Barbell Shrugged - [Creatine] The #1 Supplement for Bigger Muscles, Brains, and Bones w/ Dr. Darren Candow, Anders Varner and Doug Larson Barbell Shrugged #669

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

Dr. Darren Candow, PhD, CSEP-CEP, is a Full Professor and Associate Dean-Graduate Studies and Research in the Faculty of Kinesiology & Health Studies, University of Regina.  Dr. Candow supervises the Aging Muscle and Bone Health Laboratory and serves on the editorial review board for the Journal of Aging and Physical Activity, Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, and Biogerontology.  Dr. Candow has received over $1.5 million in research funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation, and the Nutricia Research Foundation and has published over 100 journal and knowledge dissemination articles involving exercise and nutrition.  Dr. Candow also serves as the Chief Scientific Officer for TDF Sports.  In today’s episode of Barbell Shrugged you will learn: Why creatine is so widely accepted supplement in the scientific community What happens when you digest creatine How creatine increases performance in the gym Why creatine does not cause you to hold on to water The three phases of creatine cycle How creatine affects muscle, brain, and bone tissue How creatine can help with traumatic brain injuries. How creatine can be used for children Creatine’s affect on menstrual cycle How creatine improves bone mineral density To learn more, please go to https://rapidhealthreport.com Connect with our guests: Dr. Darren Candow on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram Dan Garner on Instagram

Shrugged family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, Dr. Darren Kandout is on the show and we're talking about creatine. You've probably taken creatine in your life. It was the very first supplement I ever took when I was like 13 years old. My dad brought it into the kitchen and was like, this thing is real.

And I was like, dad, you're probably on crack. What do you know? You don't know anything. Turns out, like 26 years later, he was absolutely right and everybody needs to be taking creatine. And we're going to walk through with Dr. Kano, who's the leading researcher on creatine. We're going to talk about kind of the path of creatine, how it became such a widely accepted supplement, why it is the most tested supplement, how it helps brain health,

what happens when you actually ingest creatine and some of the physiological pathways that are going on there how it allows you to get more reps better recovery and faster results in the gym and then uncovering some of the walking through some of the myths about creatine whether you're holding too much water whether it causes cramping and then some of the the effects that you may not think about as far as bone density, brain health, and then for some of you parents out there, I'm actually starting to give my kid little bits of creatine because there's some really good research on using it in children as well as in older populations when it comes down to like bone mineral density, osteoporosis, things like that. Really fantastic show.

Dr. Kedow has been leading the research on creatine for a while. Dr. Andy Galpin was speaking up at his conference at University of Regina and was like, you have to get him on the show. So that's where all these cool new scientists are coming from that you may not have heard of. And we're trying to bring this stuff to the surface and really, really show their research because they're doing phenomenal work.

Galpin is really putting us in touch with some really, really cool people. So not just these in-house shows, but a lot of the brand new research and scientists that are in the community doing really good people. So not just these in-house shows, but a lot of the brand new research and scientists that are in the community doing really good work. So we're super excited that Dr. Kandel is on the show today. And as always, friends, head over to rapidealthreport.com. That's where you can see Dan Garner, read my labs. And all you people that may be looking at testosterone issues in your upcoming 40s or however. That's me. You can see me and my low testosterone and Dan Garner putting a plan together on how I was able to go about that

without having to use doctors and go through kind of the TRT route. But rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Marble Shrug. I'm Anders Marner, Doug Larson, Dr. Darren Kandow. You are a professor and researcher at University of Regina and Dr. Andy Galpin, who's not on the show today. He's out trying to kill baby animals that have no gun and can't shoot back at him. So he did not make it. But when he got back from your conference, he immediately put me in touch with all of the people that were speaking and said, you got to go talk to that guy. And we're going to talk about creatine today. Some of the common myths. The reason creatine to me is so cool is it is the most researched mainly by you, I think.

Supplement. And it seems like, I think I started taking creatine when I was 13 years old and just started lifting weights. My dad was like, this is the thing. Where, like, when did, that had to have been about, I want to say that was like 29 years ago, 26 years ago. So that's a long time. Why did creatine become like the supplement that everyone needed to take for brain health and getting stronger and performance? Like, why is creatine so widely accepted?

And how did it kind of get its start to becoming the supplement of choice? It's a fascinating story. It was discovered in 1832 by a french biochemist and it sort of lost its potential and of course we know all about you know muscle physiology and creatine is needed to maintain atp and of course we can exercise longer and the theory for athletes is get bigger stronger faster and it sort of took until about 1990 when a couple of European researchers, Eric Holtman and Roger Harris sort of did the landmark study where they understood the physiology of creatine and said, hey, let's give 20 grams of this stuff to young individuals. And then let's see the effect that it gets in the blood and, of course, into the muscle. And sure enough, taking a high dose of creatine, which is referred to now as our loading phase, really saturated your muscle.

And then, of course, lymphocrystie wins the gold medal. And, of course, in 96, I believe, and they asked him what he was taking. It's kind of similar to the analogy of Mark McGuire and potential steroids and home runs. And he said he was on this supplement called creatine monohydrate. And it sort of exploded, it went dormant for a century. And then after 1992, when Roger Harris's paper came out, they started to toy in with different dosing strategies. Eric Holtman showed three grams a day is probably the lowest we can take on a daily basis for the average person looking to improve either performance or health.

But now there's well over 1300 peer referee journal articles on creatine. And I've been extremely fortunate to be trained by some of the best and work with the world's best on everything that's creatine. And of course, we'll talk about today, it has massive implications for fetal development and pregnancy all the way up to extreme old age. And now we're looking at the neck up as a new area. We just think of muscle and potentially the new area of bone, but cognition and sleep deprivation. So it's it's been around forever. It's the most research is probably the safest, most effective compound.

Caffeine is going to be right there with it and protein. But at the end of the day it's naturally produced and we can talk about that why it's kind of a lot of myths still um doug i don't of all the things he just said i think i heard give your kids creatine so they get jacked that's all i heard i heard words give your kids creatine so they get jacked um can you break down some of like the, just the physiology? I have my five grams. I put it in my mouth, dry. I'm not mixing it.

I'm not one of those people. I'm just taking it. It goes in my body. And then all of a sudden, like the magic happens and my brain gets smarter and I get bigger and stronger and faster. Like what does creatine do when it gets inside me? Yeah.

So it's a really important question. So as a caveat, you're naturally synthesizing about one to three grams of creatine a day from three amino acids, arginine, glycine, and methionine. Now, it might sound very boring to the viewer, but we naturally are producing this in the body. So the IOC will never take creatine, put it on a band list because it's natural. The other thing is it's in high concentrations in red meat and seafood. So depending on where you live, and if you eat a lot of red meat or seafood, you're probably having a lot of what they call dietary creatine. And all

we've tried to do is replicate dietary creatine into a product. And so when you do take the supplement, it simply will, excuse me, go through your GI gi tract just like normal eating get in the bloodstream and primarily it's taken into your muscle and about 95 is stored in our muscle and when it's there i use the analogy it's sort of like that man and robin if that man is atp or the main energy currency of your cell robin the sidekick has to be there to fight crime and or maintain energy status so as soon as you start to run or lift barbells and dumbbells, ATP, adenosine triphosphate is immediately broken down. But we would run into cellular trauma and death if ATP was reduced. So immediately,

phosphocreatine sacrifices itself to maintain its role. So the theory is if the muscle has more fossil creatine via creatine supplementation, you can maintain energy longer. And potentially that could cause a few more reps per set that could help you recover greater between sets. And the big thing is allowing you to have more frequent training sessions. So a big thing here is creatine has some beneficial effects from a whole body perspective without exercise, but the vast majority requires the stimulus from exercise to unlock its potential. It can get you an extra rep per set. You can lift maybe a little bit heavier weight. You can run a little bit faster, speed endurance, things like that. But you said frequency between sessions. Can you dig into that specifically? Yeah.

