Why Dr. Rhonda Patrick Started Taking 10-20 Grams Of Creatine Per Day

**Rhonda Patrick** (0:00)
I'm finding now, it's not just a Jimbrow supplement. It's hugely important for not just muscle health, but I think brain health. And I'm becoming increasingly convinced that people should be thinking about their brain health, because if they're thinking about their brain health, then they're gonna get the muscular benefits. So now, there's studies out there showing that we do make a certain amount of creatine from our liver, and I think it's like one or two grams a day or something like that. It's not much, but your muscle's consuming that all. Your muscle's greedy, because creatine is, as you know very well, it's stored as creatine phosphate, and that is essentially a precursor needed to make energy, right? So it's important for energy production.
And now we know there's other roles as well that are indirect and separate from energy production. It seems to have an anti-inflammatory effect as well. Not quite sure how that works. It's interesting stuff, but what we do know is that if you are taking creatine exogenously, if you're supplementing with it, essentially it does matter by weight. You're talking about the weight, you know, gram per weight, but let's just say five grams a day seems to be the sweet spot for muscle, mostly speaking, I would say. Generally speaking, your muscles are saturated after about a month or so of consuming five grams a day. And once your muscles are saturated and happy, any spillover, anything that's left can spill over to the brain. Your brain also makes a small amount of creatine itself, but muscles are greedy and consume anything that you're orally consuming. And so after the five grams, if you go up to 10 grams a day, then we're talking about maybe getting some brain benefits. And that's what studies have shown in terms of improving cognitive function. You start to get that more at 10 grams. 10 grams a day, you can see increases in creatine levels in certain brain regions in human studies. And then going even beyond that, it seems as though creatine supplementation seems to work well in situations when there's a stress component in the brain. And that stress can be a variety of different factors. It can be sleep deprivation. It can be psychological stress. It can be my everyday life, which is cognitively demanding reading studies, analyzing them, writing about them, right? Like that is a stress.

**Derek** (2:30)
How much creatine did you take today?

**Rhonda Patrick** (2:32)
Today I took 15 grams.

**Derek** (2:33)
Okay. A light day.

**Rhonda Patrick** (2:34)
Huh?

**Derek** (2:35)
A light day.

**Rhonda Patrick** (2:35)
Yeah, because... We're traveling. Traveling. Yeah, it is.
I usually like... So typically I do 10 grams a day. That's my baseline. I used to do five grams a day. And then as this literature started to progress, I had Derard Kando on my podcast, and he was talking about some of his research. I became convinced that 10 grams is what's needed for brain benefits. And so I got myself and my family, including my mom, on 10 grams a day.

**Derek** (3:03)
So she's tossing the powder?

**Rhonda Patrick** (3:07)
She is. She's putting it in her coffee. Okay. And so 10 grams a day is usually what I do. Now, sleep deprivation, there's some evidence out there, again, creatine works well under a stressful situation for the brain, and sleep deprivation is probably the prime example of that, right? Giving people 20 to 25 grams, depending on their body weight, seemed to attenuate 21 hours, was it? Yeah, a full night of sleep deprivation, essentially. So not only did it attenuate the cognitive deficits of sleep deprivation, it also seemed to bring their baseline up higher, like they were functioning better than normal if they weren't sleep deprived. Yeah. And there's other studies out there showing, again, that it's in the background of some kind of stress, like an all-nighter or an exam or something, creatine supplementation seems to improve cognition in that respect.
I have personally been doing it. Today, I did 15 grams only because I had all my travel packets and then I had to give one to my mom and then I had to give one to my husband. And anyways, I was like, you know, aliquoting them out. I typically do like 20 grams when I travel. I wasn't really sleep deprived last night. So, but this podcast, doing podcasts, is kind of a, you know, a stressful thing on the brain. It's a long duration, right? So, I like to dose up on those instances. And the other thing I've noticed, just going up from 5 to 10, so I was doing 5 grams a day when I started lifting, I noticed that the 10 grams a day really took away the afternoon sleepiness.