is not the right way to interpret the null result (insufficient evidence to reject null hypothesis that it has no effect) because the prior for supplements that people are trying to sell you is so low. In the absence of clear, strong evidence, you should assume the the whole thing is just an example of motivated reasoning. People want nootropics to be real, and other people really want to sell you readily available powders by claiming they have nootropic properties. In that environment, they were always going to trying to concoct a similar narrative about some supplement, and it just happened to be creatine. Those efforts were always going to result in a handful of "positive" studies that turn out to be non-reproducible, maybe because of p-hacking, maybe because of publication bias, maybe because of outright fraud. This is what the literature always looks like for stuff that just doesn't work. If it did work - if the effect size was large enough that you could personally detect it in your own life - then the papers would be trying to put error bars around the effect size, not trying (and failing) to barely distinguish it from a placebo.
“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” - Ernest Rutherford
I think this is quite different because (1) creatine has been proven to be completely harmless for people of all ages absent some rare thing like a kidney disorder and (2) it has a bunch of clearly measurable positive effects.
So this is more like trying to determine whether ginseng is good at keeping away colds or whatever. Maybe it does (actually quickly searching this, it definitely does but let's pretend it's as folksy as it sounds for a minute) but even if it doesn't then it's harmless and has a bunch of other effects, so when one takes it - the whole possible cold prophylaxis can just be seen as an added perk.
Issue being that if you took everything that's "probably harmless" and overall does nothing much, cramming your body full of supplements, your liver will start to have a bad time, causing harm in aggregate. Also the more random stuff you take, the more likely it is that something you took actually does turn out to have been harmful a couple years later.
Is there a particular rare kidney disorder that creatine is contraindicated for? Because kidney disease is not rare, something like 14% of US adults have kidney disease.
and the thing people seem to not understand: how exactly do you _expect_ to be able to notice this change?
Its something that happens after you take it for a prolonged period of time (>7days) and only has a minor/medium effect.
It doesn't make you a genius. I think a better view on it is that it may mitigate some of the adhs symptoms (at least for me).
I can keep on track for a significantly longer time since ive started supplementing with it at ~15g/day - and while i dont feel a difference, i can observe it when actually paying attention to what i do / how often i drift off etc.
What I'm getting from all this is that we have an armchair expert explaining details about something they're not an expert in, and we have you reviewing the way they present this information, saying their very weak hedge wasn't strongly negative enough. Based on priors about the industry.
Basically, HN doing HN things - having a good deep think about topics outside their realm of expertise, then debating the minutiae. I'd just rather trust someone who has spent their career researching this stuff, thanks (unless that's what you do - in which case please tell us more).
It may be minutiae, but olooney’s point is valid: the evidence doesn’t seem to support saying “maybe a little”. Remove that statement from the conclusion and it’s on the right track, aside from the arbitrary IQ point calculation which is nonsensical.
Even as an informal conclusion I think it's important to know who you're up against and what their motivations are. Waving that away is how we get people like known, obvious charlatans like RFK Jr in any sort of position of power. I know this is nitpicking word choice but the informal conclusion is "Not likely, and not enough to matter for anything."
There is a brand of creatine manufactured in the US (con-cret) and a brand manufactured in Germany (Creapure). Either of those companies should address the concern around adulterated powder.
> That's why I dropped creatine since I didn't notice any benefits when I tried it for a year.
Some percentage of people (~20%) are creatine non-responders [1]. It's pretty reasonable to try creatine and then drop it if you find no benefit. I personally find the gain very marginal.
With most industries companies live and die by their reputation. Find a bulk provider with a positive reputation and the creatine you buy is almost certainly going to be safer than e.g. eating at Taco Bell. And with creatine in particular it's so dirt cheap that a lot of motivation for dodgy stuff goes away unlike e.g. with protein powders where amino acid spiking can save a company a bunch of money. And incidentally creatine is one of the substances dodgy companies use for amino acid spiking, just because it's so cheap!
That said it's obviously the right decision to drop it if you're not seeing any effects. The interesting thing about creatine is that people's bodies are very different in their natural levels of creatine, and if you're already at 'saturation' then more creatine isn't going to do anything. Same reason the typical benefits of creatine don't show much difference beyond 5g/day. That's enough to send the overwhelming majority of people towards 'saturation.'
What value is there to an informal conclusion when the topic is as important as intelligence? The downsides to creatine if taken without good scientific backing should not be disregarded, yet that’s exactly what many ordinary people are now doing because of “informal conclusions” like this.
Are there really downsides to creatine though? (Genuine question). All the advice I've seen makes it seem like it's basically just good for you even if it doesn't accomplish some specific thing. The only downside I've heard is maybe water retention?
The null is surely different in this case because we know that supplemented creatine goes to the brain and the brain uses it, which is definitely not a claim all supplements can make.
The fact that there's a biologically plausible mechanism plus mixed statistical evidence makes "maybe" a perfectly reasonable conclusion.
I think the way you interpret the null result is downstream of considering creatine as "a supplement". You can make the null result say anything by changing your prior about creatine or supplements. That's the issue with priors.
You also seem to reject the possibility that some things help just a bit. The author has another article in the same vein about "things that can help maybe a bit but the evidence we have doesn't really help detecting small effects" https://dynomight.net/vitamin-d/
I was visiting a friend’s lab at NASA Ames the other day. I smiled seeing this on the wall there. I sometimes daydream about what it’d be like if our primary education system devoted an hour a week to reading / discussing comics (well, XKCD specifically), or pages form What If…? Maybe it’d kill the magic of it, but I still feel plenty of seeds would get planted along the way for more critical thinking later in life.
Heavily agreed. The supplement industry has such a low level of reliability that it has really soured me on so many practices people have. And I flat out do not understand how some of the supplement stores survive.
Hard sell. I remember the time I went to GNC and they gave me a free sample of the notorious Jack3D which had some kind of amphetamine-like stimulant in it and was associated with young soldiers in the US Army falling down dead.
They survive because people want to believe. Look at the history: the phrase “snake oil” exists because people actually sold products by that name as a remedy. There were also tonics based on radium.
The story of how the phrase snake oil came to be is a fascinating one. Clark Stanley, an American, ripped off a Chinese product which was actually a decent anti-inflammatory, and didn't put any snake oil in his snake oil, which is why it didn't work!
