#76 - Creatine in exercise and health with Professor Darren Candow

hello and welcome to inside exercise I'm Emeritus Professor Glen McConnell from Victoria University in Australia the idea behind inside exercise is to bring to you the absolute who's who of exercise research so exercise physiology exercise metabolism and exercise in health and what I'm really wanting is for you to get your exercise information from the research experts rather than from influencers and indeed today I'm bringing to you Professor Darren kandal from the University of Regina in Saskatchewan Canada he's an absolute expert on Creatine metabolism and creatine effects on muscle mass and strength during resistance training but

also he started looking at other things such as effect of creatine on bone effect of creatin on cognitive function Etc we had a wide ranging discussion around creatine he's an absolute wealth of knowledge in the area but also in other areas we touched on we had a long really interesting chat and you'll get the most out of it if you watch the whole thing or listen to the whole thing but you can see down in the notes that on YouTube there's um times in blue that you can click on and it will move to the

section you want to listen to or on the other platforms you'll see that the times are there but you can't click on them but again it's best if you listen to the whole thing but if you want to jump around that's up to you so enjoy the chat hi Darren how are you welcome to inside exercise hey Glenn thanks for having me glad to be here great great all right so I it's gonna come out while we're chatting but I I did creatine stuff probably 20 years ago including including a study I think is a

I like to think of as a classic which I haven't even published which I think have to do something about that so that'll probably come up so we're going to be talking about creating and exercise but also in he related to health Etc um but first of all sometimes I like to ask you know how did you actually get into exercise research I I actually just looking at you I think you might have been an exerciser first but you know some people were researcher and then they moved in exercise how did how did you get

get to where you're at it was kind of by chance as well I was an or I played Sports growing up and uh not exceptionally well at any of and my undergrad degree was in cell biology and I was taking some classes I thought were very boring and then I happened to have a chance to take an elective and the option at my school was exercise physiology and just so happened to be with this outstanding Professor who really was an exceptional teacher and at the time I just started to lift weights I was very very

skinny I mean very very skinny and I didn't know the importance of nutrition and and started to to lift weights with my friends and started to get a little bit stronger and then of course you understand the principles nutrition and and then in class I could visualize what was happening to my own body and then I completely changed paths from uh biology Focus to more exercise physiology nutrition and that really paved the way for my transition into Academia and now of course into University uh career so um basically if it wasn't for that class I

probably I actually don't know what I'd be doing right now well that's interesting yeah um it's funny you just said something that totally reminded me of me running around the the 400 met track down in wenong in um so it's about 80 kilometers south of of um Sydney that that when I started studying as well you'd literally think I'd be doing intervals and I think oh that's okay that's just you know this affecting that process or something and push through it and you know can actually think oh if I if I go faster I'll be

using anerobic glycolisis so just putting it into practice is just yeah really stimulating yeah and then you then you I guess you realized hang on I can I can actually work in this field or yeah I got a more interested and then I went to do graduate school at the University of Saskatchewan and uh I got more lucky there I think I work with uh one of the best creatine re researchers Dr Phil chilibeck and then at the time Dr Darren Burke who went into industry and and we were doing muscle biopsies and and we

were some of the first to do the vegetarian studies to show the difference and I got very fortunate to work with two outstanding uh researchers my masters was on glutamine um and uh uh it didn't turn out to do anything and of course as a grad student you're very disappointed you always want to go into it thinking you'll find some benefits and at about the same time creatine was really exploding um around the year 2001 for me anyway and then reading all the Articles from Roger and Eric Holman in the late 1990s and I read

your paper as well on imp and it was interesting just to see the transition and the appreciation uh for the pioneers of research that don't get the Press today um if they're not on social media like Instagram um but uh the people who have paved the way for most of the research we now know or the way we adopt exercise nutrition um you got to give kudos to the people who did the really hard work um we're kind of just the messengers and uh it is uh important to pay the respects to those people who