So the theory is, and of course, we can talk about the mechanisms. This is very interesting. It's multifactorial, but it allows all that exactly what you said. It enhances it. So allowing the athlete to potentially get bigger, stronger, faster. But what we're actually seeing is some really good cellular data to suggest that creatine decreases protein breakdown, or it sort of creates an anti catabolic effect. So the athlete who may train alternate days or two days or whichever, they may be able to recover in between sessions faster, because the creatine

kinetics is recovering more that could allow you to have a greater training program. And the theory is that training volume or capacity goes up on creatine. So if you multiply the sets you perform by weight by reps, it's always higher, in most cases with creatine versus placebo. So that's kind of how we think this works. It's not a steroid, but it allows you to do more work, run faster, whichever it is, and that might allow you to get better, improve. But we see the recovery thing is really interesting. It kind of has anti inflammatory properties. So that's why it's now having application for long distance marathon and triathlon, it's decreasing inflammation to allow them to recover faster. So

as much as it's kind of an anabolic agent, I would argue it's just as equally an anti catabolic or anti inflammatory agent. When you are kind of pushing things to the the edge here when it comes to total volume, maximum recovery and all that. Where does, how, how is creatine really like the, the, I'm using the backdrop of like the only negative thing I've ever heard of this is like, you're going to store all of this water and it's going to increase inflammation. If our goal is to really increase the amount of volume, increase recovery. And the only negative thing I've ever heard really about creatine is increased inflammation, increased water retention. Where is the balance of what we need to be taking to get the maximum results? And maybe that backdrop of

like, it's going to increase the amount of water you're holding on to isn't as real as people want to say, but is there like a side effect? And what is the line that we're trying to draw between this is where you get the most out of using creatine for the positive benefits? And what are the negatives if we go past that line? And where is that line? That's an amazing three-part question. And I think this is probably one of the biggest. We've done this before ask one right one question exactly i struggle with that let's start with the first part of you know i think when we talk about this idea or what i consider a myth and potential misconception about water retention so the loading phase has been shown repeatedly to be the most

effective rapid way to saturate the muscle. Now, again, if we're only producing one to three grams of creatine naturally, and the loading phase is typically 20 grams, you could argue that's 10 times the amount that we're either synthesizing in the body or excreting. So the cool thing with creatine, where it's osmotic, it drags sodium, i.e. salt, in with it when it comes into the muscle. If you have salt in the human body, that will drag water. So I completely argue against the people who say creatine only leads to water retention. I say high five yourself. That is the magic. That's what's happening. When you swell your skeletal muscle fibers, you induce properties for an anabolic environment, proteins and

protein synthesis and things like that. So the cool thing with creatine, if you do the loading phase, you should expect acute water retention from a whole body perspective. And that may be one to three kilograms, maybe in the first seven days, that might be really advantageous for an individual that is finding out they're in the world championships, blah, blah, blah. The average person probably doesn't need to do a loading phase. If anything, I think the three to five grams a day is a very viable, effective strategy. It hardly results in any bloating or water retention or side effects during the first week. But the big kicker here is after about the first week, even on the loading phase, any type of acute water retention subsides. And when you start having water in the cell, so that's intracellular, which creatine causes, you unlock

all the magic. So I argue, some people say they're not a responder to creatine, or they don't want the water retention. I say you do want the water retention. You want it intracellularly. And there's really good evidence that even extracellular water is not increased. It seems to be in the cell. Shark family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that

actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. Then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns. And then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program, and we invite you to see step one of this process

by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and it's my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidealthreport.com.

And let's get back to the show. And if you swell it, think of your bicep getting larger. A lot of the water in the muscle is causing that. So three grams a day will cause hardly any water retention. So for the person watching that says, i like to take creatine for the health and maybe overall benefits three to five grams is plenty it's the elite athlete that needs a really quick boost or jolt the loading phase uh can be uh good but i will say as you brought up there's some potential gi track irritation during the loading phase um And so we don't do the loading phase typically in

our clinical studies, we'll do a relative base, sort of like based on the kilogram weight of the person. So there's many varieties, but I think the water and osmotic potential is really important from the cellular perspective. You've used this term many times now, what are the phases of creatine? Like what is it? What is the loading phase? What comes after that? Is it like, what is the path? So there's traditionally three types. So let's go with the most popular and companies will tell you do a five day loading phase. That's where you take five grams a day, four times a day. So 20 grams a day for five to seven days. And of course, they're using that that's based on Roger Harris's seminal paper. And that's been shown clearly to fully saturate

your skeletal muscle. Now, keep in mind, I've never said anything about bone or brain tissue yet. So the 20 grams a day has been shown to fully saturate your skeletal muscle. After that, you can reduce it to about three grams a day as a maintenance phase. And the reason three grams is because if we're synthesizing about one to three a day, and we actually excrete in our urine about one to three, taking three grams will maintain your muscle creatinine stores. Some people, as we just said, might get some GI tract irritation or acute water retention. Now there's a second one. You can just do three to five grams starting from day one.

It'll take about 30 days to maximize the rate in your muscle. So if you're going to take this for years and for the rest of your life, I think three to five grams is a very viable strategy. The one that we typically use is based on a theory that the larger you are, you have more of these doorways to the muscle to allow creatine in. It's identical to caffeine. So we use a relative dose where it's 0.1 gram of creatine per kilogram of your weight. So if you're 70 kilograms, someone gets seven grams a day. If you're 100 kilograms,

they get 10 grams a day. The theory is that the larger you are, you have more of these creatine transporters or doorways that help get it into the muscle. Those are the three most common and well-researched and effective strategies. So you can sort of pick the strategy you like. It's either, you know, loading and a really low dose. You can take a low dose every day, or you can do a relative dose, which we pioneered. They're all effective. Not one study has ever compared all three to see if one is better because we think creatine, unlike caffeine, accumulates in the muscle. Uh, again, we haven't talked about bone or brain tissue, but muscle, it seems to be very

viable. Um, is there, uh, I'm just kind of staying on the, the phases of this, when you're talking about a loaded loading phase and we have this, this higher, uh, amount that we're going to be taking is, is, is that for getting the most out of creatine as a whole? Or what happens if I just start taking five milligrams a day and it's just, I'm consistent. I don't, I don't have a science book in front of me that says, do it exactly like this. Is it, is it relatively the same process and results? And that's just the most optimal way? Or is there something to that loading phase that like triggers something in your body to actually get the most out of it?

Yeah. So the loading phase, you know, you can maximize the rate in five to seven days, but you can take the littlest three grams a day for 28 days and get the same saturation. So you sort of have some options. You're like, well, financially creatine prices have gone up. When they go up like a quarter of a penny, it's like the cheapest thing in the world. It's actually gone up quite a bit actually with COVID. Inflation even got to creatine? No way. So it really comes down to pick your poison. I think if we have time today, there's a big difference between bone tissue and brain that has kind of become the new emerging area instead of muscle. So what we've just talked about is muscle.