>And I flat out do not understand how some of the supplement stores survive.
I think mostly through placebo effect, people buy a supplement to treat condition X and they think it's getting better, so they keep buying.
I mean, just look at the wide variety of homeopathic "cures" that are often so diluted that there might not be any molecules of the active ingredient left. Yet people keep buying it.
Okay, but it kind of sounds like you want to nanny-state the writer's language.
Their conclusion seems like an absolutely fair interpretation of what they saw, and it also strikes me as dangerous -- perhaps more dangerous -- to suggest "writer genuinely believes, or doesn't believe, a thing, but they should say it differently from their own interpretation because..people are dumb?" Something like that.
I have severe sleep apnea as well as insomnia. I may also be a multi-phasic sleeper. In any case my average sleep per night is ~3.5 hours with only ~1.5 hours of deep sleep. I use light therapy, CPAP, medications, etc but none of it solves my problems. I started taking creatine daily a couple of months ago. I've noticed a significant uptick in my cognitive abilities, despite being constantly sleep deprived. TFA doesn't touch on this apparent benefit of creatine, so thought I'd mention it for others who might be suffering from similar sleep issues.
Apnea sufferer here, for whom cpap stopped working after weight loss. It turned out that my mouth was opening during sleep, reducing the effectiveness of cpap, and after adding a chin strap to keep my mouth shut I have had very few apnea events.
The mouth-tapers aren’t always wrong (though we do always look silly).
Sometimes I stay up until 1–3 a.m. because I'm working on a problem that's so interesting I can't stop until I make progress.
If I know I'm only going to get a few hours of sleep, I'll take 5–10 g of creatine, drink plenty of water, and go to bed. The next morning, I usually don't wake up with a headache.
If I skip the creatine under the same conditions, I'm much more likely to wake up with a headache after a short night's sleep.
Now it's become a habit, I automatically take creatine whenever I know my sleep duration is going to be much shorter than usual.
Do you still drink water when you skip creatine? Being dehydrated causes headaches, so it may be the extra water intake that's helping and not the creatine.
yes, i always drink plenty of water throughout day and night too, infact when i get stuck on a problem i go for a walk and drink water.
So drinking water part is consistent with or without creatine. I do know the creatine takes a while to build up, so i don't know why it works but it does.
Yes, but hydration isn’t really a problem for me. I’m a bit of a water purification nerd, I collect water from a natural waterfall, run it through multiple stages of purification, and then start convincing myself it has some magical properties. I don’t drink soda or caffeine, I mostly just drink water.
I wonder if there’s any long term studies like how the body gets adjusted to creatine. Because human body is remarkable at adjusting and setting new baselines and I wonder if it’s true with creatine as well, like to have the same effect you need to take more creatine the longer you keep on taking it
Most people taking creatine just need to drink water. They drink more water using creatine. In reality, the water/hydration is doing the heaviest lift, not the creatine.
Plausible-sounding mechanisms like you're presenting here do not add value to the discourse without data. There are tons of plausible mechanisms we could make up absent empirical evidence to distinguish them.
I was taking 5mg of Creatine and was in the ER for an unrelated reason. My metabolic panel measured creatinine at 1.34 mg/dL. A panel from last year without the supplement was a very normal 0.95. These were gummies and I wasn’t slamming water.
BTW, it tends to trash the eGFR test which relies on an unbiased creatinine reading.
I don’t know. I personally wouldn’t take it if you aren’t also working out/lifting frequently (even if you drink a ton of water).
Anecdotal so safe to ignore this… but my hair did thin out but only after I was lazier on my work outs. Stopped taking and hair mostly returned to normal thank God.
The reason I asked is that creatine will allow you to lift a bit more (a little more weight, a few more reps). This will cause more muscle fatigue which in turn can lead to more cramping. Water and electrolytes can help, but when the muscles are fatigued they are still more likely to cramp.
I like creatine when I’m lifting because it reduces soreness. For some people that effect helps them push further and train harder, for me it’s just proactive pain relief
There are lots like Vitamin water, alkaline, and coconut water. And overpriced salt packets like Nuun and LMNT.
There's also no shortage of expensive water bottles being sold, and smart water bottles that track your drinking frequencies and flavor pods sold via subscription.
To go off topic a bit further, I recently went into Walgreens to buy some bottled water, and other than Evian, it was all advertised as alkaline. Is that just a trend, was it already alkaline and now that’s just in fashion? Personally I see it and worry I’ll get an upset stomach if it start messing with my pH.
Water that's coming out of your tap is generally aiming for neutral (~7 ph). The alkaline waters in the store are using minerals to elevate it into probably the 9s.
Like many hippie health trends that then go mainstream, a lot of it seems to filter in from Rastafarian traditions, where in the Ital diet they believe that alkaline water coming from the Blue Mountains in Jamaica (and other natural springs there which are naturally alkaline) help detoxify the acids in the body.
I slam a lot of water. I also have a toddler and baby who suck at sleeping (I've done all the things, these kids just suck at sleeping).
Since taking creatine I feel so much more energized. I can make it through the day with just 2 coffees (was previously drinking 5 coffees and an energy drink).
Maybe it's placebo. Maybe it's not. I don't really care. I feel the benefit and I love it.
I also drink a lot of water (always have). I also train Muay Thai and am in my 40s, which means an hour of 1:1 with my trainer would just leave me ridiculously tired. I started supplementing with creatine and immediately it was evident that it was working -- after 8-10 rounds on pads and the heavy bag I was fine. To the point where my trainer would often tell me to take another round on the bag.
At a certain point I was wondering if it was just placebo, stopped taking it for a month or so, and was quickly back to feeling tired after training. Started taking it again, back to feeling energized. It really does work.
"Other studies already proved those effects with creatine with a normal dose schedule, what they were testing is if a single high dose would have a beneficial effect too, which it did.
A normal schedule is 3-5g per day with an optional loading phase of 10-20g per day during 7 days.
In the study they used a single dose of 0.35g/kg which means 20-40g per dose. How do they not get diarrhea? The loading phase is usually split into several doses to avoid diarrhea and I can personally attest to that being a good idea."
What the above doesn't tell you is that taking a loading dose can draw water into your intestines causing diarrhea. You probably can guess how I found this out.
I take my creatine with as little volume of water as possible, probably less than 50ml. I doubt that 50ml is having much impact on my overall hydration.