did it so I got very fortunate with that as well I think it's great you brought that up we're actually talking a bit before I came on we came on that um people sort of Bandy around this you know the goat of this and the greatest of all time of this and and we and as I had Yan meski on yogan meski from Copenhagen and as we know he he always talks about we're standing on the you know the shoulders of giants and things like that so it's it's and it's so important for people to

remember all these all these from you know Bank Sal like died in 2014 some students don't even know yeah yeah so even like when it comes to creatine there's probably 15 to 20 people individuals that have paved the way that a lot of people don't even um know about if they're not on social media and I always use the example if you started a hockey team with four lines I'd be lucky enough to be on the bench as an assistant coach there's that many individuals who have paved the way that just people may have heard

about um I could only imagine to be in the room with these exceptional uh creatine researchers Paul greenh half yourself Mark t psky uh Roger Harris Eric Colman these are just the Legends who everything we know about creatine and anybody in the protein field or caffeine would say the same thing um I think a lot of people uh that are sort of messengers of creatine research or research today on social media they seem to get all the Press uh but at the end of the day the real researchers in community and you know who are

the real people who do the data collection to be honest there's probably less than 10 researchers left in the world who actively do creatine research um they collect the data and and are doing the experimental randomized control trials and a lot of people may not even have ever heard of them so it is an interesting where area that we're in from the social media to the the actual science I think you've being quite modest I'm sure you'd be on the on the field or on the pitch or whatever it was but um but uh yeah

I'm glad you mentioned Paul greenh half actually because that's that's an interesting when you said when you said all these people and if they're not on social media I actually thought of Paul greenh half because Paul greenh half's been on the podcast but he wasn't talking about Crea and he did that stuff years ago and it's quite possible people could even know Paul greenh half on social media but not actually see his creating and stuff because it you know he's he's doing other things now so yeah anyway it's good good we talked about that okay

so if we think about creatine um you know we obviously people think about creating supplementation but why don't we just talk about you know what is creatine why is it important and and you know and where do we get it from rather than going straight to like oh how much do I need to take you know like maybe you don't have to take a e exactly so this is a big uh U distinction and really important so we naturally are making creatine if you have a healthy liver and kidney and brain right now the average

person maybe one to three grams a day you can also get it through your diet primarily through animal flesh so this is red meat or seafood so the the question comes up well if we're producing about 1 to three grams a day and we excrete something called creatinin at about the same level most individuals including vegans and vegetarians live a long healthy very productive life not needing any additional dietary creatine so that proves the point when someone says do you need creatine supplementation the answer is 100% no you don't but then people say what if

I take more through the diet I'm like okay now let's get into how much you're taking and if you eat one or two servings of seafood or red meat a week you're getting a minimal amount but if you're eating two or three servings a day you're getting way more than you probably need especially from a muscle perspective so who needs a creatine supplement well the answer is no one um however if you do consider supplementation that may be dictated by a lot of things your habitual diet your age uh the sex males or females or

your physical activity patterns can you get enough creatine from the diet that's been shown to be effective I think you can um however vegans and vegetarians might have a little bit more difficulty getting the L and that's why I think supplementation is probably considered um but again this is important for everybody watching if you said does a healthy human need creatine the answer is no but you may experience some benefits if you're either a little bit low on the uh the the platform if you will or you might get some benefits and as you know

from your work we our muscles kind of have a a ceiling of how much you can put in there um and if you want to fill it up a little bit more it has been shown to be effective but there's ways to either get it through the diet or through supplementation right that's great I like the sound of that because if you've seen other I know you have seen other podcast I'm not a massive fan of supplements but but if anything and I think because I was thinking when we were getting ready I thought okay

this is one where you could you know you could say oh maybe but most you just say you don't need it right but we'll get get to that more what I was thinking when you were talking was something I've mentioned here and there was was we've managed to go you know tens of thousands of years without supplements right supplements have just come along and we've managed to survive okay but but people say oh yeah but soil depletion and things like that do you do you have something I'm sure people have said this to you do