Yeah. And which I think most people love. Now, the other cool thing is if you don't want to take the 20 grams, half a teaspoon or whatever it is, three to five grams a day. And five grams has been shown to be probably the most overall viable dose. It saturates your blood and it lasts for hours later. So, you know, to get that through your diet, that's a serving and a half of red meat or seafood. So that's why I think supplementation is just an easier, more convenient way to go. What would you prefer, brain or bone tissue? Well, we sort of pioneered and by actually come up with some brain.

There we go. We're hot on brain health right now. So let's roll there. We actually just interviewed, and it will come out probably right before this, Dr. Tommy Wood. And we did basically 90 minutes on Alzheimer's, dementia, brain health. So let's roll right into that. I would love to hear creatine and brain health. Yeah, so this is a huge, you know, concussion athletes, well, a tutorial from the Miami Dolphins, you see them on the field and some of the effects. And the theory here is that we always have focused on muscle.

And then maybe in the last 25 years, we got some really cool data on bone density. This could have application for older adults with osteoporosis. And then all of a sudden, we started to look at some really cool molecular data and technology looking at, wow, the brain is kind of unique. Now, keep in mind, the muscle will suck up creatine really easily because it doesn't make it. The brain says, well, well, well, we have a blood brain barrier for a really protective reason. We're going to tell you when we want creatine to sort of accumulate. And lo and behold, when you look at that organ, it's like, wait, we synthesize our own brain creatine. And some of our cells don't have

these doorways. So we're going to be a little resistant because we're very picky. But when you look at some of the data, and I mean, there's probably less than 20 studies that have now looked at brain creatine content, it will get in the brain. The theory though, is it's going to take a longer period of time because it's resistant and or synthesizes its own. So speculation, and we're in the midst of a huge review right now on this, maybe you need higher dosages for longer periods of time than what people take for skeletal muscle to accumulate in the brain. Does five grams a day, will it accumulate really slowly? Some of the researchers suggest, you know, 10 grams a day

from a whole body perspective would be very viable, but it's having an explosion of beneficial effects on many indices of brain health. Um, going back to the muscle part of it, then does that mean we should have a higher loading phase to push the levels as high as possible and hopefully be able to break that barrier faster? Yeah, it's an excellent point, which, and it's been theorized that maybe you do the loading phase for maybe 14 days or longer, saturate the muscle and then whatever's left over. Yes, some will be excreted in the kidney, but maybe some will get taken into bone and or brain. If you're looking at it from a whole body perspective, there's only a few labs in the kidney, but maybe some will get taken into bone and or brain if you're looking at it from a whole body perspective. There's only a few labs in the world that have magnetic resonance

spectroscopy to look at brain creatine content. The alternative is a brain biopsy, which no ethics board will ever approve. So it's really hard to measure. You can measure cognitive abilities, depression, anxiety, but to measure the true content, a muscle biopsy is more prevalent than obviously a brain biopsy. But that's an excellent point. Could you do the loading phase longer? Or in our case, where we do it based on a relative dose, the average person in our studies take about nine grams a day. And we've had them doing that for all the way up to two straight years continuous, no breaks, no adverse effects, Could that have some advantageous effects? So in my opinion, I think we can go much higher than what's generally recommend, recommend it from a whole

body perspective. There's no, there's no, uh, have you not found an upper limit to where the positive benefits stop? You know, that's a really good point, too, because even if someone says you've saturated your muscle. Now, the question is, well, what about from an anti inflammatory perspective, a bone biology perspective, now the brain, you know, maybe you get to a point where taking 20 grams a day for the rest of your life is probably going to be too much to handle, you might get some side effects, but we're not seeing any adverse effects at eight or nine for up to two straight years. And we've looked at liver and kidney function. And so I'm thinking, it's kind of like the theory of anabolic resistance with protein, we now used to tell people, you only need a small amount. Now we

say you need more up to a maximal daily amount, maybe our recommendations with creatine may need to be tweaked, or at least broaden to potentially someone who has, you know, for example, if someone is born with a creatine synthesis deficiency, they don't make creatine, they're going to need more. Whereas the individual who eats two steaks a day is going to probably need less, it comes down to the individual. And with the big push on plant basedbased proteins and vegan diets those individuals respond really almost miraculously with creatine supplementation because they don't have hardly any in the muscle and it's kind of like giving someone caffeine for the first time um so is there an upper limit i hope not i got about 20 or 30 years left of research from this

let's push it let's push it um and then the other question is what about in combination like calf or creatine and protein uh creatine omega-3 and are we able to develop a multi-ingredient anti-aging or overall health compound uh who knows right it's all in its infancy yeah yeah um Yeah. Um, back in graduate school, I looked at a lot of studies on, on creatine and, uh, when, you know, looking at speed, power, strength, speed, endurance type stuff, uh, I have a good handle on like what those studies look like and how to test to see if creatine is effective in kind of in that world. But as far as, uh, cognitive performance, like what, what are the studies look like and how, how do they, like, what's the, what are the outcome

measures and how do you test to see if it improves cognition? Yeah. So when it comes to cognition and memory, I'll put those sort of together. They'll usually do types of not like a crossword puzzle, but very similar, or they'll give them a whole bunch of like picture a puzzle putting together. And typically these are healthy individuals, but we see the best results in aging individuals. So the theory could be that could offset some of the effects of age-related dementia and Alzheimer's and things like that and keeping a brain sharp. Creatine uses, or the brain uses creatine very similarly to the muscle. And when the brain is taxed, so think of the athlete in the fourth quarter,

Michael Jordan coming down with two minutes to go, like mentally, he better be focused um and then you have the individuals working graveyard shift uh sleep deprivation we're always suffering from sleep um society is so stressed with covid the mental health so now the theory is can we actually improve cognition uh memory and so a lot of times we do subjective questionnaires or tasks like puzzles and very specific validated things to see, did the person put together the object or the puzzle quicker, and then recall for aging adults. And interesting, we put out a couple of recent papers on cognition

and memory. And the more taxed the person is, they create teen supplementation seems to work more effectively. So if the person says I'm well rested, I don't have any stressors in my life, I'm happy go lucky, they're probably not going to get a response or beneficial effect from creatine that's noticeable. But if the person says, I'm getting four hours sleep a night, I'm really stressed, creatine bioenergetics in the brain is really taxed. And that's where we think it could happen. So most people I know are very stressed all the time, screen time and sleep deprivation. And, and that's why we think there's a lot of emerging evidence in the neck up, I like to call it Yeah. Yeah, we've also looked at some case studies in depression and anxiety, which is enormously important. We're seeing some really good data on decreasing depressive symptoms now most times

these are in animals or in individuals on depressive anti-depression medication but creatine seems to increase brain creatine content there as well and again it might have some application for treating some symptoms of depression and anxiety in humans. I'm curious, when we get to the brain health side of things, longevity of your brain is a piece of it. And then immediate performance and cognition is another piece of it. Have you seen positive effects in both of those over time? Um, or is it kind of more focused on like, there's an immediate kind of like bumping cognition, focus, energy. Um, and then how does that play into like the, the long-term brain health? Yeah. Unfortunately the vast majority are acute. Um, so for example, when it came to concussion, that was a massive thing for the NCAA and NFL. And there was only

two studies and they, ironically, they were in children who suffered head trauma. And then as soon as they were brought to the hospital, within four hours, they were placed on placebo or creatine. And it had enormous benefits of improving self care, cognition, memory in the children on creatine. Now, you could argue in children, they have an amazing ability to regenerate right after head trauma, right? So they're natural production, but that's why they use the placebo control. So it had a lot of potential. The other theory is, do you give all athletes that we now know creatine? And then if they get a concussion, do we measure the rate of recovery after that's, that's the question we're trying to deal with. But there's not a lot of long term studies. The only ones that we see are in some neurological conditions like Parkinson's, and they don't

have a lot of great promise. The issue with those studies is that the sample size required to find really statistical significance is usually in the hundreds. And ironically, we don't want anybody to be in the study because that means someone has Parkinson's and Huntington's, but they get a lot of eligible volunteers in these big clinical trials is hard. So the vast majority is acute. And so, for example, you picture a university student super stressed during final exams leading up to it. Could creatine help them sleep better and or perform better academically?