How much water are you drinking the rest of the day? Creatine in theory makes you more thirsty such that you should be drinking more water throughout the day
Knowledge of the potential is peripheral expectation.
If you can say "Oh yea that makes sense" with the same set of knowledge you had both before and after some event happens, all else being equal, you have an expectation. That is enough for placebo.
You have to have literally 0 knowledge about an event to rule out placebo.
Are you suggesting that the placebo effect applies retroactively? I'd been using creatine for months before I even heard there were conversations about supposed cognitive effects (and I hadn't noticed any myself, either, and I continue to not notice any. That isn't why I take it.)
Why are you so sure that the poster (or anyone else commenting here) isn’t drinking enough water?
I drink lots of water. Lots and lots, to the point that it’s already kind of annoying how frequently I have to piss. I’m fairly skeptical that drinking yet more would yield any benefits.
Yes. It’s very rare for a supplement to have such strong and consistent evidence.
A widely-cited review says that short-term supplementation increases maximal power/strength by 5-15%. This in turn may increase the long-term gainz from strength-training exercise. Creatine also increases sprint performance by 1-5%. Though, there seems to be little if any benefit for endurance exercise like long-distance running.
>Contrary to the common myth, thinking hard does not burn significantly more calories. (Demonstration: Start thinking hard, and watch as your heart rate does not increase.)
The original claim is not wrong. Thinking hard does not burn significantly more calories.
If it’s really hard to measure because the amount is so small that it requires precise equipment, it’s not significant relative to the rest of the body’s energy expenditure.
This matches what Gwern wrote years ago [0]. It does unequivocally make you stronger though. So if you're training anyway, may as well take it and hope it makes you smarter as well (just believing might be enough for that sweet placebo effect).
This made me wonder if sun exposure/vitamin D has any impact on storing or processing creatine, and maybe that's why the results in Australia were so much greater
I have definitely noticed improvements taking a larger dose with my energy when low on sleep, check out McMorris et al. (2006) which is not cited here. I agree it probably doesn't make you generally more 'smart' but it does may improve function under stress, e.g. when sleep deprived, also see Gordji-Nejad et al. (2024). I think the sleep benefits should at least be mentioned in this article.
Also search for 'sleep' in this comment section, seems many see similar improvements!
> Wikipedia quotes a paper saying people make / recycle around 50 kilograms per day. That would imply that people make around 0.5787 grams per second. But this is in tension with the idea that people use 100 watts at rest. Since that 100 watt number seems to be more strongly established, I think 1 gram per second is a better estimate.
The cited paper in Wikipedia might be accurate and the author is just expecting "at rest" to mean awake but mostly idle. I'd wager that during sleep, we use less than 100W. For the sake of argument if you take out 8 hours (asleep time) from a 24 hour period, you end up with a rate of ~0.8681 grams per second, much closer to 1g/s. Anyway, just a little fun with numbers.
> Available short and long-term studies in healthy and diseased populations, from > infants to the elderly, at dosages ranging from 0.3 to 0.8 g/kg/day for up to 5 > years have consistently shown that creatine supplementation poses no adverse
> health risks and may provide a number of health and performance benefits.
Yep. From what I read mental fatigue (mental math problems is what the study used) or sleep deprivation are two scenarios in which creatine boosted cognition and memory.
Personally I have noticed a lot less cognitive impairment after a poor night’s sleep since starting on 10g per day. It seems to make a noticeable difference in my ability to reason and to act having slept less than 7 hours per night, even on consecutive nights.
I started taking 5g for cognition. Never any clear signal for that, but it does seem to help a bit with my (more than occasional) sleep deprivation. Mostly with fighting off headaches.
I think another source of variation on the results is the actual nutritional intake of the subjects.
The vegan/vegetarian is a big spectrum. A vegetarian eating plenty of dairy products and eggs should in theory be much better creatine-equipped than a poor vegan student feeding on noodles and ketchup pastas. A lot of pseudo-meat for vegans are full of processed shit.
Confusion will be even higher if you include fish in the vegetarian diet, which is odd but some people do that.
Could the cognitive effect works in the case of creatine deficiency (vegan) and not in the case a vegetarian (low creatine but not deficient) ?
JRE mentioned it several times recently, I imagine it could have spiked interest but overall it's been growing over the past decade because of the advances in fitness trackers, IMO. It's been very easy to see its effect with trackers measuring FTP and VO2max.
It’s always been popular among athletes and weight lifters but now nootropic influencers have gotten ahold of it. It’s one of the few supplements with robust scientific evidence of a strong effect but that’s in athletic performance not nootropics.
I've been taking 5g/creatine daily for nearly 30 years. In weightlifting circles it's always been popular because it's cheap and one of the few non-steroidal supplements that actually works.
Creatine is a health fad? No other supplement has been this widely-used for such a long time. It was considered safe and effective when I started using it 30 years ago. The benefits are/were well established, the mechanisms well-known, the safety is impeccable. If anything, it's the most well-established supplement on the market - the exact opposite of a fad!
> thinking hard does not burn significantly more calories
Up to 50 Cal extra over ~2 hours of intense thinking IS significant given brains consume 240-400 Cal over 24 hours.
> Start thinking hard, and watch as your heart rate does not increase.
And yet you soon get tired and slow down. Now try the opposite. Stretch or punch the air a few times to get the heart rate going. You'll sustain brain performance for longer. Try it.
Perhaps the problem is that higher brain activity SHOULD trigger heart rate increase, but doesn't due to one of many design defects of the human body.
I experienced dramatic and obvious hair loss in my late twenties after starting creatine supplementation. I'm talking hundreds of hairs coming out every shower. It stopped when I stopped creatine. No I didn't make any other changes in diet or lifestyle at the time. I hadn't even heard of the link before that. This is actually one of those things that made me start doubting "the science" in general because it's supposedly not true, but, it obviously is true for my head beyond a reasonable doubt.
I just ordered some yesterday because I saw something that reminded what my friend said recently about it boosting cognition. Then this morning I saw it mentioned in some health segment on tv. Now I stumble upon this discussion. Hmmm.
Cycling is also a marketing ploy, since it makes it sound more like a PED and less like a compound found naturally in meat. It's the same reason people say they 'take' whey, when Miss Muffet simply ate it.
