This is such a crazy substance. I'm 43 and I feel like I have more energy than I have ever had before. I started taking it during recovery from a bad ankle fracture since it helps building muscle mass. Once the ankle was better I took up CrossFit, and kept on taking creatine because why not, it helps replenish ATP so I will be able to give the extra-push when working out, I thought.
What is blowing my mind though is that at $dayjob my team is going through a crazy crunch to deliver a very strategic project and some of us are pushing 10-12h days often. I'm in hour 12 today for the second day in a row, and my head is not tired at all. Turns out the brain also uses a lot of ATP too, specially during demanding cognitive tasks so I guess it is creatine that is keeping the engine running smoothly even after so many hours.
I will like once every week or two have a poor night sleep. These days I take twice the dose and I don't feel like I'm sleep deprived at all. Feels like cheating! And apparently no side effects at all so far. Well, maybe I'm working too much.
Mind that, while the "creatine high dose to fight drowsiness" hack works and has no side effects (other than upset stomachs), the lost sleep still does it thing. You don't notice day to day but it will catch up to you eventually in many bad ways.
The overall fitness is going to definitely have a positive effect on the perceived energy levels (my Vo2 max is at its highest ever). On the other hand, I have been very fit at other times in my life but have never experienced this "my head can just go on" feeling before. I used to take conscious breaks, do NSDR between meetings and other energy-replenishing tricks because I __needed__ them. It feels like now I don't
And, if you drink a glass of carrot juice a day, you'll receive toxic levels of vitamin A!
~40% of people don't get enough vitamin D [1]. It's not useful to categorize it as some trend, based on people just not following general recommended dosing (with more precise dosing depending entirely on personal sun exposure and skin color).
My doctor added vitamin D test to his patients recurring blood work since the start of COVID, and found out just about all his patients was deficient or near it.
If you don't have a primarily fish based diet or spend hours under direct overhead sunlight every day without a shirt on, you're probably deficient as well.
I've also heard about it 'hardening' in the bloodstream and that you should really be taking it with K2 as well. This is anecdotal so someone please do more research than basing anything from this comment
I get severe cramping from it (reproducible). All I can find are papers about this being a myth and some reddit threads about other people having this.
I get it too if I don't drink a lot more water. So did many people on my sports team.
Creatine binds to water (making less water available to your muscles) and allows your muscles to work harder (which makes them need more water). So if you're not drinking a lot more water when you're taking creatine, you will get cramps from either dehydration and/or muscle overuse.
But once you're past the loading phase for creatine and getting sufficient hydration, it's supposed to lessen cramps because the water bound to creatine also becomes available for use again as the creatine is used by the body.
I get this unless I drink a lot of water. About 48 fl oz seems to be the right amount for 10g creatine. Sometimes this needs to be combined with a light snack, like a handful of nuts.
Your body can synthesize creatine, so it's not essential, but meat is a source of exogenous creatine and eating it results in higher stored creatine levels, which is slightly good for muscle power endurance in the ~5-15 second effort range. Supplementing produces slightly higher relative improvements in creatine levels in vegetarians and vegans than it does in people who eat meat.
Well, if vegetarians and those of the Vegan religion don't get enough creatine it is most likely related to them not partaking of an important source of the substance: meat.
Not vouching for creatine, but in general, humans get some vital nutrients from animal consumption. Vegans have to take some B-vitamins for best health due to what they don't get from meat. I assume creatine is the same.
Excessively large doses make your stomach and perhaps your kidneys unhappy and supplements being lightly regulated there may be purity issues where the risk is what else is in it.
Please remember that this is a study not the ads and pop-sci articles usually posted here. That means it’s meant to elucidate at most some biological pathways and not to present an overall recommendation. Maybe creatine has strong anti-tumor activity through one pathway and strongly tumor-promoting impacts elsewhere.
Please… just read it as the isolated and interesting insight into biology that it is. It’s a fascinating in vitro result that shows a potentially important role for creatinine in a certain immune response.
As it turns out, no one lets you generate mutant human embryos with deficient creatine receptors, grow them up into adult humans, inject them with melanoma, euthanize them and harvest the tumor cell mass and bone marrow for analysis.
Now I am imagining a 501-C where school children are encouraged to read studies to mice. Children get better at reading technical papers, mice learn more about their options! Win Win!
What is blowing my mind though is that at $dayjob my team is going through a crazy crunch to deliver a very strategic project and some of us are pushing 10-12h days often. I'm in hour 12 today for the second day in a row, and my head is not tired at all. Turns out the brain also uses a lot of ATP too, specially during demanding cognitive tasks so I guess it is creatine that is keeping the engine running smoothly even after so many hours.
I will like once every week or two have a poor night sleep. These days I take twice the dose and I don't feel like I'm sleep deprived at all. Feels like cheating! And apparently no side effects at all so far. Well, maybe I'm working too much.
I take creatine daily but when I'm working out more than a couple of weeks, i feel much better than on weeks when I skip working out.
- Loo et al. 2015 found color cancer cells can use it as fuel and blocking the creatine cut metastasis in mice [0]
- zhang et al 20921 found it promoting mouse colon and breast cancer models [1]
not an expert in any way, but i’m guessing it depends on cancer type and there doesn’t seem to be human data either way.
[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25601461/
[1]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2021.03.009
So, creatine = good?
Creatine uptake promotes dendritic cell activation and enhances antitumor immunity
> …and support the use of creatine supplementation as a strategy to augment DC-based cancer immunotherapy.
So it seems that from this research the outcome is indeed creatine = good
This is vague and doesn't explain anything. Can you share any references that communicate what you're thinking about?
It became something of a panacea nutrient, recently around COVID.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D_toxicity
~40% of people don't get enough vitamin D [1]. It's not useful to categorize it as some trend, based on people just not following general recommended dosing (with more precise dosing depending entirely on personal sun exposure and skin color).
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9573946/
If you don't have a primarily fish based diet or spend hours under direct overhead sunlight every day without a shirt on, you're probably deficient as well.
This doesn't mean you can just pound it, but for the most part it just becomes waste product.
(I regret posting that blog post, but the study is interesting)
That being said some people do have adverse effects to supplementation, e.g. excessive water retention, bloating, stomach discomfort, &c.
So try it, if you have a bad reaction stop.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3...
Creatine binds to water (making less water available to your muscles) and allows your muscles to work harder (which makes them need more water). So if you're not drinking a lot more water when you're taking creatine, you will get cramps from either dehydration and/or muscle overuse.
But once you're past the loading phase for creatine and getting sufficient hydration, it's supposed to lessen cramps because the water bound to creatine also becomes available for use again as the creatine is used by the body.
But it's pretty safe at recommended doses.
Please… just read it as the isolated and interesting insight into biology that it is. It’s a fascinating in vitro result that shows a potentially important role for creatinine in a certain immune response.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_creatine_deficiency
> Notably, creatine uptake similarly boosted the activation and immunostimulatory function of human monocyte-derived DCs.
Source: https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Mice