The study hasn't been done, but the theory is it can help with sleep deprivation or whichever it could. So most of those studies are acute um but hopefully we get some more long-term ones i'm really fascinated in the treating mild traumatic brain injury or concussion once the person gets it can it speed up the rate of recovery um and i we're trying to find out the best way to do it so yeah i'm actually super curious because that that, that the quarterback that just went through the massive TBI, I mean, I've never seen anything like that. I'm not in that space all the time. I'm sure in the MMA world, there's something similar that happens

every weekend. What, how does that work? That creatine is something that can really help. I mean, I thought the guy was dead. And that's what it looks like when you die in the middle of a football field. And to hear that creatine is something that could really come in and help him in that situation is mind-boggling to me. Yeah, the theory is that it certainly won't prevent the concussion. But if he was on creatine supplementation and typically NFL, uh, athletes are, uh, could, or did that help accelerate his recovery to come back after a few weeks compared to what, if he didn't have creatine in the brain, maybe it would have taken double or triple the

amount of time. And then we don't know the effects on multiple concussions, but when you do have head trauma, brain creatine contrary, creatine content is significantly reduced. And then you look at the heightened inflammation that occurs. And two of the main principles of creatine supplementation, it increases cream bioenergetics and it decreases inflammation. So the theory is, could this be a compound that could increase recovery or decrease symptoms of concussion. It's still still very speculative, but there is potential there based on those two studies in children. Yeah. Um, if creatine is found naturally in meats, um, obviously supplementation itself is

kind of like relatively new in the history of humans. Is there an argument that we're really just supposed to be eating so much meat that we're getting this naturally and not having to worry about, are we taking our five upper limits, 10, 20 grams a day? And that we should just be basically meat eaters and naturally have this? Yeah. be basically meat eaters and naturally have this yeah so the theory that the carnivore or even an omnivore diet you know if you're eating i don't want to even go i don't want to give those people street cred yeah but so yeah the theory is yeah you can eat a lot of meat but the problem to get the dose that's required to be sustainable i'll give you an example if you were to eat seafood you would have to eat two to three pounds of seafood a day. And so financially, maybe they're allergic to seafood,

they don't eat red meat anymore. So viability is probably not there. Whereas a teaspoon of a commercially manufactured product, which is all vegan based, which is ironic, it has the greater effect and no side effects. So the interesting other thing is that creatine is made up of an essential amino acid and two non-essential whereas most proteins are essential so the question comes why hasn't creatine ever been shown to increase protein synthesis directly and i'm like well it makes sense it's only three amino acids and it's not even all essential whereas protein like leucine will have there so people say oh it doesn't increase protein like it's been closed it's never been shown to do it it does it in other factors but i agree that that your habitual diet can influence what you're you're doing on the side it's just so difficult

even in the scandinavian countries to get that much meat and seafood is really difficult on a daily basis yeah i mean that's going to be the biggest hang up with most people. Go ahead, I'm sorry. I mean, at this point, creatine has been researched, what did you say earlier, like 1,300 different papers? Oh, at least 1,300 papers. And I mean, we got seven in review right now.

It just keeps going and going and going now. Cool. So it's one of the most researched supplements of all time. There's been many, many, many hundreds of research

articles done on it, kind of mostly in performance and muscle mass, but now in brain and sounds like bone as well. What are the holes in the research at this point? Like why is there continuing to be so many more papers written on it? Certainly many of these things are just like established at this point where they're generally accepted that it works for, like we said earlier, like speed, power, strength, that type of thing. Like, but what are the holes right now? And what are the, what are the upcoming studies or the findings that you're looking to find

in the future? Yeah, I think for about 30 or 40 years, we got complacent. It was like study after study clearly showed, as you talked about increased muscle mass, strength, power, and that's all anybody cared about. And then all of a sudden, every now and then we'd start to say, Oh, let's add in a more of a health variable or a clinical variable. And then all of a sudden, it's like, Oh, wow, we've found some amazing things on bone density. Well, who could that be applicable for every female that's prone to osteoporosis. And then you start to look at Caxia, frailty, falls prevention. And then we got into the whole

brain. So we were complacent for a while because every study was coming out on a daily basis it's doing the same thing same thing same thing like caffeine and then i think we sort of got a little bored with just finding all the potential positives and then it got to a point where well we kind of have a good idea about muscle but if you were to ask someone, does every single person on the planet have a saturation of 180 millimoles of potential creatine in the body? You'd have to test all seven and a half billion people.

So we were, we got a little complacent and now the recommendations are changing. No one can tell you the best dose. That's the best to take. Even on a muscle perspective, we've only had three options, but no's done a graded uh dosing study for a long period of time and then what happens when you you take creatine away from you how long do those benefits last and that's got to the idea about do you need to cycle it well no studies ever looked at cycling versus continuous and so you have all these potential gaps and then we have all these emerging areas. And it's like I've been doing this since 2001.

And each year just gets more momentum, which I thought, oh, my God, like, you know, I got to switch to do something a little different. But each year you're continuing to have eight grad students right now. And every single one is doing creatine with a new question and a new study a new population focusing on young females a huge area that's underrepresented we're trying to get a ways to get the uh the understand the menstrual cycle and so uh there's a lot of areas but i think we had complacency because it works so well and all of a sudden it's like whoa this seems to have the potential to do a lot more let's let's investigate. We both have young kids. How does that, how jacked can I get my kids now? Set them up for the future. And if there are some brain cognition things in there,

like, you know, that would help them too. But mostly how do we get our kids really jacked? And this is an area of controversy. Of course, you're like, oh my God, weightlifting for kids, that's going to, you know, destroy their body. And of course, it's one of the biggest myths we've ever had. And then there's some research out of Australia showing not only did the pregnant female benefit from creatine, but the fetal development was it potentially decreased any inborn errors. And then Andrew Yagam and Chad Kersick in the United States, they're probably the leaders on creatine supplementation in children and adolescents. And then Andrew Yagham and Chad Kersick in the United States, they're probably the leaders on creatine supplementation in children and adolescents. And Andrew and Chad will clearly tell you that it has a lot of health and sport performance benefits, no adverse effects. It is

limited that there's no blood or biomarker measures to see the effects in children. But my stand is there's not a human on the planet that can't benefit from creatine supplementation, or you can flip it. There's no human on the planet that would get any detrimental effects from creatine, in my opinion, because it's naturally synthesized. And a small dose can be effective. So it is very effective and beneficial for children. There's always caution, you want to make sure that the recommended lowest dosage. So if a parent emails me, I always ask, you know, I said, I'm not a medical doctor. But based on research, I think starting two to three grams a day spread out is a very viable strategy,

because they're such a small person. So the dosing will be a lot little or a lot less. Yeah. Yeah. Are there differences in when females take take it you mentioned menstrual cycles how does how is that connected i wouldn't i wouldn't expect that yeah we don't speculate abby smith ryan is probably the world's leader uh in north carolina on oh yeah i'm going to go lift weights with her soon oh yeah good that's awesome she's amazing she's right down the street she's like half an hour away i was like yo we need to lift weights she said she's the best. She does a lot. That means we're friends. That's right. Yeah. Female health. And we think the menstrual cycle can play a role. But every time we look at the data, it doesn't matter if you're in the follicular phase or the luteal phase.