I don't ever remember needing or being advised to cycle it.
It was always start by 'loading' and then cruise at 5g. Of course GNC was filled with sugar filled "delivery" products like Celltech that claimed to forego any need for 'loading'.
I've never heard of cycling it. We're you a teen during the steroid arrival? Maybe people were confusing things. I've always just done 5mg a day, but now people are talking about taking mega doses of like 20-30mg a day, shrug
Yes, they did, and many still do write it on the package, but it is, and always was a myth born God knows when out of precaution, because nobody really knows anything about how all this stuff really works now, and they did know even less than that 30 years ago. There never really was any evidence that you have to cycle it, and nobody (aside from the manufacturers) ever says it anymore. It makes about as much sense as cycling protein powder.
As for pills, yes, there is about every form of creatine supplement now, even chewing gum, but this is just dumb, how much of creatine do you think you can consume this way in a day?
The conclusions aren't any different (it's one of the few thing that helps strength, poses no danger to your hair, and almost certainly does nothing for cognition), but the articles at https://www.strongerbyscience.com/?s=creatine are far more comprehensive, including the famous extremely long podcast episodes they used to do.
The one thing this misses is many supplements are tainted, which skews the popular perception of both upsides and risks. This was especially true in the US prior to 2005 or so when prohormones were still legal over the counter. Anything branded that wasn't just pure creatine was extremely likely to actually be a low-dose oral steroid, which really can make you lose hair and will increase strength quite a bit more than any dietary supplement.
This also misses caffeine as the other a-tier supplement that consistently shows strength increases in RCTs, though of course, caffeine is more frought than creatine because you build tolerance and it can disturb sleep.
"poses no danger to your hair" I keep hearing folks say this, and even in this thread there's someone who's experienced that and had it stop when they eliminated creatine. I too have experienced exactly that with exactly the stopping of issues once I stopped taking creatine.
Perhaps you can say "danger to your hair is rare", but there's very clearly (to me at least) an effect there, and the way it gets hand-waved away is strange to me.
Last I checked, the only study actually focusing on this is n=38, out of Iran, and has heavy conflict of interest issues (funded by the supplement industry).
That's not remotely sufficient to consider this a settled fact.
I feel like you would need to find some correlation between dosing creatine and increased DHT production to find a link between the two.
Creatine is not an anabolic steroid and does not increase testosterone levels, according to Harvard Health, so while there was 1 suspicious study that claimed that creatine increased DHT, that study has afterwards not been able to be replicated, and since creatine does not manipulate hormones but rather energy instead, it seems to as closes a possible to being a settled fact sans the final nail in the coffin.
> This also misses caffeine as the other a-tier supplement
In college Ripped Fuel wasn't banned yet. We would take two, go to the gym for 2 hours, shower, then go out until the sun came up the next day. It's no surprise it was eventually banned. I think some people ended up dying by taking too many.
I don’t think they’re strong evidence that it does anything beyond helping you build muscle. There are some people say they think clearer, but I don’t think that’s been measured in any significant way.
Of course it is. LLMs aren't as smart as you think, or at least their "intelligence" isn't comparable to ours. They're just a useful tool, and they will always need someone to guide them.
Productivity isn’t the only reason to be smarter. For example, there’s also the benefit of asking fewer inane questions on the internet (hypothetically)
Good discussion, but this conclusion:
> I don’t know. Maybe a little.
is not the right way to interpret the null result (insufficient evidence to reject null hypothesis that it has no effect) because the prior for supplements that people are trying to sell you is so low. In the absence of clear, strong evidence, you should assume the the whole thing is just an example of motivated reasoning. People want nootropics to be real, and other people really want to sell you readily available powders by claiming they have nootropic properties. In that environment, they were always going to trying to concoct a similar narrative about some supplement, and it just happened to be creatine. Those efforts were always going to result in a handful of "positive" studies that turn out to be non-reproducible, maybe because of p-hacking, maybe because of publication bias, maybe because of outright fraud. This is what the literature always looks like for stuff that just doesn't work. If it did work - if the effect size was large enough that you could personally detect it in your own life - then the papers would be trying to put error bars around the effect size, not trying (and failing) to barely distinguish it from a placebo.
“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” - Ernest Rutherford
I think this is quite different because (1) creatine has been proven to be completely harmless for people of all ages absent some rare thing like a kidney disorder and (2) it has a bunch of clearly measurable positive effects.
So this is more like trying to determine whether ginseng is good at keeping away colds or whatever. Maybe it does (actually quickly searching this, it definitely does but let's pretend it's as folksy as it sounds for a minute) but even if it doesn't then it's harmless and has a bunch of other effects, so when one takes it - the whole possible cold prophylaxis can just be seen as an added perk.
Issue being that if you took everything that's "probably harmless" and overall does nothing much, cramming your body full of supplements, your liver will start to have a bad time, causing harm in aggregate. Also the more random stuff you take, the more likely it is that something you took actually does turn out to have been harmful a couple years later.
Is there a particular rare kidney disorder that creatine is contraindicated for? Because kidney disease is not rare, something like 14% of US adults have kidney disease.
and the thing people seem to not understand: how exactly do you _expect_ to be able to notice this change? Its something that happens after you take it for a prolonged period of time (>7days) and only has a minor/medium effect.
It doesn't make you a genius. I think a better view on it is that it may mitigate some of the adhs symptoms (at least for me).
I can keep on track for a significantly longer time since ive started supplementing with it at ~15g/day - and while i dont feel a difference, i can observe it when actually paying attention to what i do / how often i drift off etc.
What I'm getting from all this is that we have an armchair expert explaining details about something they're not an expert in, and we have you reviewing the way they present this information, saying their very weak hedge wasn't strongly negative enough. Based on priors about the industry.
Basically, HN doing HN things - having a good deep think about topics outside their realm of expertise, then debating the minutiae. I'd just rather trust someone who has spent their career researching this stuff, thanks (unless that's what you do - in which case please tell us more).
It may be minutiae, but olooney’s point is valid: the evidence doesn’t seem to support saying “maybe a little”. Remove that statement from the conclusion and it’s on the right track, aside from the arbitrary IQ point calculation which is nonsensical.
If you're being academically rigorous about it, sure, but I think it's fine as an informal conclusion.
