there's some studies shows the lowest cholesterol. I wonder if it will work in people that have high cholesterol in an exercise training, maybe some benefit. Then we found that it seemed to help with glucose management. So there are studies now that have been done in people with type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes. You put them in an exercise program, you give them creatine, it seems to help them. Okay. Now we're looking at things like irritable bowel syndrome. Creatine is a main player in the absorption of nutrients in the intestine, and it seems to help alleviate some symptoms that irritable bowel syndrome. Heart failure, your heart, when there's ischemia, you don't have enough oxygen to the cells, and that causes arrhythmias and things and abnormal function. If I have creatine, I don't have as much problem. If I'm creatine loaded before I have a stroke or a heart attack, or a concussion or traumatic brain injury, the damage is less. So in animals at least shows that this is something that if you just had a high diet and creatine, you can prevent the severity of some of these type of injuries. We now know that creatine plays a role in female physiology throughout the lifespan. Fascinating things in pregnancy. So the third trimester, there's a greater need of creatine for the baby that's developing. And so the baby actually pulls more creatine out of the blood from the mother. And we know that if there are animals that don't have enough creatine, and they go to birth, and it's a difficult birth, like asphyxia, baby cord wraps around the neck, or there's a long prolonged natural birth, that this causes brain ischemia and could cause death. But when they give these animals creatine, it reduces the severity and improves survival by about 20 to 50 percent. Creatine, when you do the natural birth, it's muscle contraction, relaxation, muscle contraction, relaxation. And so there's an interest now, and a number of studies underway, to see how women who are pregnant or giving birth seem to have an effect. There's even now studies trying to look at children that have lower creatine levels, seem to have developmental problems. Even linked to things like autism. And we know that when kids have creatine synthesis deficiencies, where they can't produce creatine on their own, and it's not diagnosed early, that they have cognitive decline and a whole host of problems. So we identify children early on with these enzyme deficiencies and give them creatine throughout the lifespan, they have much more normal functions. And the thought is, well, maybe creatine is important as you're growing those first 6, 8, 10 years, and really developing through adolescence, there's a greater need for creatine. And the NHANES database actually supports that. Low creatine levels means slower maturation and development. We then go through young adults and young women that have benefit from creatine. You go into the middle age and older, now all the diseases, heart disease and diabetes and metabolic syndrome that's often, there seems to have some role, particularly if you're staying fit and active, on improving those outcomes. And now the focus is on cognition as you're aging. We now know that creatine, more creatine in the brain, more phosphocreatine in the brain, seems to have better improvement in cognition. So we're looking at doing studies, a lot of people are doing studies on how much creatine is enough to get this kind of cognitive benefit. And it's something that helps people aging for lots of reasons. So it goes from cradle all the way to older folks, there's a role of creatine, it's an essential nutrient. It's an essential compound the body's got to have. And I think we're going to get to the point where it's going to be classified as a conditionally essential nutrient. Your body can produce some, it won't be essential, but it's something that you need to have enough of, particular certain points of your lifespan to have a normal function overall.

Dylan Carnahan:That's fascinating. That's fascinating. You know, to... What advice do you have for people thinking, thinking of taking a creatine supplement?

Dr. Richard Kreider:Well, I always tell them to look at the science, so that's why we have creatineforhealth.com. It has all the papers, it has people talking about it, all the researchers on there, and so they can get an informed decision. And we also have some review papers so they can understand. It's also not only helpful for the person thinking about it, but it's also helpful to give that information to your physician, because most physicians don't know enough about creatine, and some are very weary of when to take in, under certain conditions, and they're not aware of all the literature. So, you know, if you actually have renal failure, you might actually benefit from it. And so, I think that's important. So, one of the efforts we're trying to do with our Creatine Advisory Board was developed about five years ago, is get the information out to the public, because we know as scientists, there seems to be benefit, but if nobody reads the scientific journals, then they're not going to hear about it. So, podcasts and all these things help people understand. Go look at the science, go to creatinehealth.com, you can see the papers in there, and ask yourself, you can watch YouTube videos of the presentations of the latest information, and then you can decide whether it's something to try or not. Our recommendations are if you're generally healthy and trying to stay fit, man, it's probably more important as you age. My parent, father is still one, he's 87. We have lots of folks in the 90s, they're still strong and fit and doing things, and trying to slow down the aging clock and the decline that is associated with aging. So, just one thing in your arsenal that can help, exercise is the base, good diet is the base, and maybe creatine and a few other things can help as you age. Wow.

Dylan Carnahan:This, I really appreciate the effort and time that you've put into one, coming on here to disseminate information to the public as well as, you know, your body of work, your career and your contributions. Dr. Kreider, thank you for sharing your knowledge and time today.

Dr. Richard Kreider:It's been a pleasure, thank you.

Dylan Carnahan:That wraps up our conversation with Dr. Kreider. We talked about how to properly onboard creatine for best results, how creatine affects different age groups from teens to older adults, and where creatine is found naturally in food. Go to this episode's show notes to see any resources Dr. Kreider mentioned during our episode, and lastly, subscribe to Simple Questions Podcast to get notified when our latest episodes are released. Thank you for listening, and remember to keep asking questions.