Estrogen can interfere a little bit with creatine kinetics um females typically either have a lower total body creatine stores or they have a little bit higher already in the muscle before they start so the theory here is that females and males respond very well to creatine there's been a few studies showing that females don't. We speculate, and it's been shown numerous times, that for some reason, and it could have an ability to deal with estrogen, that females don't experience the rates of protein breakdown nearly as high as males. So I want to repeat that, that for some reason,

the female muscle is either more protected or doesn't decrease the muscle in a protein breakdown response nearly as much to get that rebound synthesis effect. Whereas males do. So there, there could be a sex difference. And the theory is that maybe estrogen or having higher concentrations might be involved, but it's still that's in its infancy. Yeah. If somebody does not lift weights, is not engaged in some, the majority of the people that are listening to the show are most likely going to be interested

or engaged in long-term physical fitness training programs. If you're just a random person that hates lifting weights, maybe you like to go for a jog every once in a while and work on your cardio, not this audience again. But is there still a large benefit to taking creatine? Yeah, the benefit that you would probably expect if you're just a recreationally active individual is from the neck up. I think you're not gonna get an increase in muscle mass and bone density and bone needs to have that mechanical stimuli. But if you want to take it like a Flintstone vitamin or a one a day,

I think what happens over time is you might get some cognitive or brain health benefits that might help improve you at your job or sleep or whichever. But you're right from a performance enhancement. There's been a few studies where they did creatine loading and then they measured them without exercise on strength and fatigue. And it did improve. You can get that. Of course, that's in a lab. But the average person, they might get some benefits from

potentially a decrease in pain, like low grade inflammation after the age of 40, or my guess is probably an improvement in some indices of brain health. Yeah. I'd love to dig into a little bit more on like the the bone side of things, bone tissue. What are kind of like the general? Like, what what is happening in the development of bone tissue that creatine uh really helps with yeah we kind of didn't even think about this you look at yourself in the mirror and you're always looking at how much body fat and muscle mass you have but under the skin of course oh no i am terrified of the i one of the scariest things in my life after lifting weights for 26 years and squatting like at least twice a week for that many years is breaking a femur. The idea of like a tree

snap in half with all the quad and hamstring around it and a doctor have it. That is a legitimate nightmare. I think about bone density all the time. When you see like a strong man, you're like, ah, that guy's freaking femur must be the size of like an oak tree. I'm terrified of that. That's the scariest thing ever to me. Yeah, and it's super interesting. So we use some technology, and you're familiar with DEXA. And, of course, you know lean tissue and fat mass, but DEXA actually would give you bone mineral content and bone mineral density. And the landmark study was by my phd advisor and they did a study where it showed

that resistance training 12 weeks in older men and creatine supplementation significantly increased muscle mass strength as well as endurance but when you got the printout from the dexa we started to just eyeball some of the changes in bone mineral content and then when you run the printout from the DEXA, we started to just eyeball some of the changes in bone mineral content. And then when you run the stats, lo and behold, that the arm and leg bone mineral content significantly went up when they were on creatine and resistance training compared to the older men on creatine or sorry, placebo. So it was a first line evidence to suggest not only do you get an anabolic muscle effect, but bone mineral content or the weight of the bone went up as well and then we looked at some previous cellular data and sure enough when you put the bone building cells like osteoblasts in a petri dish in the presence of creatine they go crazy it's like super mario brothers in the original nintendo getting a mushroom they just went crazy

so the theory was that if the also mushrooms guys different mushrooms you knew there was a mushroom joke coming right and so if you put creatine in in in the presence of bone building cells maybe they can lay down more calcium and phosphate salts faster and that could potentially improve bone health over time so immediately you think what population is very susceptible to bone loss, and that's going to be postmenopausal females. And so we ran a few clinical trials, one year of resistance training. With that dosage, we did 0.1 gram per kilogram. And sure enough, when we looked at after a full year, three times a week of weight training and creatine, the females and these were all postmenopausal,

when we measure their bone mineral density and content, they lost way less bone mineral at the hip than the poor females who were just on placebo. So in other words, creatine didn't increase bone mineral density, which in theory, if it did, you could say it cured osteoporosis. But what it did do is it decreased the rate of loss. So that hip area, which is very susceptible for hip replacements, or when people fall, it was stronger. And then we pioneered and we have a review, a huge clinical trial in review right now. It's where we gave postmenopausal females creatine for two straight years, the longest trial, and it showed to increase bone mineral strength, bone strength in certain areas of the body and increase muscle mass. So the theory here is that if muscle goes up,

you're causing more mechanical strain on the bone, which can get stronger, and or may have a direct effect on some of these bone cells. So the theory now is that creatine can have some potential beneficial effects on bone uh density for bone health and it's primarily in post-menopausal females um i will say sorry creatine will give you no bone effects without exercise so unlike the brain it has to be paired with strength training and it's primarily resistance training and we added in brisk walking on their alternate off training days. Yeah. Gotcha.

We actually work with an athlete that has kind of a large history with stress fractures. Is this something that would be a good thing to add to their nutrition supplementation? Yeah. We've never seen the decrease in the risk or prevalence of falls or fractures. But from a stress fracture perspective, to me, there's no reason why not. If anything, if the muscle or the tendons get stronger, potentially with exercise, the bone inevitably has to have an anabolic response. So it could help. Will it speed up the rate of fracture, stress fracture?

Maybe, probably not, but it can't hurt. Yeah. Yeah. The, the other thing that always kind of comes to mind when I, when I think about anything creatine, how do we, is, is it something that like, because there doesn't seem to be an upper limit or an amount of time that we can use it. Is there is it detrimental to your basic physiology that it's going to stop producing it or we're going to become dependent on it because we're just going to be using it for the rest of our life? There's no like you're resilient enough. You have enough. Do we do we need to keep using it for indefinitely? Yeah. Excellent point. So that brings up the cycling versus continuous. So the,

it was initially proposed in about 2003 that when you take supplementation, you decrease your natural production. And logically that kind of makes sense. If, if you're taking in a supplement, it's just like exogenous insulin to a diabetic. If you're, if you're taking in a supplement, it's just like exogenous insulin to a diabetic. If you're taking in a supplement, you may acutely downregulate your natural production. It certainly doesn't stop it. And then, of course, if you stop the supplementation, it would probably come up. There's actually better evidence to suggest that that happens in the brain. If you're taking creatine supplementation, we actually see better evidence that the brain may decrease its natural rate of production because this is why waste my energy. No detrimental effects long term. But that's

never actually been assessed that your, your rate of endogenous production has never been measured long term with creatine supplementation. I will piggyback that up. There's been three studies that have looked at the rate of creatine sensation. So when you go on it, what about when you come off the supplement, it takes about 30 days before all those benefits to come back to baseline. So in other words, if you have an athlete say, I'm going to take creatine for six weeks, and that's actually been shown to fully saturate your muscle, you can go off it for a full month, just eat your normal food again, and you'll still get a greater magnitude of effect. So it takes about 30 days to come

back to baseline but we've again the study i just said we've looked at for two full years there's been no adverse effects and no reason to suspect that your natural rate uh was abolished totally um i remember back and even as far as high school when people were recommending to cycle on and cycle off creatine i'm actually shocked to hear that at this point with how many studies have been done that nobody's looked at cycling. Yeah, it's in the methodological design. So the problem is you need a group that will do multiple cycles because you need to sort of test them, put them on a loading phase, test them, wait 28 days, put them on a cycling phase again, compare it to continuous. It can be done, but for some reason, it just hasn't. I've toyed with it as well, but it's based on the methodological design.

