Creatine: A Hack To Get Jacked?
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Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus. Today on the show, we're pitting facts against fitness buffs. Want to work out harder, increase your stamina, endurance, scientifically formulated to get results. Expect more from workouts. Aim for greatness.

And you know how we're going to get that greatness from our workouts? With one supplement that everyone is talking about. This is creatine. Take creatine. How important creatine supplementation is. A wonderful, wonderful supplement. It's the best thing ever.

It's huge if you want to get huge. People are saying that if you want to build muscles, you have to take this. Here's how to use creatine to get bigger and stronger. You're a gym girly with a flat ass. I have a supplement that will help. Creatine, creatine. Girl, creatine made that booty grow.

But it's not just about your booty and muscles. More and more, we're hearing that creatine can also boost your brain power, too. There's a lot of, like, cognitive benefits, and one of the big ones that they found recently is performance when sleep-deprived. You know, the data is unbelievable, and it improves mood and memory. That's extraordinary. Very, very, very, very, very, very.

Over and over again, influencers, podcasters are saying that the studies on creatine are amazing. You'll hear things like there's 50 years of data to show that it works and it's safe. And some folks on our team actually got so excited about the hype here that they have started to give it a go.

But then, more recently, there's been some not-so-exciting headlines about this supplement. Like, quote, creatine may not build more muscle after all, study suggests. Another one, shocking new study challenges muscle-building hype.

So what's going on here? Should you take creatine or not? Will it boost your brawn and your brain? That is on today's show. When it comes to creatine, there's a lot of... Girl creatine made that booty grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. But then there's science. Science versus creatine is coming up just after the break. ♪

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Welcome back today on the show, Creatine. Can it help you get that big booty, those big muscles and that big brain? That's what we're asking today. Producer Michelle Dang is here to tell us all about it. Hey, Michelle. Hey, Wendy. So what got you so excited about learning all the facts on Creatine? Well, I want to build muscle. Yeah. And I just kept hearing that Creatine is like the supplement to take in

And I figured, like, research is research. So let's find out if the hype is real. Love it. Okay. So first up, just a very basic question. What exactly is creatine? Some people think it's a steroid, but it's not. It's actually something our body naturally makes from food.

When you eat things like meat or fish, your body pulls together amino acids from it to actually create creatine. But people take supplements like that white powder you buy in the store because they want more of this stuff. So let's jump into the claims. And I want to start with the muscles. Because online, you see these folks with these huge muscles, right?

Is Crichton doing the heavy lifting here? Yeah. Speaking of huge muscles...

We got to go talk to Darren Willoughby, who's a professor of anatomy at Baylor College Medicine in Texas. Not just any exercise nerd. Darren's also a former bodybuilder, which means lots of skimpy outfits. What's it like to be up there with no clothes on? Actually, it wasn't stressful for me at all. I've always been a pretty modest, humble individual.

But when it comes time to come on stage, the fact that, you know, I've got these next to nothing posing trunks on, I mean, because I've worked so hard, you know, and you just, you want to show it off.

Let me show you what he looked like last time he won a competition. This was back in 2018. Wow. I mean, he's huge. He's huge. I mean, he looks like those classic images of Adolf Schwarzenegger. All right. I trust that this guy knows how to build some muscles. Yeah, so Darren's been studying creatine for a while. It was back in the 90s. He started hearing whispers about creatine's powers. Obviously, I'm going to be interested in that.

So Darren wanted to know, does creatine actually work? Does it build muscle? So to find out, he got 22 men, split them into two groups. One got creatine and one got placebo. And for three months, every few days, they did this lower body workout, lots of leg presses. But they took it a step further.

and look inside the muscles themselves by grabbing a giant needle and ramming it into their upper thigh. He showed me what one of these look like. It's hollow, but it's very sharp on the end. And then this thing is just a chopper. So I would just take it and just push it down two or three times. It's kind of like a plunger? Yeah. A piece of muscle will actually pooch into that window and that chopper just then just cuts it right off and saves it.

They use an anesthetic, but Darren says that this basically feels like getting punched in the thigh. So when he got the muscle biopsies, did he see a difference between the people who were taking creatine and those who weren't? Yes, he did see a difference.