you do you have any thoughts on that this the fact that we've actually managed to survive yeah and we I've just been in Italy and you know the Gladiators are running around even if they're eating meat extra meat and then some people say they weren't they w't supplementing do you have any thoughts on that yeah the the key is the I love the word supplement right so it's on top of what you're already getting and usually you supplement the diet when you're deficient in a nutrient or vitamin or and you know everybody talks about protein

supplementation and it's well established you can get way more protein than you need through food creatine's a little different can you get it through the diet yes if you want more it's going to be very expensive because there's only certain foods who who uh uh consume it or if you uh based on ethical pre principles or environment or vegan and vegetarian but you don't need supplementation unless you're deficient so it's very interesting I mean we drink coffee with caffeine for a specific stimulant but from a nutrient perspective unless you're deficient you're dumping in too much

vitamin C you make expensive urine it's very simple that you're dumping it in and and dumping it out but uh of course we'll talk about the evidence-based research on Creatine and maybe a little bit more than what you get through the diet is advantageous but at the end of the day five or 10 grams is a half a teaspoon we're not talking about 200 grams like in protein world uh so the amount that even if it is uh effective is very very very small right right so let's let's just think again about okay so what

is cre creatine so whether whether it's coming um from your own endogenous production or you've you've had a supplement for example what happens so the creatine because I mean this is one where because you know some suppl you say it doesn't even make sense because you going to get broken down you're going to it's going to you know you're going to urinate it out or whatever Crea and actually does end up in the muscle so why don't you just talk about so if you do take a supplement for example you know does it end up

in the blood does it end up in the muscle and I know we'll talk about brain and things later as well and then how much does it go up by and and also maybe if you can introduce creatine phosphate because because you know people are sort of thinking creatines what's having the effect on on the my exercise performance but it's not yeah yeah so when people inest creatine and I think for the purposes of the rest of the podcast we're going to be referring to monohydrate because it's the most safest and effective form of creatine

is just link to water and you can consume it in a powder in solution or with food and goes through the GI tract intact and it actually will get uh released through the GI track into the circulation and it's been well established especially from Roger Harris and er Eric Holman that a small dose as little as three to five grams can easily get into the blood and of course our bloodstream will act as the vehicle and bring it to our muscles uh but our muscles are very stripped on what gets in um and it has

a specific transporter or doorway it's very similar to glucose and glute four Transporters it only will allow creatine in and once it goes into the muscle uh going all the way back to our high school biology days creatine is phosphorated to phosphocreatine or PCR and that's really the important distinction you're consuming creatine but through basing energy metabolism it gets phosphorated and when it's phosphocreatine it's been able to maintain our energy currency of the cell adenosine triphosphate during exercise so the whole Theory here is if your muscles had more phosphocreatine via supplementation or increase in diet

that would allow ATP to be maintained during high-intensity exercise and that's probably why some athletes get bigger stronger faster they also can recover in between sets or races quicker and that may speed up some of the recovery aspects so that's kind of where creatin really got its momentum for athletes to sort of train at a higher intensity potentially recover more and that could lead to more gold medals or an impr improvement in the weight room or on the track yeah yeah so that that's an interesting one because some people don't even know about Cranium phosphate

like when they talk about anerobic metabolism they'll just talk about lactate right they don't actually realize so I wouldn't mind just getting a little bit of that down as well so if you're doing like a 10-second Sprint okay and and just want to make sure people are clear so phosphorilation is where you just add a phosphate so it's basically creatine you had a phosphate it's now creatin phosphate or phosphocreatine and that's the one as you said which is kind of buffer they often use the term buffering ATP so ATP is the immediate source you know

for the contraction you you contract you you um break down the ATP to ATP and then instantly you can get the Crum phosphate breaking down the energy in the Crum phosphate uh putting the ATP back together again and now you're back to creatine yeah now now hopefully people understand that one if play it again but um anyway and that's what you're talking about it's it's it's helping to maintain your ATP levels now what I wanted to talk about is you know what so if you do 100 meter sprint for example or even like uh one