Sorry, Doug, go ahead. I was going to say, at this point, since you said earlier that 0.1 grams per kilo, so for me, I'm 90 kilos, it'd be 9 grams for me. I don't normally take that much. I normally just grab my scooper. Creatine's cheap enough. I just take my scoop, throw it in my shake or whatever it is, and it's roughly 5 grams usually. You said for cognitive performance, we don't really what the the optimum dose is is but as cheap as creatine is should i just double my dose and there's no there's no real downside to it so

and it's not going to cost me that much money just double it up and take the upside if it's there and if there's no downside why not yeah i think if you're exercising multiple days a week at high intensity and some people throw in HIIT training or cardio and then you throw in stressful job work I see no reason why that 10 grams is not a viable source that's what I take a day I split it up or whichever and we can talk about timing or creatine or do you need to take multiple dosages um you know it the theory here is that we've always focused on muscle, but again, we're seeing better potential with higher dosages. And I think with the way the world is, there used to be a 40-hour work week.

And some people are working 60, 70 hours a week. They're spending tons of time being sedentary. There's a lot of stressors. I'm not seeing any downfall with around 10. There's some populations who say, geez, I need 20 grams a day. Well, they need, we need to research that to see if there's any potential adverse effects long-term, but I see no reason. We've given nine grams a day to post menopausal women for, you know, two straight years, no adverse effects, like zero. Could

they even go higher? Yeah. So if it was me, i'd probably say for a guy your size why not if anything you'll probably get a benefit right like you know um it accumulates your muscles are probably saturated but now you're like geez maybe i'm looking at bone health as i get older or cognition it's the time to stressful yeah i for sure um you've mentioned HIIT training a couple of times. Is there an impact on the cardiovascular system? And of course, if we bring that into even a more specific thing that is kind of related to the audience and being in a CrossFit type environment where there's like a big anaerobic capacity element to it, how does creatine play into that? Yeah, creatine has enormous potential

for CrossFit. I look at that type of sport and my God, it encompasses everything that the human body can go through. And from a recovery to a performance to decreasing soft tissue injury, for sure. We did a study with hit and a small sample size population, and it didn't improve any of the performance variables. But hit is very interesting to me because it has all the design of what creatine was there for multiple sessions, high intensity, maybe it could have some aspects of more longer term studies need to be there. It actually now creatine is having some potential for endurance, which we never thought was even possible. I don't think it's going to improve your endurance, light intensity capacity, but it has great effects for decreasing cytokines or inflammatory markers

after a marathon, triathlon, and maybe even a long, long duration sport. So it seems to have some again, recovery aspects, or anabolic aspects. So long soccer match could have potential there's evidence swimming potentially yes but the cellular aspects are looking at uh marathon and triathlon as a recovery agent is there any research on uh like reaction time or um things of that nature like coordination yeah there is uh not so much coordination but reaction time a power for sure um agility some of those are pioneering studies in the states they're all there and that was Yeah, there is not so much coordination, but reaction time, power for sure, agility. Some of those are pioneering studies in the States. They're all there.

And that was primarily done in athletes who already have great agility and coordination. But we thought about that. What about an older adult whose agility and coordination is impaired? Could this help improve their walking ability and gait? So we're now going to be looking at some gait variability with older adults. And maybe you don't need an assistive device anymore until you're, you know, late 80s and 90s, maybe creatine and exercise. And again, creatine is always going to be the sprinkles on the cake. Exercise has to be there. It's foundational. So again, I think the big thing for the viewers, obviously, is exercise, as we all know, is a staple for everything. Creatine is

going to give you a small potential greater effect. But again, that's the key potential greater. And I think we're all hoping to improve health and longevity over time. Yeah. Yeah. Does it also help you maintain muscle mass as you age? Either with with training, I'd imagine, but without training, would it help as well? Or no? Great idea, especially with Caxi and someone that goes in for long-term bed care or surgery. But we did an immobilization study in the early 2000s where we got volunteers, young individuals, put a plaster cast on. And sure enough, obviously, they would experience a decrease in endurance and strength in the limbs, but creatine offset the rate of loss. So here's a great example. If you know an athlete injured, broken limb, independent of cross education training,

creatine can offset the rate of loss. So just because they're sedentary doesn't necessarily mean they can't work out the other limb and take creatine. And there's a researcher here in the province that I'm at is outstanding and he looks at cross education. So when you see an individual with a, you know, ACL issue coming up, they shouldn't be sedentary. They should be working out the opposite limb and have those potential effects. And we think creatine can offset some of the detrimental muscle tissue atrophy over time. Um, we've laid out like 15 different things in this that creatine can very positively impact. Is there like something where you go, yeah, there just isn't great research around this part of performance. But when you get into if it's cardiovascular, if it's anaerobic, muscle, bone, brain, and it helps with like long-term cognition as well as acute

what are we missing yeah i think it's like it's like vitamin d is good for you but if you take too much you know it's going to be terrible like yeah there has to be some place maybe there isn't um where where just there are limitations to um its positive effects is there or is it really like a supplement it's interesting and it's an area i sort of started uh it's the timing of creatine we got an idea about timing a protein and like oh my god i gotta go to the change room get my protein shaker i'm'm going to deflate, I miss. And I will say probably the biggest area that shows no beneficial effect is around the timing of creatine. In other words, there's been a series of studies now that creatine is not like caffeine, it accumulates. So rushing

to the gym to take your creatine is not advantageous. We've done a series of studies, you can take creatine before you work out,ine during that means a sip of your water with creatine and after every set, or creatine after exercise, you get the same effect. Even taking creatine in the morning and evening has been effective. So again, the timing, there's no good evidence to suggest that this is the absolute time you have to take it if you miss that timing. It's irrelevant. So and now that's identical to protein it seems a total daily amount uh is is the most effective so when someone says the timing of creatine is really important i think if you take it on the days you work out in close

proximity blood flow and kinetic seems to to work you can take it before during or after so so doug if you go up to 10 grams you might say geez I'm going to take a scoop with breakfast. I put mine in my Greek yogurt in the morning and then you take it after in your post-exercise meal, piece of cake, right there. You don't need to have an alarm clock, which is nice. Where's caffeine, you know, peak 60 minutes before. And that's a bit different. Yeah. On a similar note, if you miss a day, it's like not a big deal. It doesn't really matter. A hundred percent. Yeah. You have 28 days to go before it comes down. And then the other one is the creatine-caffeine combo. This is controversial, whereas they seem to interfere with each other on a molecular perspective if you do a creatine loading phase and then take caffeine.