So he took out a bit of muscle from them, did this chemical analysis and found more of these muscle proteins, one called myosin heavy chain and another one called myofibrillar protein. And there was more of this stuff in the people that took creatine.

meaning that their muscles had grown, indeed grown more. Oh, that's cool. You could say the actual muscle was getting bigger? Yeah, like the density of the muscles growing. You have more units of this muscle

microscopic muscle that's actually being grown and built. And the people in the study were feeling a bit stronger too. The creatine group actually got stronger. It wasn't dramatic, but it was enough that it was certainly of impact. So how is creatine actually doing this? Is it

building the muscle for you? Well, Darren said it's not physically building muscle for you. Instead, it works by getting you extra energy during your workout. So like as you're working out, you're rapidly using up fuel in your body, which is ATP or adenosine triphosphate. Uh-huh.

And your body like eats it up really quickly, runs out of ATP and then needs to recycle it to use it again. And what creatine does is help that recycling process happening faster. Interesting. Yeah. And another really interesting thing that Darren's study tried to sort out is this question of whether creatine actually helped grow muscles or if maybe it just kind of makes them look bigger.

What do you mean? It's because of this other thing creatine can do in our bodies. So when we bring a bunch of creatine into our muscles, it can bring water in with it. Here's Darren. It pulls water out of the bloodstream into the muscle cell. Which would mean maybe your muscles get plumped up, but you're sort of tricked into thinking it's muscle gain when it's really just this water that's hanging around in there.

Oh, okay. But Darren's study showed, no, it's not just that. Actual muscle was growing, right? Exactly. It looked like at least some of the gain was real muscle. And some studies in older folks have also found that creatine really can help build muscle too.

But then there's been these headlines lately saying that creatine might not help build muscle. So what is going on here? Well, this new study came out suggesting that the question of how much of the gains you see with creatine are water weight versus actual muscle growth hasn't been fully solved.

But, you know, we spoke to the author of the study and he basically told us that when you zoom out and look at the bulk of studies on creatine, it shows creatine can help build muscle. But the question is, how much? So did you notice that Darren said that even in his study when creatine made people stronger, it wasn't a dramatic difference? Yes.

That's what a lot of these studies find. Creatine can work, but it's not this huge change. Like it's not a night and day difference from how you were working out before creatine.

Darren told me maybe I'll help you do like two to three extra reps, like a few extra push-ups or lifts per set at the gym. Maybe just a meathead in the gym like me and you get a couple of extra reps per set. And one review of 10 studies that followed people for different times, about a week all the way up to a year, imaged their muscles and found that creatine compared to placebo increased the thickness of their muscles by about a tenth of a centimeter.

A tenth of a centimeter more muscle. That's like a tenth of a belly button? Right. So these differences are not huge. And, you know, these extra reps you can do thanks to creatine, it might add up for some people. Darren reckons it's worth trying. Right.

But big picture here. Let me tell you about the Olympics. They have this huge list of banned substances. You can't use steroids or this and that, but you can use creatine. It is not a banned substance. Oh.

It is not a banned substance. Yeah, it's not a banned substance. And some have suggested that this is because it's a naturally occurring substance that the body makes from food.

However, we also reached out to the World Anti-Doping Agency and asked them, like, why isn't this stuff banned? And they told us there's this criteria for banning substances. One is, quote, it has the potential to enhance sport performance. Yes, which you would think if it's building muscle, it obviously has the potential to enhance your sport performance. Yes, yes. And they told us that creatine does not satisfy that.

criteria. Interesting. We followed up and said, you know, triple checking here. Are you sure creatine does not have the potential to enhance sport performance? And they wrote back, it is not considered sufficiently performance enhancing. That is very interesting because if creatine did, it

What the internet really makes it sound like it does, which is you take it and you become the Hulk in a few months. There's no way the Olympics would allow it. But the fact that they're saying not sufficiently performance enhancing, right, so maybe it helps a little, but we don't care. Go for it. Exactly. Even the U.S. anti-doping agency, which also doesn't ban creatine, says...

Quote, although creatine can have a small effect on performance, the effects are not guaranteed. End quote. And this takes us to another really important point about creatine. The reason those effects are not guaranteed is that we know from the research there are some people who don't respond to creatine. So people who don't even get those small benefits that we talked about earlier.

For example, there was one small study that found about one in four men didn't respond. And we think it might be even worse for women. Oh, how come? Maybe because the hormone fluctuations with the menstrual cycle affect our uptake of creatine, but we're not really sure yet.

