Most Replayed Moment: Can Creatine Offset Sleep Deprivation? Is It Really The Best Supplement?

**Steven Bartlett** (0:04)
When I asked you before this conversation started rolling, what you're really excited about at the moment, your response to me was, there was a few things, but one of them, which lit up your face was creatine.

**Rhonda Patrick** (0:14)
Yes. And it's funny because-

**Steven Bartlett** (0:16)
It lit up your face again.

**Rhonda Patrick** (0:19)
Yeah. It's funny because creatine has been around for, I mean, ever, for decades. And it's always been, in my mind, it was like one of those Jimbrow things. I'm like, I don't need to be swole. I don't need creatine to get swole. And this was the thought for many, many years. And then over the last five years or so, the effects of creatine on the brain started to really get my interest. Anything that affects the brain, I really become interested in. And so that's kind of what did get me the most excited about creatine. But also I started doing a lot of resistance training. And so I was like, okay, here I am now. I'm like one of those gym guys.
I'm doing the barbells. I'm doing the squats and the deadlifts and all that. And so why not give myself some of the creatine? Well, what is creatine, right? Why is it important? You talked about earlier, why doesn't our body just make more of these things that are so beneficial? We do make creatine. We make about, I don't know, our liver makes about one to three grams a day of creatine. And our brain also makes creatine. And those are the two organs that make it. Creatine gets consumed by other tissues, like the muscle is probably the one that's the greediest, because creatine is stored as phosphocreatine, but it's used to make energy, essentially. So it can increase muscle mass, it can increase muscle strength, in combination with resistance training, because you're able to regenerate and make energy faster. So, for example, I became interested in it after reading studies where people that supplemented with creatine that were engaged in resistance training were able to gain more lean body mass, they were able to gain more strength, it was increasing their training volume. So you can do one to two more reps, right, of whatever exercise you're doing, and it seems to decrease the recovery time between those sets as well. So you're able to increase your training volume. Well, anything that's going to increase your training volume is going to then have the downstream effect of increasing the adaptations, like increased muscle mass or increased muscle strength. I started supplementing with creatine about a year ago, and I started supplementing with it for that reason, for my training. And I was doing about five grams a day, because that was really what was shown to be beneficial for muscle health in combination with resistance training. And it's important for people to realize that supplementing with creatine by itself without any type of resistance training isn't going to grow your muscle. It's not going to make you stronger. You have to put in the effort, because what creatine is doing, it's helping you make the energy quicker, right? And then being able to make that energy quicker means that you're able to then do that exercise better, harder, more of it, right? So, it's sort of supercharging your exercise routine. And five grams a day was like, okay, perfect, that's what I'm doing. I'm doing five grams a day. And definitely noticed an effect on my training volume, where I was doing more reps. So that was like, okay, a year ago, I had already been aware of the effects on the brain, I thought maybe the five grams a day would do that. So what are the effects on the brain? Well, your brain also consumes a lot of energy, needs a lot of energy. So it does make its own creatine. But it turns out, if you can give your brain more of that creatine, particularly under a period of anything that's causing stress. So let's say lack of sleep, or let's say emotional, psychological stress, or in my case, high cognitive load, where you're just every day learning concepts, complex things, you're trying to remember them, you're putting ideas together and coming up with new hypotheses. And you're just studying a lot, and it's very cognitively demanding, and it's a type of stress on your brain. That's like my life, right? Under this condition of stress, depression is another one, that's a stress on your brain, or neurodegenerative disease, that's a stress on your brain. So any kind of stressful condition, that's where creatine shines in the brain. I would argue that all of us, who has the perfect amount of sleep, never has stress, nobody, right? There's always some sort of stress in the background. So that's when I was like, okay, so if you're the perfect person, you have no stress, you get the perfect amount of sleep every night, your brain makes enough creatine to kind of do what it needs to do. I know that I'm constantly under stress, so I'm like, okay, well, I think I need a boost. And this is where a lot of very interesting studies have come out of many different labs. Some out of Germany that looked at the dose of creatine and how it increases creatine levels in the brain. And this is why I now supplement with 10 grams a day. So the study out of Germany found that 5 grams a day of creatine, if you're supplementing with 5 grams a day, your muscles are greedily consuming it, particularly if you're working out. They want it. They want it. After about 5 grams a day, especially over a few months, like you're saturating your muscle and that's enough, right? Anything above that kind of spills over to the brain. And so what this German study found was that 10 grams of creatine increased creatine levels in several different regions of the brain. And that was probably the most exciting, I would say, evidence that supplementing higher than 5 grams a day was actually doing something in terms of getting creatine in the brain. There have now been a variety of studies that have looked at different outcomes, right? So if you supplement with 10 grams of creatine or even go higher than that, like 20 grams of creatine, how does that affect cognitive function, right? And so some of these studies have been done by Dr. Darren Kandao. He's at the University of Regina in Canada.