We just did a study, it was a small sample, but when individuals who perform weight lifting and took creatine and caffeine powder together, that did have a negative effect compared to creatine. So there is theory that if you combine the two together, over a long period of time, they may blunt one another. So I, I'm a big coffee drinker. So I usually have coffee before I work out. And again, since the timing of creatine is irrelevant, you take, I'll take it with breakfast and then post exercise, there's no interference effect. Those pre-workouts are a little different because they have so many other things in there that might overrule each other,

but that's an area that's of very interest as well. Um, when over time, um, is, is there a, um, in, in the cycling of it is, do you have any general recommendations on how long people should be taking off? Um, if there is like a 28 day kind of like half-life or whatever that is to clear your system, um, is there an amount of time of just giving your body a little bit of time to build resilience and not, um, be on it? Yeah. So I would use exactly that. I would think if you're going on vacation or whatever, whatever reason, uh, the 28 to 30 day is, um, um, is a great way to look at that. Um, I actually see no reason why you can't take it on a daily basis. No evidence has shown that it's detrimental or has any negative

effects. So I think that month off, um, is good. That might have application for strength and conditioning specialists with athletes. If you're looking at preseason tapering, things like that, it really depends. Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah um question about cutting weight has there if you have cut weight for an mma fight or whatever and you have you know 30 hours before your fight would it help with rehydration to introduce creatine if you weren't already taking it like you your your your system is clear of any supplementation but then right after you weigh in when you are rehydrating for the fight taking creatine kind of in a loading phase manner pre-fight would that help specifically rehydrate your muscles at a at a faster rate than it otherwise would yeah so the big one of the

biggest myths was that we always thought creatine was dehydrating and we're like oh god and actually it's totally opposite it's super hydrating to the muscle so the theory with an athlete boxing mma or whichever needing to cut weight the theory here is that if creatine is intracellular that's going to stay in the body they can still take it and a common question i get is people going on stage bodybuilding can they still take creatine i was like well why wouldn't you you it's intracellular you know the vascularity the diet's gonna play a role it's probably more the glycogen storing water that you're you're needing to play a role with but i agree it's something that should be considered or not looked at in a negative way and if you're worried about the massive amount take smaller amounts again it will accumulate and give you the benefits yeah

um one of the kind of like common myths you probably heard many times um gets into like dehydration and muscle cramping is there any validity to that no it's one of the biggest myths if anything it hyper hydrates so i tell athletes if they're exercising in hot environments to make sure you're taking creatine with lots of water um that will hydrate the muscle and um um some of these anecdotal effects of people dying and they're wearing garbage bags and massive weight cutting, and taking, you know, I think some was over 50 to 60 grams of creatine a day with a lot of other things that of course, oh, you're on creatine that caused you to have heat stroke. None of the good research supports that of anything.

It totally refutes it. It's hyper-hydrating. Yeah. Hence the hydrate part of monohydrate. Yeah. That's a good one to bring in right now. Right. Can you break down like how, I never really get the feeling that there's like bad creatine on the market. Maybe that's just

me over trusting it, but it's not like a pre-workout where I'm like, what kind of stimulant did they put in this one? Like creatine seems to be in a very non lab way. Like it seems like it's a relatively safe one to go just pick up the cheapest bulk one you can find and just start taking creatine monohydrate. Just start doing it. Well, I'm really, I'm really freaked out by some of them, but creatine seems to be like a safe one to me. Yeah. So this is really important.

And so when people say, oh, I've heard of creatine hydrochloride, ethyl ether, blah, blah, blah. There's probably about 50. This is important. purported forms of creatine on the market. They're typically very expensive compared to the gold standard monohydrate. For anybody listening, please only take creatine monohydrate. Make sure it has creatine monohydrate on the label. And there's a plethora of reasons, I'm going to tell you the big one. For creatine to work, it has to get through your GI tract into your blood. And then it has to leave the blood and be taken into your demanding cells, which is either muscle, bone and brain. There's never been

another form of creatine shown to get better into the tissue. There's a few forms of creatine independent of monohydrate that may get into the blood. But at the end of it, it has to be creatine first. And a lot of those purported forms out there are not even creatine. And then it has to get into the tissue. Not a single study has ever shown that these alternate purported marketing forms of creatine are better. Monohydrate is identical to the one that's released in our liver. So creatine monohydrate is the same creatine molecule that we produce. And the water molecule is just disassociated in the GI tract. So again, when people say, Oh, I heard creatine hydrochloride is better. It's all

BS. Not a single study has shown it to get into the tissue and lead to performance enhancement better. So a big take home here today is if you're going to try creatine, make sure it's creatine monohydrate, a hundred percent pure. Gotcha. I, yeah, I don't know why, um, wait, where the ones that you don't want people taking, what are the drawbacks in maybe some of the more popular ones? Well, the biggest thing is monohydrate was boring. It's like, God, it works all the time. We need to liven things up and come up with some new thing, right?

You know, it was like Coca-Cola Classic. Well, and there's no flavors. Yeah, there's no flavors of monohydrate. It's just basic, boring. Exactly. At least when you get your protein, it's like, ooh, strawberry this week. Where do you think that strawberry comes from?

That's scary. Don't think about it. So the biggest thing I think is price and marketing. You know, companies are coming up like, Ooh, strawberry this week. Where do you think that strawberry comes from? That's scary. Don't think about it. Like, so the biggest thing I think is price and marketing, you know, companies are coming up with like, let's, let's take something that's the best and try to make it better. I'm like, well, if it's already a hundred percent bioavailable, how are you going to get greater than a hundred percent bioavailable in the muscle? And they just can't do it. Um, and so I think people said, geez, we just need to liven this up and try to make money. So I think if you look at all those other purported forms, they're probably double in price. Interesting. Good marketing team. Great job.

People buy it. People buy it. Yeah. What are we missing here? I feel like, you know, the general recommendation, make sure you're getting, you have, Doug needs his 10. Yeah. I need my 10, about 90 kilos myself. I feel like this,

this is like a no brainer. I've never actually dug into so many different things that creatine can be used for. And, you know, 75 minutes later, it looks like, yeah can't imagine a scenario in which, uh, taking creatine to your recommended dosage is not a good thing. I think the best summary for anybody listening, cause some people say, geez, I don't want to take 10 grand. Cause some people may be, you know, a little sensitive to whatever you want to start with a low dose, three grams.

Start with that for the first five days and see how your body adapts. Moving up, you can probably adjust and take up to 10 grams. But before you do all of that, make sure you're exercising. Again, people say, oh, can I just take this and sit on the couch? No, you're not going to get any beneficial effects from it. First, you need to exercise. And then this potentially will give you some small beneficial health and clinical aspects. And I think starting at a small dose is very viable to see if you like it. And then I like putting it in food. You know, I always try to combine it

with protein because there's some evidence that you get a synergistic effect there. But if you just want to put it in water, go ahead. I like to drink it sometimes when I'm doing Peloton in my bottle. So as I'm drinking it, it's, it's getting into my system. So again, the timing is irrelevant and, and, um, um, I think you should take it on a daily basis. Have there been any, um, reported like gut issue? I've never had any, any digestion issues or anything. To me, it just seems like literally the most basic, it's almost more basic than your regular protein powder like when you see it it's so fine it dissolves it you don't you're never going to get some like

chunky protein shake that you is disgusting from it it's it's literally as basic as it gets which is probably why people are trying to find things wrong with it because we do see some anecdotal yeah we see some anecdotal side effects gi track with the loading phase and that's why a lot of clinical trials we try maybe just do a smaller amount so again if you're susceptible you have ibs or clones or colitis or just sensitivity uh i think trying two to three grams a day again you're that's the amount you're naturally synthesizing try that for the first seven days and if you say geez then move it up to five and then over a couple weeks if you want to

get the whole body potential perspective moving it i don't think there's any viability over 10 grams uh that seems to be a dose that would do all its potential effects um and you can spread that up into multiple dosages by the way you don't have to take it all one shot since it accumulates you can take a couple grams in your greek in the morning, three grams later and whichever. You're looking at your total daily amount. It's interesting. I'm in. What part of this, what part of the future of the studies most interests you? I mean, it looks like something that you could go in a zillion different directions on.