Even as an informal conclusion I think it's important to know who you're up against and what their motivations are. Waving that away is how we get people like known, obvious charlatans like RFK Jr in any sort of position of power. I know this is nitpicking word choice but the informal conclusion is "Not likely, and not enough to matter for anything."
Personally I take creatine for entirely non-cognitive reasons, so it's reassuring to know it's probably not making me any dumber.
Though you also have to consider potentially adulterated powder (accidental or not) in the unregulated supplement industry.
That's why I dropped creatine since I didn't notice any benefits when I tried it for a year.
There is a brand of creatine manufactured in the US (con-cret) and a brand manufactured in Germany (Creapure). Either of those companies should address the concern around adulterated powder.
> That's why I dropped creatine since I didn't notice any benefits when I tried it for a year.
Some percentage of people (~20%) are creatine non-responders [1]. It's pretty reasonable to try creatine and then drop it if you find no benefit. I personally find the gain very marginal.
[1] https://fitchef.com/shorts/creatine-non-responder/
With most industries companies live and die by their reputation. Find a bulk provider with a positive reputation and the creatine you buy is almost certainly going to be safer than e.g. eating at Taco Bell. And with creatine in particular it's so dirt cheap that a lot of motivation for dodgy stuff goes away unlike e.g. with protein powders where amino acid spiking can save a company a bunch of money. And incidentally creatine is one of the substances dodgy companies use for amino acid spiking, just because it's so cheap!
That said it's obviously the right decision to drop it if you're not seeing any effects. The interesting thing about creatine is that people's bodies are very different in their natural levels of creatine, and if you're already at 'saturation' then more creatine isn't going to do anything. Same reason the typical benefits of creatine don't show much difference beyond 5g/day. That's enough to send the overwhelming majority of people towards 'saturation.'
it might even be counteracting the negative effects of your frequent contact with airborne nitrogen
What value is there to an informal conclusion when the topic is as important as intelligence? The downsides to creatine if taken without good scientific backing should not be disregarded, yet that’s exactly what many ordinary people are now doing because of “informal conclusions” like this.
Are there really downsides to creatine though? (Genuine question). All the advice I've seen makes it seem like it's basically just good for you even if it doesn't accomplish some specific thing. The only downside I've heard is maybe water retention?
What are the "downsides"? It is one of the most studied substances and except in special cases like kidney issues it is totally safe.
You are essentially trying to say that most studies regarding supplements are not valid
The null is surely different in this case because we know that supplemented creatine goes to the brain and the brain uses it, which is definitely not a claim all supplements can make.
The fact that there's a biologically plausible mechanism plus mixed statistical evidence makes "maybe" a perfectly reasonable conclusion.
I think the way you interpret the null result is downstream of considering creatine as "a supplement". You can make the null result say anything by changing your prior about creatine or supplements. That's the issue with priors.
You also seem to reject the possibility that some things help just a bit. The author has another article in the same vein about "things that can help maybe a bit but the evidence we have doesn't really help detecting small effects" https://dynomight.net/vitamin-d/
mandatory XKCD https://xkcd.com/882/ "Jellybeans cause acne"
I was visiting a friend’s lab at NASA Ames the other day. I smiled seeing this on the wall there. I sometimes daydream about what it’d be like if our primary education system devoted an hour a week to reading / discussing comics (well, XKCD specifically), or pages form What If…? Maybe it’d kill the magic of it, but I still feel plenty of seeds would get planted along the way for more critical thinking later in life.
Heavily agreed. The supplement industry has such a low level of reliability that it has really soured me on so many practices people have. And I flat out do not understand how some of the supplement stores survive.
Hard sell. I remember the time I went to GNC and they gave me a free sample of the notorious Jack3D which had some kind of amphetamine-like stimulant in it and was associated with young soldiers in the US Army falling down dead.
They survive because people want to believe. Look at the history: the phrase “snake oil” exists because people actually sold products by that name as a remedy. There were also tonics based on radium.
“There's a sucker born every minute.”
The story of how the phrase snake oil came to be is a fascinating one. Clark Stanley, an American, ripped off a Chinese product which was actually a decent anti-inflammatory, and didn't put any snake oil in his snake oil, which is why it didn't work!
>And I flat out do not understand how some of the supplement stores survive.
I think mostly through placebo effect, people buy a supplement to treat condition X and they think it's getting better, so they keep buying.
I mean, just look at the wide variety of homeopathic "cures" that are often so diluted that there might not be any molecules of the active ingredient left. Yet people keep buying it.
Okay, but it kind of sounds like you want to nanny-state the writer's language.
Their conclusion seems like an absolutely fair interpretation of what they saw, and it also strikes me as dangerous -- perhaps more dangerous -- to suggest "writer genuinely believes, or doesn't believe, a thing, but they should say it differently from their own interpretation because..people are dumb?" Something like that.
One person is not a nation.
I have severe sleep apnea as well as insomnia. I may also be a multi-phasic sleeper. In any case my average sleep per night is ~3.5 hours with only ~1.5 hours of deep sleep. I use light therapy, CPAP, medications, etc but none of it solves my problems. I started taking creatine daily a couple of months ago. I've noticed a significant uptick in my cognitive abilities, despite being constantly sleep deprived. TFA doesn't touch on this apparent benefit of creatine, so thought I'd mention it for others who might be suffering from similar sleep issues.
Apnea sufferer here, for whom cpap stopped working after weight loss. It turned out that my mouth was opening during sleep, reducing the effectiveness of cpap, and after adding a chin strap to keep my mouth shut I have had very few apnea events.
The mouth-tapers aren’t always wrong (though we do always look silly).
I also started sleeping measurably better when I started taking creatine, but the broader evidence strongly suggests this was some kind of coincidence
What dosage are we talking here?
5g/day
Sometimes I stay up until 1–3 a.m. because I'm working on a problem that's so interesting I can't stop until I make progress.
If I know I'm only going to get a few hours of sleep, I'll take 5–10 g of creatine, drink plenty of water, and go to bed. The next morning, I usually don't wake up with a headache.
If I skip the creatine under the same conditions, I'm much more likely to wake up with a headache after a short night's sleep.
Now it's become a habit, I automatically take creatine whenever I know my sleep duration is going to be much shorter than usual.