rep you know maximum one RM or 10 10 reps or something what's actually happening to Ukrainian phosphate and why would supplementing maybe help that process yes so that's an excellent point the other big thing when fossil creatine combines with ADP it buffers a hydrogen ion so that's were one of the buffering acidosis effects so creatine really should in theory work the longer the Anor robic event goes so the more seconds so for example at 8 seconds nine seconds in a Sprint or repeated Sprints sometimes we don't see an increase in 1 RM strength because you

really haven't activated enough muscle contractions for the buffering to occur but multiple sets of weightlifting or multiple Sprints is kind of when you see creatine really come to the aid of performance in the second and third and it's primarily I think based on the recovering of ATP but also we can't forget the importance of the buffering of those hydrogen ions in the bloodstream and or muscle and that helps basically cycle because it's a reversible reaction so it really works spontaneously and maintaining anerobic exercise it's probably why there wasn't much press in aerobic exercise that was

long duration because people thought you're using more aerobic metabolism the mitochondria maybe fat and aerobic glycolysis I I think pram may have applications for Recovery of some of those Sports um but it's really emphasizing the anerobic style of sports for sure right all right so yeah so you've got so anerobic metabolism you've actually got the the caum phosphate breakdown which does not use oxygen that's why it's called anobi and then you've got the glycogen and to a less extent glucose getting broken down to lactate again not using oxygen and that's anerobic now what I wanted

to get out was that the thing you touched on that um you know six seconds seven second so the classic thing would say oh you creating phosphate lasts for about 6 seconds but then people tend to think oh black and white so if you're doing a 10-second Sprint the first six seconds is only carum phosphate and then you start breaking down lactate no they both happening at the same time yeah but it's actually Paul greenh half again that did some those studies where they they' Sprint for like I can't remember exactly there's a bunch of

them in also at um in um you know Larry spr and stuff like that where they looked at like 3 seconds of exercise six seconds and and basically you're creating phosphate you're getting energy so quickly it's being used and if and I think you're saying if you can if you supplement by food or or diet or bio supplement if you can just put that creating phosphate up and why don't we talk about what sort of percent you increase and maybe instead of six seconds and then you slow down in bed it might be six and

a half or seven and that could be the difference and as you say with recovery but do you want to just tell us when you take the creatine you know how much goes to creatine phosphate how much St is creatine and and how much does the muscle actually go up by yeah that's that's important too so there's already way more creatine in the muscle than ATP so the concentration gradient is going to be pushing towards the Regeneration but supplementation even at a loading phase will only increase creatine by about 20% in the muscle and there's

not a lot of room in that muscle for creatine anyway the majority of it's water so even a very stringent supplementation program in addition to diet will only increase creatine stores by about let's say 20 to 40% across the whole spectrum and of that increase 20 to 30% is only phosphocreatine the rest is going to be free creatine so you don't get that much of an increase however to the world champion athlete or the individual who needs that one or two extra seconds of sprinting or effort that could mean the difference between a gold or

silver medal to the average individual if you top up the if your car is 90% full of fuel and you top it up the extra temp % great you can go a little bit longer um so again at the end of the day it the theory is the muscle can just go a little bit longer before you start to switch those slower um macronutrients such as fat and aerobic glycolysis and protein for energy so you're topping up the tank a little bit it's not a lot maybe 20 to 40% and I think the 40% would

be the vegans and vegetarians Who start low so you're you're only going to get about 20% carnivore you're probably already there but the vegans we've shown you know they have about a significant reduction compared to an omnivore so they're going to respond a lot more percentage okay exactly all right so so you've got this creatine and creatine phosphate now I'm getting sort of nitty-gritty on this but yeah so yeah basically you've got more Crum phosphate than creatine in the muscle yeah 66% to free creatines about 33 yeah exactly and then when you supplement you don't