Which part of this is like the most interesting to you yeah i the the one that i think has a huge area is cancer rehabilitation um so individuals prostate cancer and and caxia so accelerated aging i think we've done a huge disservice to the aging population where we used to tell them to eat less protein and be less active because you're going to hurt yourself and we now know that's totally opposite to what we should be doing. So I'd love for people to have an average life expand to be 110 120. And so try to improve healthy aging, decrease neurodegenerative diseases. And the mental health aspect has a lot of COVID taught us a lot of things. But I think the mental health crisis, I mean, they took away physical activity from us. And then what traumatic effect does that have? So

I think this little nutrient in combination with holistic approach can have what I hopefully is an anti-aging or maybe even just improve your way of life. Everybody can agree with different aspects. So I think that's really important. And for me, it's the aging aspect. How do we get these people to live longer, free of disease and have a greater quality of life? Yeah, I'm always blown away when we can take these things that started in like the strength and conditioning performance space. And then, and really the thing was so interesting when we did that show with, uh, Dr. Tommy wood last week was like brain health is the thing that like is, is the most terrifying to me. Like, I don't want to be able to squat like three 15 when I'm 80, but not have a brain.

Yeah. And if we can, if we can find these things that progress much further than just getting results in the gym and actually have this global effect on neurological function, that is the thing that I'm the most interested in over the next 60 years. And I think the awareness, like what you guys are doing, podcasts, getting the information out there from scientists and things like that. That's really important because we're starting to run the issue with social media has taken over everything, including science. And sometimes the messages that you hear are not backed by evidence-based research. And so sometimes you hear a really famous person and if they don't have the right background or education and they have a hundred000 followers, there's 100,000 followers who may adopt what they're saying, and it may be right or wrong. And I think by getting evidence based research out to more streams and more awareness, the better. Again, there's always medical interventions and

things that most people can do. But if at the end of the day, if you can have a better understanding of what works and exercises, as we all can agree is the fountain of youth, the more active you are, it has unbelievable benefits. And if we can sprinkle in a couple of things that might help, we'll make it threes, um, you know, protein, obviously, uh, we have beneficial effects, potentially as caffeine on some neurological conditions and things like that. And then you add in creatine, like these are naturally synthesized things in the body except for caffeine. And you know, it's, if we just ate food, but healthy food, we'd probably be better off, right? A serving of salmon gives you a ton of protein, omega-3s,

some vitamin D and creatine. A lot of people can't eat seafood. They don't want to for whatever reason. But if you just look at a healthy approach um unfortunately creatine is not in vegetables it's only in trace amounts in poultry and very minimal in dairy so it's interesting that you kind of got to look at two animal-based products um or can some of these food product manufacturers start fortifying um their dry type of foods with creatine can Can creatine be stable in Greek yogurt? Could that be effective for, you know, calcium, vitamin D? And so I'm sure these phenomenal companies out

there, if they're not familiar with creatine, maybe they're starting to become more aware of it. How can we put it into a product? It's not stable in solution. So therefore, you know, you got to put it in a dry product or good. but i'm sure someone is thinking of how can we put a bit of creatine in a creek yogurt product or milk or or milk derivative or cheese or something um to give a little bit better bang for your dollar so to speak yeah most wait go ahead i was gonna say given that it has so many benefits for muscle and so many benefits for bone you think there'd be some research out there on joint health as well? Is there any research on joint health? Yeah, there's been a few decreased, a lot of symptoms, osteoarthritis in older adults. So again, that's beneficial. There's been a few on ACL pre and post surgery. And the research has has been equivocal but it can help decrease or speed up recovery um and so uh nothing really on rheumatoid arthritis there might be one study

but a few on osteoarthritis um obviously that has implications there as well so again it's it's kind of transitioned from the athlete to the average population now we're starting to get in some really cool clinical populations that's just from the anti-inflammatory benefits. The majority of people are going to have like a, a basic blood work panel. Is there anything that they can look at in those lab results to kind of see where their levels are at? If they're in, you know, in a, in a bad place, average level, optimal level, what can they,, if they're in, you know, in a bad place, average level, optimal level,

what can they what can they look like, look at in their blood work to be able to see this on their own? So the first thing, as soon as you go to a nephrologist, or your GP, you need to tell them that you're on creatine supplementation. The big reason is that creatine when it diffuses from the muscle, it diffuses in a product called creatinine and of course that's a very standard measure in the blood to indicate kidney function so people say oh my god my creatinine was high uh make sure you tell your doctor and hopefully they have an understanding of how this works but it should be elevated acutely but your kidneys will filter that out really easily sometimes they ask you to go off creatine and we come back and measure to make sure it was the creatine supplementation, but nine times out of 10,

it's a false alarm. If you're on creatine supplementation, your blood creatinine may be elevated compared to when you were taking it before. But other than that, we've looked at liver and kidney panels. We've looked at all those individuals and never had any detrimental effects. We're saying hi to Doug's wife. She just dropped off some coffee. Incredible. Nice. There you go.

Right. Yeah. So again, that's something because a lot of people say, oh, I got to go off creatine. It's killing my kidneys. No, make sure you're going to the person. And look at the data you had beforehand and very common. They go off creatine for a little bit. Their values come down.

It's just a natural process. It's different than creatine chiase. That's a little bit different. Yeah. Awesome, man. Where can people find you, your research and everything you have going on in the lab? Yeah, well, I started to do social media. So on Instagram, it's just at Dr. Darren Kando. And then as we talk about PubMed, it's for the journal articles, but not a lot of people go and read journal articles. But I think Instagram is probably the easiest. And the other thing is I'm very interested in responding to messages and questions. So I think the best is try me on Instagram and then we can follow up with email. Again, it's at Dr. Darren Kando.

And I'm more than happy to talk about this. I'm pretty excited and passionate, but again, we got seven papers in review, about eight studies and there's other labs going on in the world that are doing lots of great stuff. So I don't see this going away anytime soon. If anything, we're probably going to get better results and look at this from a health perspective. Yeah. It's crazy that, uh, it really, I feel like it obviously was the first time the first supplement i ever took um and that was actually like 26 summers ago when i started lifting weights and it's uh the fact that it's it still is something that is being researched and they're finding so many good things about it still um i feel like most things they like it, yep, it's good for this. And it's boring after that, or just, yeah, we hit the end.

It's interesting to the population, we see the best as vegans. And of course, it makes sense. They don't have red meat or seafood in their diet, they're going to have the lowest amount in the muscle. And when you give a vegan or vegetarian, or I guess you could even put in low meat eater or plant based diet emphasis. Now, they double the amount of creatine in the muscle and they can do way more reps or volume of

exercise. So even for females trying to put on lean tissue mass, decreased body fat, that's a very viable strategy. If you can do more work in the gym or on the Peloton or whatever, the theory is that you're going to increase your metabolic rate and transition or repurpose your body composition. So again, it's not just for males. Females can get massive benefits from creating supplementation and exercise. I appreciate it, man. Doug Larson. All right. Darren, dude, I really appreciate you coming on the show. This was really interesting. I really enjoyed it. Awesome. Thanks, man.

You bet. I'm on Instagram, Douglas E. Larson. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. Make sure you get over to RapidHealthReport.com where you can see Dan Garner read my labs. If you want to hang out with me, get super healthy and perform at your best, that's where you go. Set the call up. RapidHealthReport.com.

Friends, we'll see you guys next week.