Your Brain On... Creatine

Ayesha Sherzai (0:00)

Welcome to Your Brain On Podcast, brought to you by Neuro World, a comprehensive and empowering online community built to support people like you in creating brain healthy habits that last. At Neuro World, we combine expert guidance, practical tools and a welcoming space for growth, all grounded in cutting edge neuroscience and behavioral science. It's designed to fit into real life and costs less than a dollar a day. As we record this in June 2025, a small pilot study on creatine and Alzheimer's disease has recently caused a stir on social media. Many posts have been published claiming that creatine could reverse memory loss, prevent dementia and even biohack your brain. But what did the study actually show? What does creatine really do in the brain? What happens when scientific nuance gets flattened into a supplement headline? We reviewed the study, we interviewed the actual authors, and we're here to walk you through the facts without the hype. This is Your Brain On Creatine.

Dean, I'm excited to be here to talk about creatine because it's one of the most asked questions on social media from us. Every time I open up Instagram and go to our messages and try to answer, there is something about creatine almost every single day. And I would love for us not to just talk about creatine and this particular study that was conducted, but generally speaking, how information is consumed on social media and how something as basic as a feasibility study gets equated to, you've got to do this for your brain health. And I think we've talked about it in multiple different podcast episodes, Your Brain On Misinformation, Your Brain On Social Media. We tackle these issues in there as well. But here we are again about an important topic and we still have to go back and discuss why is it that there's so much misunderstanding.

Dean Sherzai (1:57)

That is a very important concept. Managing better the information that's coming to us. How we look at the information, how we distill it, how do we operationalize it. This study is so important in teaching us not about creatine, but about how to look at the data. And what was remarkable, as it will become evident, is that the conversation with the scientists that actually did the study elucidated this very concept, that it's how you look at the data, how you consume data that's more important sometimes than the data itself.

Ayesha Sherzai (2:30)

I love that when I was interviewing Dr. Swerdlow and Dr. Taylor, our guests for this podcast, at the back of my mind, I thought how amazing of an opportunity I have, and I don't take that lightly. What a privilege it is to be able to show our lovely audience how the scientists and the doctors who are actually doing the study think, and what their aim and goals are, and how between what happens in the lab and what happens in the universities where people actually investigate something, how it kind of slowly and gradually changes and gets broken down into a 30-second reel that is given to people, and they're either left satisfied if it's done well, if it's based on evidence and if it's communicating properly, or it creates a lot of fear, or it just generates paths from that particular piece of information onward. Before we start discussing the paper itself and creatine and brain health, let's talk about why creatine. What is it about creatine that is so exciting and so fancy, and why is it that researchers are actually studying it? I think that's a very important thing. Creatine is essentially an organic molecule, and it is present in every cell in our body. It's essentially attached to parts and parcels of the mitochondria, which is the generator, the energy generator of the cell, and it helps create more energy.

It has been studied in Alzheimer's disease because Alzheimer's disease essentially has been associated with impairment of brain energy usage. We've seen that in multiple studies where they slice the brain and they look at the cells where there's degeneration or death of cells in particular parts of the brain. They've seen it in multiple imaging studies as well, whether that's PET scans or MR spectroscopy, where glucose usage by the brain is affected in Alzheimer's disease. And because creatine has been associated with energy generation, it generated some hypotheses and scientists have been studying it for a long time.

Dean Sherzai (4:31)

And it's, as you said, it's ubiquitous. It's in every cell and every energy transaction. It's a major commodity that's used in the cell. So that's why it's important at the energy level. Also, the fact that we've been seeing some signal and as far as how effective it is in certain functions, such as building muscle, which was in the last few years that we've learned, it is effective and the data is pretty robust.