And while Wendy, I've been taking creatine and Blythe, our editor, has also been taking creatine. And speaking of all this like booty growing, she's been doing this workout program called the Brazilian Booty Lift. Okay. And so is, dare I ask, how's Blythe's booty going? Yeah. Here's a snippet of how it's going. Do you feel any differently at the gym? Five weeks in. No.

Oh. Yeah, I totally log it. And I was like, let me see if I'm lifting any more weight for the exact same workout than I was in January or even February, right? Well, if creatine is doing anything, you know, I would think I would be like putting more weight or feeling stronger. And I looked at the pounds and it's like basically the same. I was like, ah, can I do more weight on this incline press, like pushing my arms above my head? And I just like,

No, no, I just can't. I really can't push the weight up there. Michelle, it's not working. And, you know, I've been taking it too. And me and Blythe, we're just an N of two. But I haven't noticed a difference either while taking creatine. But just because we haven't experienced a difference doesn't mean like you, listener, won't. So...

But then, I mean, just one more question on this muscle thing. What do you make of these videos where people get so huge? Like they'll have this before and after and they say the only thing that's changed is creatine. Why are they so swole all of a sudden? Well, one, it could be exaggerating.

Like how fast it took them. But it's also possible that some people are responding really well to creatine, but kind of in a psychological way, too.

Darren told me that when you go to work out, you could be physically working harder because you think like, oh my God, this creatine is amazing. Here's Darren. A lot of times that's because they're actually training harder or working harder, hoping that they're really going to get an impact from the supplement. So in the end, they have improved performance, period. That's all that matters, right? Whether it's a placebo effect or where it comes from creatine. Game on.

All right, so here's where we're at with creatine and building muscle. It does have the potential to help you build muscle through either giving you more energy to do more reps because you have more ATP to play with because it's working on your mind, but it's also

It's not magic. Some people don't respond at all. And even if you do respond, for most of us, it's not going to make us shredded. Exactly. Okay. After the break, forget brawn. It's time to look at the brain. People are saying that creatine can do remarkable things to boost your brain power. Could they be right? Yes. Scientists are getting excited here. Whoa. Yeah, yeah. It was for me totally amazing.

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That's R-O-K-A dot com. And use offer code SCIENCE20 for 20% off your order. Welcome back. We're looking at the supplement creatine and we're going to find out if it can help our brain, which I'm seeing a lot of buzz about right now that, you know, creatine is going to help with your cognition and memory, particularly when you're sleep deprived.

Yeah. Now, this idea isn't totally wild. Remember how creatine works to help you build muscle because you're better at recycling that fuel, ATP? Yes, that's right. You have more fuel, then you have more energy, you can do more reps. Yes. Yeah. Well, the brain also uses ATP.

So Ali Gorjanejan, a physicist from the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, Germany, figured... We thought, okay, when that is working for the muscles, why not for the brain? So Ali wanted to know if creatine could really boost your brain power. And for this study, he wanted to get the brain when it's at its worst and really needs that fuel. When it is totally exhausted, totally stressed...

And the totally exhausted, totally stressed state that he studied was the sleep-deprived brain. Ugh, this study is going to get rough. Uh-huh. And so one evening, Ali brought 15 people into the lab and ran a bunch of tests on them. In one of these tests, he's looking at reaction times. So a green dot lights up on a screen and you have to press a clicker as soon as you see it.

But you get tired and more tired and you get really crappy at this. Yes, I know. I've done this test actually while sleep deprived and you think it would be easy because you just see this damn green dot, but you're just, you know, missing the clicker at points. Yeah. So there's also memory tests he did, stuff like that. And then Ali had to make sure that these folks didn't sleep.

And for those who were struggling to stay awake, he had a cheeky trick. I find out what controversial thematic issues are and I take the opposite position.

You debated about politics. Yeah, about politics. Exactly. Oh my gosh. I couldn't imagine anything worse than having political discussions with someone at 3, 4, 5 in the morning where everyone's just going bonkers at that point. On top of the annoying chats throughout the night, Ollie's taking MRI scans and repeating those cognitive tests repeatedly.

Once at midnight, at 2 a.m., and at 4 a.m. And, you know, these people are really dedicated. They all came into the lab to do this on a second night again.

So each person got one night on creatine, another on placebo. They didn't know which they were getting each time. Okay. It is time to find out, did they do better at the cognitive tests with creatine? Well, very on theme, it was late at night when Ali tallied up the results and he got so excited. Creatine was actually doing something.