actually keep that 60s if anything you get a little bit of an increase in creating phosphate and a greater increase in creating creating correct so the total pool kind of goes up by about 20% and then we say of that 20 20 to 30 is fossil creatine yeah all right now now what I wanted to do and I didn't want to glaze not glaze over skip over what you said so there there sort of two sides to this maybe more is this the the thing we're saying like during 100 meter sprint if if the creating

phosphates running out up to 6 seconds and you can have a you know 20% more maybe even 40% then maybe you'll last 7 Seconds and and then you you'll slow down so you should slow down less that's the thing that people don't realize 100 me Sprint your Crum phosphate runs out and you're having to rely more and more on anerobic glycolysis you actually start to slow down so you slow down so that's one side of it but as you mentioned and I didn't want to you know I want to get back to that is the

repeated Sprints yeah so maybe you just talk about that because people don't necessarily think that during the recovery you know you're getting the creating phosphate and Etc so maybe just talk about that um as well yeah so the interesting thing with creatine very similar to a red blood cell is that uh creatine is anerobic or we think of it but the recovery comes from the mitochondria so some people have heard about the shuttling of ATP from the mitochondria to the cytool that's what creatine is helping as well increase that shuttling um capacity so as we're

resting in between Sprints or sets and we're breathing oxygen the mitochondria is working very quickly to regenerate ATP and of course creatine will help shuttle uh that from the ATP or sort of the med condra to the cytool we're acting aice and and the crossbridge Cycles occur so it's actually speeding up that shuttle and that's why we think repeated muscle contractions can benefit from creatine and the recovery from contractions to get you ready for the next subsequent belt I agree Perfect all right so so just let me check on that one so I know again

Paul greenh half has done this nice NMR stuff other people have as well so have they actually shown when you creating supplement that when you do the so you do your Sprint or your high-intensity exercise your creting phosphate B basically goes down to zero and then you can use NMR to look at the resynthesis of the corinium phosphate and indeed that's actually used to look at the aerobic this is the thing I don't want to confuse people it's actually one way you want to look at you know how what is your mitochondrial capacity like how

good are you actually using aerobic metabolism is to look at how quickly your cranium phosphate is resynthesized during the recovery now are you saying if you look at NMR you can see it we synthesiz quicker when they've yeah the theory is that if it if just say you're not on Creatine and it takes three to five minutes after a boat to resynthesize it naturally the theory is that it could be sped up with creatine supplementation because you have an increase in intramuscular creatine pool and or shuttling so that's one of the main theories it could

help speed up recovery after each set or contraction it has it been shown do you know I believe so all for sure yes okay okay sorry when you see Theory I was like maybe okay now the other thing is so if you think about okay now we're going to get to this but I guess one of the main things we know about creating supplementation is it is can have uh benefits for resistance training is that fair to say that that if you look at all the different events yeah 95% seem to be resistance training or

weight training base yeah yes okay so if we think about that we go okay is that because they can train harder you know because as we said so you know how you said one one rep you won't use up all your cranium phosphate so Cranium supplementation probably won't have much effect but you know if you're doing 10 15 reps then it would make sense that you the cranium phosphate might be running out so then that might allow enable to train harder but also you said you've got the recovery so then you go to the next

set and you might be able to push harder as well so again it gets a bit complicated but but you tend to end up doing better when you do creatine with resistance training I'm just wondering how much of that because you got all these variables right can you train can you actually do that one rep that one set better can you recover better so you can do the next set better and can you actually train harder as well so then you can you can back up so I want you it's quite a lot a lot

of stuff there but if you can unpackage that a little bit yes so one of the main outcomes what we often see in experimental research or antidotal is people say their training volume wet uh weight by reps by set go up each session or sorry over time so if you do a study we'll often see that people on Creatine just lifted or perform more uh Exercise capacity and I think that's something that for your viewers they know but you can take creatine alone and nothing's going to happen the whole driver behind creatine primarily from a