Do you still drink water when you skip creatine? Being dehydrated causes headaches, so it may be the extra water intake that's helping and not the creatine.
yes, i always drink plenty of water throughout day and night too, infact when i get stuck on a problem i go for a walk and drink water.
So drinking water part is consistent with or without creatine. I do know the creatine takes a while to build up, so i don't know why it works but it does.
> If I know I'm only going to get a few hours of sleep, I'll ... drink plenty of water
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21517-dehydra...
from your link
>Headache pain often appears along with other signs and symptoms of dehydration, including darker-than-usual pee, dry mouth and fatigue
none of these symptoms are true for me.
"often" and "always" are two different words that mean two different things
Yes, but hydration isn’t really a problem for me. I’m a bit of a water purification nerd, I collect water from a natural waterfall, run it through multiple stages of purification, and then start convincing myself it has some magical properties. I don’t drink soda or caffeine, I mostly just drink water.
Do you take monohydrate or HCL?
Monihydrate causes me terrible GI issues and insomnia. I’ve found HCL to me much easier on my body.
most common one, monohydrate.
I wonder if there’s any long term studies like how the body gets adjusted to creatine. Because human body is remarkable at adjusting and setting new baselines and I wonder if it’s true with creatine as well, like to have the same effect you need to take more creatine the longer you keep on taking it
Most people taking creatine just need to drink water. They drink more water using creatine. In reality, the water/hydration is doing the heaviest lift, not the creatine.
Plausible-sounding mechanisms like you're presenting here do not add value to the discourse without data. There are tons of plausible mechanisms we could make up absent empirical evidence to distinguish them.
You’re yelling at clouds.
I was taking 5mg of Creatine and was in the ER for an unrelated reason. My metabolic panel measured creatinine at 1.34 mg/dL. A panel from last year without the supplement was a very normal 0.95. These were gummies and I wasn’t slamming water.
BTW, it tends to trash the eGFR test which relies on an unbiased creatinine reading.
I don’t know. I personally wouldn’t take it if you aren’t also working out/lifting frequently (even if you drink a ton of water).
Anecdotal so safe to ignore this… but my hair did thin out but only after I was lazier on my work outs. Stopped taking and hair mostly returned to normal thank God.
I get severe muscle cramping, even after pounding water and electrolytes. Like I can’t handle my kid something in the car without risking a spasm.
Do you lift weights?
Yes I’m fit, easily passed military and LEO fitness tests this year.
The reason I asked is that creatine will allow you to lift a bit more (a little more weight, a few more reps). This will cause more muscle fatigue which in turn can lead to more cramping. Water and electrolytes can help, but when the muscles are fatigued they are still more likely to cramp.
spasms are commonly a potassium deficiency, you could take a multivitamin.
Multivitamins don't contain a lot of potassium because of the risk over overdosing in that form. Eat a banana instead (or 3).
I do function health and have completely normal nutrient blood levels.
I like creatine when I’m lifting because it reduces soreness. For some people that effect helps them push further and train harder, for me it’s just proactive pain relief
A pity that water isn’t being sold as an expensive supplement. Or is it?
There are lots like Vitamin water, alkaline, and coconut water. And overpriced salt packets like Nuun and LMNT.
There's also no shortage of expensive water bottles being sold, and smart water bottles that track your drinking frequencies and flavor pods sold via subscription.
To go off topic a bit further, I recently went into Walgreens to buy some bottled water, and other than Evian, it was all advertised as alkaline. Is that just a trend, was it already alkaline and now that’s just in fashion? Personally I see it and worry I’ll get an upset stomach if it start messing with my pH.
Water that's coming out of your tap is generally aiming for neutral (~7 ph). The alkaline waters in the store are using minerals to elevate it into probably the 9s.
Like many hippie health trends that then go mainstream, a lot of it seems to filter in from Rastafarian traditions, where in the Ital diet they believe that alkaline water coming from the Blue Mountains in Jamaica (and other natural springs there which are naturally alkaline) help detoxify the acids in the body.
I do really love LMNT, it's basically the only one I've tried that actually has a sizable dose of sodium, has no sugar, and tastes good.
You're looking in the wrong place. There is a moderately large industry around water bottles.
I slam a lot of water. I also have a toddler and baby who suck at sleeping (I've done all the things, these kids just suck at sleeping).
Since taking creatine I feel so much more energized. I can make it through the day with just 2 coffees (was previously drinking 5 coffees and an energy drink).
Maybe it's placebo. Maybe it's not. I don't really care. I feel the benefit and I love it.
I also drink a lot of water (always have). I also train Muay Thai and am in my 40s, which means an hour of 1:1 with my trainer would just leave me ridiculously tired. I started supplementing with creatine and immediately it was evident that it was working -- after 8-10 rounds on pads and the heavy bag I was fine. To the point where my trainer would often tell me to take another round on the bag.
At a certain point I was wondering if it was just placebo, stopped taking it for a month or so, and was quickly back to feeling tired after training. Started taking it again, back to feeling energized. It really does work.
"Creatine found to improve cognitive performance during sleep deprivation" (2024, 56 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40170474
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40184046
"Other studies already proved those effects with creatine with a normal dose schedule, what they were testing is if a single high dose would have a beneficial effect too, which it did. A normal schedule is 3-5g per day with an optional loading phase of 10-20g per day during 7 days.
In the study they used a single dose of 0.35g/kg which means 20-40g per dose. How do they not get diarrhea? The loading phase is usually split into several doses to avoid diarrhea and I can personally attest to that being a good idea."
What the above doesn't tell you is that taking a loading dose can draw water into your intestines causing diarrhea. You probably can guess how I found this out.
I take my creatine with as little volume of water as possible, probably less than 50ml. I doubt that 50ml is having much impact on my overall hydration.
How much water are you drinking the rest of the day? Creatine in theory makes you more thirsty such that you should be drinking more water throughout the day
It's not something I track, but if it is making me thirstier then that sounds like another useful benefit.
yes but again, the idea is that it helps retains water in your muscles so I don't see it aiding in regular water intake
If you actually drank enough water daily, sans creatine, I'm sure you'd feel better.
Hydration is important so I'm with you on the first half, but what is the proposed link between reduced creatine intake and emotional wellbeing?
Placebo.
I wasn't expecting creatine to have any bearing on my emotional state in the first place, so I'm not sure how that would work.
Knowledge of the potential is peripheral expectation.