And that is a totally amazing moment. Yes, okay. Wow. Cool. Yeah. Just imagine it was about 1 a.m. or something like that. 2 a.m. And I saw, wow. Cool. I didn't know all the people were sleeping here. I didn't know whom to say. So it was for me totally amazing. But I have to keep the celebration for myself for the first time.

But next day I told it to the colleagues and they celebrated that. Those taking creatine on average did significantly better at both the memory test and the clicker test. Surprising was the speed in processing time. They were all extremely faster. Wow.

Wow. Extremely faster. Through those MRI scans, Ali was also able to see that brain creatine levels increased and went up over time. And that the brain was using them up throughout the night. That's so cool that they could see it in the brain scanners. Yeah. So he had total proof that this is what was happening. But you have to know that Ali gave the people in the study a huge dose of

Most people suggest that you need to take around like five grams a day. He gave them around five times that. Yeah, this is about 20 to 30 grams. Just imagine, this is like a half glass of this white powder. It's a lot. It tastes also not good.

yeah but hey it worked and Ali's study has created this huge buzz online you've got folks like Joe Rogan talking about it but it is a small study and so before I started smashing half a glass of white powder I went hunting for other studies looking into creatine in the brain and came across this very interesting one by Julia Fabian Sandkuhler I'm Fabian and

And I'm a psychology researcher. At the University of Bonn, also in Germany. So Fabian and her team recruited 123 healthy people and had them take creatine for six weeks. She also had those same people take placebo for six weeks to compare.

And Fabian thinks this is the largest study on creatine supplementation and the brain that we have so far. She did a bunch of cognitive tests on them. Stuff like you heard before, things that look at memory, but also intelligence and reasoning. Mm-hmm.

For example, they did this one test called the backward digit span test. I tell you a few numbers. I start with two, just two. And then you have to say them back in reverse order. Would you like to try it out, Wendy? Sure, sure. Okay. I want to give you digits. You have to repeat it back to me, but backwards. Okay. And I'm going to add a digit until you mess up. Okay, okay. Two. Two. Two.

Two, six. Six, two. Two, six, three. Three, six, two. Two, six, three, one. One, six, three, two. Okay, you messed up. Two, three. It was two, three, wasn't it? So you did almost average. On average, people can do about five digits pretty well. Uh-huh. So if I took creatine, according to Fabian's study, would I do better? Yeah.

So Fabian looked at the results before and after creatine, and on average, no, it didn't help. Some people got a little boost compared to when they were on the placebo, but overall, it wasn't statistically significant. Aww. Yeah. So people online say it's amazing, brings you this giant boost in mental clarity and energy, but it's not.

Fabienne says Isha notes it's not anywhere near that big of a jump. Like suddenly they can do like quantum physics. No, definitely no quantum physics. I'm not sure how easy it would be to notice. She's saying I'm not sure how easy it would be to notice.

Right. And I've been taking it. Blythe has been taking it. We've been exercising and we haven't really noticed much of anything. Here's Blythe. How do you feel mentally? Do you feel any different from before, before you took creatine to now? No, not whatsoever. Not remotely.

Yeah, no, I feel no different. Zero, zero, zero across the board on increased memory, cognition, energy. I'm not noticing that. So does this mean this claim about creatine? I mean, you have Ali's study that said yes, then Fabian's larger study that says no. What do we make of this?

So Allie's study was really when the brain was at its worst, right? Right. Everyone was sleep-deprived. And maybe that's where creatine does its best work for the brain. Because there's been other studies showing that creatine can help with the brain in other stressed-out states, like helping with recovery after a stroke or concussion, and maybe even depression. Yeah.

A study published just this year on 100 folks with pretty nasty depression found that taking creatine along with cognitive behavioral therapy helped folks more than just CBT and a placebo. Huh, interesting. And even just for older folks. A recent review suggested that maybe it's more effective in boosting the memory of older adults compared to younger adults. But as for those...

influencers who are like, everybody take this, everybody boost your brain, do a better job at work. That's probably overstated. I guess even though it's not going to turn you into a quantum physicist, just the fact that, you know, maybe if you're sleep deprived, it could help your brain or if you have depression, maybe it could help early research suggesting it's exciting. Plus those people

small benefits that you say to your muscles I mean I'm not kicking this supplement out of bed just yet but

The last question is, what are the risks of taking it? So we know from the hundreds of studies on creatine that it's safe on the recommended dose, three to five grams a day. One thing on the internet I hear a lot that people are worried about is putting on weight and bloating. We think this sometimes happens because, as you heard before, creatine does this thing where it brings water into muscle cells.