muscle Andor bone perspective is the mechanical signaling of resistance training um the whole theory is the more stimuli to the muscle that'll stimulate cellular hydration satellite cells we'll talk about all that the inventor pathway but if you take creatine on its own it's probably going to have a minimal effect to the muscle because it needs to Mechanical stimuli so yes if you put in the effort in the gym you know maybe you have more cellular energy to lift a little bit heavier weight or Eco a couple more reps over time that could increase training volume

we think that's a main driving force from a muscle perspective okay so so during that actual session so you go to the gym Y and you'll just feel better and you'll be a to do put squeeze out a rep or two more or do another set we're not talking about recovery so I just want to make sure we're clear we're not talking about recovery as as in like oh two days later you'll feel better feel better and we talking about recovery between since and during the actual session so both you you actually get a faster

recovery from a fossil creatine perspective after every set and now we're actually starting to see if the the workout was intense enough you can get a decrease in inflammatory cyto kindes which are good and bad but after the session some individuals say they have enhanced recovery um not so much muscle damage but in improved recovery after the session that may allow them to train the next day or for the athletes what if you're splitting it up in the morning and evening that might allow you to recover even from a glycogen perspective a little bit easier

on as well so again to your point it's after every set or Sprint whatever it is and allowing increased recovery between the next subsequent workout okay great right so I guess I guess I'm I'm starting to think oh you know even I should be taking this stuff so let's just make sure we're clear on this um in terms of of who should be taking it so I'm want to get back to the vegetarians I I guess um because that's interesting I and to be honest I wasn't aware that was one of your early studies so

why did you tell us again uh why the vegetarians are low lower on average and maybe if you can break it down to vegans and vegetarians and and and again I often say well people often say vegetarian isn't a vegetarian you can be a healthy vegetarian I often say how Oreos we're not definitely not promoting Oreos are vegan right so it doesn't you can could be vegan and and only eat Oreos right so why don't you just I guess talk about um yeah vegetarianism veganism and the effects on of on muscle creatine yeah so when

it comes to muscle creatine both are going to be combined that the reason being is if you do not eat dairy or eggs it doesn't matter because creatine is only going to be found in the muscle fiber of the animal so you consider vegetarian and vegan together and even those who are emphasizing a plant-based diet the reason that we think respond very favorably to supplementation is to that point they're not eating any dietary creatine and so when you supplement the muscle with this metabolite uh they do trap it in the muscle so when creatine gets

in the muscle it's locked in it's very phosphorated and they really respond so their percent will go up at least 40% if not more and therefore that has been shown to translator correlate into obviously an increase in muscle creatine which can lead to improvements in strength muscle mass and performance um so PE the main thing that determines your response to creatine supplementation is your baseline or initial creatine Stores um so a vegan or vegetarian would respond very well that's also why we think older adults primarily in the lower limbs respond so well there is evidence

that those muscles atropy um as we get older type two muscle fibers specifically and that's probably why older adults seem to respond so well to supplementation uh they may have low creatine in their diet activity levels but there is some changes in muscle morphology that we think primarily explain that okay now I'm just wondering about that so you mentioned earlier and it makes sense that that if you're not doing weight training just taking creatine increasing your Crum phosphate levels won't really do anything but are you saying if you're uh if you're older and you have

atrophied muscles just taking the creatine itself without the weight training can have some benefits on the muscle is that you say uh not really any muscle effects although there's about five five that have been published worldwide who have given creatine without exercise and shown improvements from a neuromuscular and strength performance in older adults so I can't say there's no evidence but the vast majority suggests that doesn't matter how old you are you need that mechanical stimuli from exercise at a high intensity that cause it but there are a few studies that have looked at a