If you can say "Oh yea that makes sense" with the same set of knowledge you had both before and after some event happens, all else being equal, you have an expectation. That is enough for placebo.
You have to have literally 0 knowledge about an event to rule out placebo.
Are you suggesting that the placebo effect applies retroactively? I'd been using creatine for months before I even heard there were conversations about supposed cognitive effects (and I hadn't noticed any myself, either, and I continue to not notice any. That isn't why I take it.)
Why are you so sure that the poster (or anyone else commenting here) isn’t drinking enough water?
I drink lots of water. Lots and lots, to the point that it’s already kind of annoying how frequently I have to piss. I’m fairly skeptical that drinking yet more would yield any benefits.
just reminded me to buy a decent waterbottle - thank you
This is not true. Did you read the article?
People love to float this myth that everyone's just walking around dehydrated all the time and they do so based on absolutely no data.
Yes. None of the supposed action of creatine was backed by any statistically significant study. Just drink water. Or don't. It's up to you.
Does creatine make you stronger?
Yes. It’s very rare for a supplement to have such strong and consistent evidence.
A widely-cited review says that short-term supplementation increases maximal power/strength by 5-15%. This in turn may increase the long-term gainz from strength-training exercise. Creatine also increases sprint performance by 1-5%. Though, there seems to be little if any benefit for endurance exercise like long-distance running.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5469049/#CR46
>Contrary to the common myth, thinking hard does not burn significantly more calories. (Demonstration: Start thinking hard, and watch as your heart rate does not increase.)
this is wrong [0] , it's just hard to measure.
[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32314956/
The original claim is not wrong. Thinking hard does not burn significantly more calories.
If it’s really hard to measure because the amount is so small that it requires precise equipment, it’s not significant relative to the rest of the body’s energy expenditure.
This matches what Gwern wrote years ago [0]. It does unequivocally make you stronger though. So if you're training anyway, may as well take it and hope it makes you smarter as well (just believing might be enough for that sweet placebo effect).
[0] https://gwern.net/creatine
This made me wonder if sun exposure/vitamin D has any impact on storing or processing creatine, and maybe that's why the results in Australia were so much greater
I have definitely noticed improvements taking a larger dose with my energy when low on sleep, check out McMorris et al. (2006) which is not cited here. I agree it probably doesn't make you generally more 'smart' but it does may improve function under stress, e.g. when sleep deprived, also see Gordji-Nejad et al. (2024). I think the sleep benefits should at least be mentioned in this article.
Also search for 'sleep' in this comment section, seems many see similar improvements!
> Wikipedia quotes a paper saying people make / recycle around 50 kilograms per day. That would imply that people make around 0.5787 grams per second. But this is in tension with the idea that people use 100 watts at rest. Since that 100 watt number seems to be more strongly established, I think 1 gram per second is a better estimate.
The cited paper in Wikipedia might be accurate and the author is just expecting "at rest" to mean awake but mostly idle. I'd wager that during sleep, we use less than 100W. For the sake of argument if you take out 8 hours (asleep time) from a 24 hour period, you end up with a rate of ~0.8681 grams per second, much closer to 1g/s. Anyway, just a little fun with numbers.
In my experience, it wont make you smarter but my brain just feels more energized to think.
> Available short and long-term studies in healthy and diseased populations, from > infants to the elderly, at dosages ranging from 0.3 to 0.8 g/kg/day for up to 5 > years have consistently shown that creatine supplementation poses no adverse > health risks and may provide a number of health and performance benefits.
They missed a zero behind the comma, didn't they?
Likely. I did one time a creatine loading week of 30gr a day at 100kg body weight and I had to drink 7L of water to not feel like I have a hangover.
Dang, missed opportunity to explain the actin-myosine sliding filament theory.
Studies I read seems to show a marginal boost in cognitionl and memory, but only if you were otherwise overtaxed for some reason.
Like being tired, stressed, etc...
Yep. From what I read mental fatigue (mental math problems is what the study used) or sleep deprivation are two scenarios in which creatine boosted cognition and memory.
Here are the sleep deprivation studies
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54249-9
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16416332/
Personally I have noticed a lot less cognitive impairment after a poor night’s sleep since starting on 10g per day. It seems to make a noticeable difference in my ability to reason and to act having slept less than 7 hours per night, even on consecutive nights.
> Maybe for some reason, Rae et al.’s cohort had lower baseline creatine levels?
Well, yes. It is well known that you must eat fish, beef, i.e., animal protein, to get close to optimal levels of creatine.
Its something you might aswell just take, no proven side negative side effects, unless you are gulping it, it will benefit you
I started taking 5g for cognition. Never any clear signal for that, but it does seem to help a bit with my (more than occasional) sleep deprivation. Mostly with fighting off headaches.
I think another source of variation on the results is the actual nutritional intake of the subjects.
The vegan/vegetarian is a big spectrum. A vegetarian eating plenty of dairy products and eggs should in theory be much better creatine-equipped than a poor vegan student feeding on noodles and ketchup pastas. A lot of pseudo-meat for vegans are full of processed shit.
Confusion will be even higher if you include fish in the vegetarian diet, which is odd but some people do that.
Could the cognitive effect works in the case of creatine deficiency (vegan) and not in the case a vegetarian (low creatine but not deficient) ?
> if you include fish in the vegetarian diet, which is odd but some people do that.
Meat Is Murder but Fish Is Justifiable Homicide.
Okay, I skimmed the article.
Is creatine safe to supplement for children?
Why is creatine so popular lately? what changed?
JRE mentioned it several times recently, I imagine it could have spiked interest but overall it's been growing over the past decade because of the advances in fitness trackers, IMO. It's been very easy to see its effect with trackers measuring FTP and VO2max.
It’s always been popular among athletes and weight lifters but now nootropic influencers have gotten ahold of it. It’s one of the few supplements with robust scientific evidence of a strong effect but that’s in athletic performance not nootropics.
and that scientific evidence is new? like a new study boosted this or just resurfacing?
another upside is its also hella cheap so its a very easy addin
I've been taking 5g/creatine daily for nearly 30 years. In weightlifting circles it's always been popular because it's cheap and one of the few non-steroidal supplements that actually works.