So muscles around your body are holding on to a bit more water than it normally would. This can lead to that bloaty feeling. And that water retention might lead to a bit of weight gain on the scales. Uh-huh. Okay. But if this happens to you, you should feel back to normal pretty quickly. Okay. There's also this big idea that you'll get dehydrated from creatine. So people online say like drink tons of water to make up for this.

But Darren, our bodybuilder, says you don't have to worry about this. There's no concerns with any types of ongoing dehydration. There have been a number of studies that have shown that also to be true. Just quickly, some people don't seem to digest creatine very well.

You can get a bit of diarrhea or feel uncomfortable in your gut. Darren is actually one of these people. He said he gets gassy on creatine and he's tried all kinds of different forms of creatine to help, but nothing did. And also, if you're someone who has any kind of kidney conditions, you should maybe, you maybe shouldn't take creatine because it's going to give your kidneys a lot of extra work.

But if your kidneys are healthy, that three to five gram dose should be perfectly fine for you. That's great. And if you do want to try this for your muscles, there's no need to be taking more than the recommended dose. Oh, because people talk about taking a ton of this stuff when you first start that

loading phase? Yeah, people claim you should take this loading phase of 20 to 25 grams of creatine a day for a week so that you saturate your muscles faster and then you drop down to that lower dose. But Darren's actually said you don't need to do this. It's not necessary. He did a study on this looking at how much creatine came out of people's pee when they started their creatine regimens with a loading phase. So after like four days of

The subjects were urinating out large amounts of their creatine dose. After about four days, the muscle was saturated. So that convention that it takes like weeks to become saturated? No, that's not true. Not true at all. Oh, okay. So forget the loading phase. You're just going to pee it out.

pee out all this excess creatine. Your muscles don't need it. Yeah. But bottom line, capping off this episode here, having done the research, for me, creatine isn't mind-blowing, but it's safe and it might boost some muscle. So I think it might be a helpful tool in the gym. I plan to keep trying it out and see if it works for me. Huh. Okay. I mean, even though some of the benefits are definitely overstated...

I will say, Michelle, it's probably the most optimistic conclusion we've had about a supplement in a long time. So thank you. Thanks, Wendy. Thank you.

So how many citations are in this week's episode? Wendy, there are 65 citations. 65 citations. Yes. And if people want to see them in all of their glory, where should they go? Please check out our transcript in the show notes. Michelle, happy birthday. Happy birthday.

Happy birthday to... Science Versus! Science Versus! Science Versus is 10 years old! Crazy. This show's been going for 10 years. It's bonkers. Well, you've been here for all those 10 years. How are you feeling? What is most funny to me is how...

Things have changed a lot in the world and in the world of misinformation and in social media, blah, blah, blah, blah. But at the same time, the more things change, the more they stay the same. And I love that the very first pilot episode of Science Versus, which in the future, I reckon we should put it down the feed because it's so funny. It's about the paleo diet. And next week, our episode is about the carnivore diet. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

that. That is very nice symmetry to me. Oh, and there's something that you wanted to ask the audience about, right? Yeah, well, if you guys want to send us a message or it feels weird to

Do you want to send me a happy birthday message? No, but, you know, in a future episode, we're going to kind of be pulling together some fun birthday stuff. And we would love to hear from you about how you felt about listening to Science Versus over these years, if there was like an episode that changed what you do, whatever.

or a pun that still makes you laugh. That seems unlikely. But we would just love to hear from you. Yeah, so people should send us a voicemail or even a video to our email at sciencevstteam at gmail.com. Or if you're in the US, you can call us and leave a voicemail at 774-481-1238. Those two things will be in our show notes. So head over there and send us a message.

All right. See you soon, Michelle. See you. Bye. Bye. This episode was produced by Michelle Dang with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, Meryl Horn, Rose Rimler and Aketi Foster-Keys. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Marlo Starling.

Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Emma Munger, So Wiley, Peter Leonard, Bumi Hidaka and Bobby Lord. A special thanks to all of the researchers that we reached out to, including Dr. Imtiaz Desai and Professor Phil Chillebeck. Thanks to Larry Lee and Lee Physical Therapy and Wellness.

Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We are everywhere. But if you are listening on Spotify, you can follow us and tap the bell icon so you get notifications when new episodes come out. And on whatever app you are listening on, please give us a five-star review if you like what we're doing because it helps people find the show. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.