high do creatine without exercise compared to Placebo and there has been some functionality and muscle performance benefits so I can't say there's no uh evidence to support that but by far 95 to 99% would show that exercise first creatine may give a small favorable effect okay all right so I guess I'm wondering about mechanisms here um so you know you mentioned mtor and we'll try and walk people through this stuff a little bit but I'm just wondering uh and then well I guess and we'll get to it later like how you can have effects without

the supplementation but what what are thought to be the mechanism so I know we've talked about if you've got more Cranium phosphate then you know you can you can um last longer but you know during a a Sprint what are the mechanisms they're finding in in muscle can you actually pick up you know greater protein synthesis rates or greater signaling yes so it's a very multifactorial Theory so a couple things the main driver is if you have an increase in high energy phosphate metabolism that could allow the individual to do more work but there is

some evidence and it's primarily in young adults or rodents so that's really important to uh uh put forth but the main mechanisms is that it can speed up calcium re-uptake into the sarcoplasm reticulum so the theory there was that it can actually increase or decrease muscle relaxation time it has been shown to stimulate glycogen kinetics and some stimulation in glute four but when it gets to the muscle it seems that where it's linked to sodium it'll drag water in from an osmotic standpoint and it sort of swells the the cell or the plasma membrane and

by doing that if you're putting more fluid into the organel area it has been shown minimally uh from a scientific perspective but it has been shown to stimulate transcription factors involved in DNA uh to RNA um satellite cells which we can talk about it's been shown to increase insulin like growth factor and now here's something that a lot of people probably don't know it's only ever been shown to increase protein kinases in the mtor pathway creatine has never shown it's been shown to fail multiple times at directly increasing protein synthesis so this is an important

distinction wayy protein casin that increases the rates of protein synthesis directly creatine does not it may increase muscle mass by a plethora of other mechanisms but it also has anti-catabolic effects there's good evidence to suggest it decreases protein breakdown and it has some anti-inflammatory properties so I think that's kind of where the mechanisms stand um but the most established obviously is increasing high energy phosphate metabolism okay so there's a lot lot of stuff there I guess um so yeah I think where where there's no doubt you increase the creating phosphate but more thinking about yeah

the the the the actual mechanisms that then transfer to increases in muscle mass and Etc and as you're saying it's a bit unclear you can't pick up changes in protein synthesis right and and do you pick up um so you mentioned and maybe if we can just explain things a bit more as we go along so what's considered almost the master regulator there's a lot more to it mour it's like a stepbystep process so the theory if you do a step by step it's water would come in with creatine that would activate insulin like growth

factor which is a main anabolic growth factor we think and that of course turns on transcription factors in Satellite cells and of course everybody thought well if satellite cells are increased there's a greater capacity for the mile nuclear domain they can actually donate their nucleus for greater capacity for protein synthesis um but that only seemed to turn on some of these proteins in the melion target of rapamycin or the the master governor of muscle protein synthesis mtor but a lot of molecular researchers will suggest that when you measure protein kinases as you would would know

in mtor it's a snapshot you know you got to look at multiple transition and just because mtor got turned on once does that really correlate to an increase in muscle mass we don't think so it's very similar to the argument with acute hormones um so creatine sort of turns on a lot of things of involved in the muscle protein synthetic pathway and I think over time weeks and weeks of training that's probably what's helping increase muscle mass yeah now what I'm wondering here is the the old you know classic is it is it just because

they're training harder so when they do these studies with and without creatine and then they do resistance training for example resistance exercise do they match the training you know like is it is it just because things get turned on because they've done more training or is it because creatine is intrinsically doing something yeah so creatin with old exercise has a minimal to no effect on any of those protein CES sorry sorry I'm saying if they do the same so if you do the same resistance because that's the thing when you when you look at creatine

increasing supplementation increasing strength sorry to cut you off there to I'm not talking about not doing any exercise I'm talking about when they look at the effect of uh creating supplementation on mtor activation or synthesis do they do the same exercise so do they do the same 10 reps the same weight Etc or is it they're looking at it during a training study and they've actually done more training on the creatine to both yeah they always compared to like a a match placebo group who would be just doing the resistance training to see the greater

