Nobody Told You This About Creatine

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:00)
Can you eat your way to 5 grams of creatine a day? To reach 5 grams of creatine from food alone, you would need 5 times your dietary intake, a steak at lunch, herring, chicken at dinner. So you sit down to roughly 24 ounces of cooked meat and fish across 3 meals. That's a lot, as opposed to having a single scoop of creatine. Creatine is the raw material your muscles use to rapidly regenerate ATP, the body's immediate energy currency. Now, it doesn't build muscle by itself, it raises the ceiling on the work that you can do.
Creatine is a multiplier on a training plan, not a replacement for it. You still have to live, you still have to eat adequate protein and calories. The powder does not define the effort. By the end of this episode, you will know the facts that pertain to you. Who should take creatine, whether it's safe, the real side effects, and exactly how does it work. Now, there's two myths that deserve direct answers. First.
Picture this. A jar of white powder on a laboratory bench in Newmarket, England. 50 grams of creatine monohydrate sitting untouched because the biochemist who owned it didn't believe it was worth anything. 15 years earlier, in his own lab, he had tested creatine and found nothing and concluded the human body simply would not absorb it. So this one conclusion froze creatine research for over a decade. The most studied, most proven compound in the history of sports nutrition was in fact discovered by accident. In the mid-1980s, the British biochemist Roger Harris was studying muscle metabolism in racehorses. A supplier sent him the wrong compound. What he had actually ordered was carnosine. What arrived was creatine. Eventually, he decided, well, I guess I got to use this up. And not on a person, but on a racehorse. The protocol was simple. Dissolve the creatine in water, deliver it, draw blood over two hours and see whether anything moved.
But as we all know, creatine barely dissolves in water and especially cold water. He forced 10 grams into a syringe and it clogged. So he did what any normal scientist would do. He measured a smaller dose, five grams, dissolved it in water, and he drank it himself. Then he drew his own blood at intervals. And this is kind of not far off from the Barry Marshall story, drinking H pylori to prove that it caused ulcers.
This kind of self-experiment, which is one that I don't necessarily recommend, became this study. The manuscript was rejected by two journals before it landed in 1992 in clinical science. Very small study, 17 subjects, five grams of creatine several times a day, muscle biopsies to measure whether the tissue retained creatine rather than the plasma, and the people who responded most were the ones who started with the least. That summer at the Barcelona Olympics, British athletes were already using it. A supplement that had been unwanted a few years earlier, had made its informal debut on the world stage. Now, I love this story, and I will come back to what it exposes at the end, but I know that you didn't come here for my stories or history lessons. But by the end of this episode, you will know the facts that pertain to you, who should take creatine, whether it's safe, the real side effects, and exactly how does it work. First, what creatine is and what it's not. Creatine is not an anabolic steroid. It is not a stimulant and it is not a hormone. It's a compound your body already makes from three amino acids, arginine, glycine, and methionine, and one you already eat every time you have meat or fish. Research indicates high-quality creatine monohydrate is recognized as safe by regulators and has been studied at doses well above maintenance for years at a time in populations ranging from infants to the very elderly.
We always have to ask, what is the mechanism of action? Creatine is the raw material your muscles use to rapidly regenerate ATP, the body's immediate energy currency, through what is known as the phosphocreatine system. ATP powers muscle contraction, but your stores are small and can be spent within seconds during intense effort.
By increasing the creatine stores, which makes a ton of sense in your muscle, supplementation expands the rapid energy reserve. So like in my morning workout, which was brutal this morning, I can produce high force for a little bit longer before fatigue or nausea set in. Now, it doesn't build muscle by itself, it raises the ceiling on the work that you can do. Now, there's been a ton of conversation about whether men versus women, whether there are differences. So how does that translate into what I care about, and hopefully you care about, lean mass? Research points to two routes. The first is water inside the muscle cell. When you supplement, creatine is pulled into muscle and brings water with it. Your muscles look fuller, you might look more jacked, but ladies, not that much more jacked. Your scale weight rises and the literature suggests that the cell swelling itself, which I found very interesting, may send an anabolic signal. The second route is training capacity. More phosphocreatine means your fastest energy system recovers faster.