Health fads come and go
Creatine is a health fad? No other supplement has been this widely-used for such a long time. It was considered safe and effective when I started using it 30 years ago. The benefits are/were well established, the mechanisms well-known, the safety is impeccable. If anything, it's the most well-established supplement on the market - the exact opposite of a fad!
OP was asking why the addition now though specifically. I'm not calling it quackery, etc.
> thinking hard does not burn significantly more calories
Up to 50 Cal extra over ~2 hours of intense thinking IS significant given brains consume 240-400 Cal over 24 hours.
> Start thinking hard, and watch as your heart rate does not increase.
And yet you soon get tired and slow down. Now try the opposite. Stretch or punch the air a few times to get the heart rate going. You'll sustain brain performance for longer. Try it.
Perhaps the problem is that higher brain activity SHOULD trigger heart rate increase, but doesn't due to one of many design defects of the human body.
I experienced dramatic and obvious hair loss in my late twenties after starting creatine supplementation. I'm talking hundreds of hairs coming out every shower. It stopped when I stopped creatine. No I didn't make any other changes in diet or lifestyle at the time. I hadn't even heard of the link before that. This is actually one of those things that made me start doubting "the science" in general because it's supposedly not true, but, it obviously is true for my head beyond a reasonable doubt.
Nope, but makes a producer's pocket heavier :D
When you realize that, you got a little smarter
I just ordered some yesterday because I saw something that reminded what my friend said recently about it boosting cognition. Then this morning I saw it mentioned in some health segment on tv. Now I stumble upon this discussion. Hmmm.
I remember learning about Creatine as a weightlifting teen
I never ended up doing it because you had to cycle it, and it was just one more thing to track
Is it the same case in 2026? Is there a simple pill I can take?
You don't have to cycle it. You also don't need to load it (a marketing ploy to get you to buy more).
You can just take 3-5g daily.
Cycling is also a marketing ploy, since it makes it sound more like a PED and less like a compound found naturally in meat. It's the same reason people say they 'take' whey, when Miss Muffet simply ate it.
Cycling creatine was the guidance from the 90s. 5g/day and drink plenty of water is all you need to do.
I don't ever remember needing or being advised to cycle it.
It was always start by 'loading' and then cruise at 5g. Of course GNC was filled with sugar filled "delivery" products like Celltech that claimed to forego any need for 'loading'.
I've never heard of cycling it. We're you a teen during the steroid arrival? Maybe people were confusing things. I've always just done 5mg a day, but now people are talking about taking mega doses of like 20-30mg a day, shrug
Creatine is dosed in grams not milligrams, otherwise your number are correct.
Homeopathic sports supplementation
Yes, they did, and many still do write it on the package, but it is, and always was a myth born God knows when out of precaution, because nobody really knows anything about how all this stuff really works now, and they did know even less than that 30 years ago. There never really was any evidence that you have to cycle it, and nobody (aside from the manufacturers) ever says it anymore. It makes about as much sense as cycling protein powder.
As for pills, yes, there is about every form of creatine supplement now, even chewing gum, but this is just dumb, how much of creatine do you think you can consume this way in a day?
That’s never been the case, you were getting bad information.
It was certainly the case that gym bros thought you had to cycle it. But you're right that this was never necessary.
if you are using to slim down it will hold on to water unless you are bulking i dont see creatine to be consumed regularly
if you truly want fuel for the brain nothing beats keto
Saved you a click:
> Does creatine make you smarter?
> I don’t know. Maybe a little.
The conclusions aren't any different (it's one of the few thing that helps strength, poses no danger to your hair, and almost certainly does nothing for cognition), but the articles at https://www.strongerbyscience.com/?s=creatine are far more comprehensive, including the famous extremely long podcast episodes they used to do.
The one thing this misses is many supplements are tainted, which skews the popular perception of both upsides and risks. This was especially true in the US prior to 2005 or so when prohormones were still legal over the counter. Anything branded that wasn't just pure creatine was extremely likely to actually be a low-dose oral steroid, which really can make you lose hair and will increase strength quite a bit more than any dietary supplement.
This also misses caffeine as the other a-tier supplement that consistently shows strength increases in RCTs, though of course, caffeine is more frought than creatine because you build tolerance and it can disturb sleep.
"poses no danger to your hair" I keep hearing folks say this, and even in this thread there's someone who's experienced that and had it stop when they eliminated creatine. I too have experienced exactly that with exactly the stopping of issues once I stopped taking creatine.
Perhaps you can say "danger to your hair is rare", but there's very clearly (to me at least) an effect there, and the way it gets hand-waved away is strange to me.
> poses no danger to your hair,
Last I checked, the only study actually focusing on this is n=38, out of Iran, and has heavy conflict of interest issues (funded by the supplement industry).
That's not remotely sufficient to consider this a settled fact.
I feel like you would need to find some correlation between dosing creatine and increased DHT production to find a link between the two.
Creatine is not an anabolic steroid and does not increase testosterone levels, according to Harvard Health, so while there was 1 suspicious study that claimed that creatine increased DHT, that study has afterwards not been able to be replicated, and since creatine does not manipulate hormones but rather energy instead, it seems to as closes a possible to being a settled fact sans the final nail in the coffin.
> This also misses caffeine as the other a-tier supplement
In college Ripped Fuel wasn't banned yet. We would take two, go to the gym for 2 hours, shower, then go out until the sun came up the next day. It's no surprise it was eventually banned. I think some people ended up dying by taking too many.
Article's answer to its own question:
It safely builds muscle and boosts cognition.
No, it does not.
More like "probably", "yes", and "probably not."
I don’t think they’re strong evidence that it does anything beyond helping you build muscle. There are some people say they think clearer, but I don’t think that’s been measured in any significant way.
Given LLM's is being smarter still a worthwhile to optimize with supplements?
Of course it is. LLMs aren't as smart as you think, or at least their "intelligence" isn't comparable to ours. They're just a useful tool, and they will always need someone to guide them.
Yeah, mix some creatine in with the thermal paste. It should help!
that was hard to parse, but yes, because then you can ask smarter questions to the LLM which saves you money, so you can afford supplements
Productivity isn’t the only reason to be smarter. For example, there’s also the benefit of asking fewer inane questions on the internet (hypothetically)
Present company excluded, of course.
I still seek the fount of infinite wisdom.
LoL.maybe the question is not phrased in the best way, English as a second language and laziness, but it's a pretty decent question.