stimuli effect there's been some cellular data Mark tarnopolsky lab has looked at the gene expression just from creatine by itself uh but the uppr regulation is synergistic with exercise yeah sorry sorry so you're saying they match it so they do the same exact 10 reps same weight even though they feel like they can squeeze one more r No usually they would go to fatigue unless it's a a specific program like where the program was three sets of 10 but you're right the whole idea is maybe to enhance volume and how do you do that you

either put on weight and do more reps or vice versa okay so I guess that's the that's the problem then because if you're trying to say does creatin increase um mus Mass during weight training by turning on protein synthesis or by activating M to more whatever my feeling is is important that they do the exactly the same exercise if they're doing a little bit more right then obviously it would turn it on so do you know yeah and and that's an important distinction because usually compared to Placebo you see a really nice progression of weeks

and weeks of training where the people technically on Creatine uh got either bigger stronger or faster and they actually could lift more low for more reps and therefore their training volume went up and that's usually one of the main things is like wow your training volume went up on creating that probably explains a lot of the adaptations and I totally agree with that yeah so it's a bit tricky to it when when you look at mechanisms now I I can't help thinking about we were talking off here a study I did like 20 years ago

I never published it and I think that's that's part of the thinking you can see I hav't I'm still thinking like that what I was thinking at the time was you know how much uh the fact that you do get bigger and stronger with crine supplementation is because they're training more so I was interested to see if the effect of creating per se and and also at that time there was talk about like you said about how you get water drawn into the cell yes and and whether that would stimulate protein synthesis on its own

I think it was a paper by ingwell or something yeah and they so maybe if you can just address that again and then I'll just say what I was going to get at so oh anyway what we did is that we did minus one week yeah we did we did strength and body composition with dexa and then we gave them either creatine or Placebo for a week and then we did the strength and and body composition again so you can see is there effect of just the creatine without weight training and then we did 10

weeks of training in they either on Creatine or PBO and it's a bit of I won't bore people but um basically when you do four groups like we did and you've got these multiple time points because we also looked at 10 weeks of training and then we looked at five weeks so had minus one week zero five weeks 10 weeks it's hard to get significant so basically it's still sitting in the drawer you know you gotta publish that's a good study really good design yeah I know well interestingly I shouldn't say I know but thank

you um anyway that was Sor I like that design because it's the first study to control volume to see actually is it the Crea more training and to be honest that never happens like we usually want people to progress exactly so that's an interesting model and that would answer is it the creatine 100% or is it training because if you match volume then you'll know the mechanisms of creating by itself so that's a really elegant design I like that oh thank you because it's funny there's a guy there's a guy who follows me on social

media and he's been great well actually his name's David Propst and I think you know yeah and he's made these little video summaries and things and I was asking because I literally haven't looked at the literature and it's 20 years later and he said as far as he knows CU he's massively creatin his his username is creatin something and he said as far as he knows it hasn't been done anyway we're not talking about my studies but the point was there that that was saying maybe the maybe just the creatin on itself would would cause

this you know swelling of the cells and stimulate protein synthesis right so but but we found basically no effect of just taking sorry of of doing creating without the wood resistance training but I I couldn't believe it I was quite amazed but even though they we made sure they did exactly the same training so 10 weeks and I had a master student on it and he kept saying oh they feel better they want to do more and I like no no the whole point is don't let them do more it's but we want to see

if they get bigger and stronger and I said people have already shown that we know that they get bigger and stronger yeah yeah I mean matched exactly it was exactly to the kilogram that the groups were exactly the same and guess what what would you predict what would you predict probably no difference no they got bigger and stronger on the creative we we don't really need to publish this so I was surprised but again with the significance and you know whatever but basically it was quite noticeable that they they actually got bigger and stronger on

the creating even though we matched it to the exact kilogram so that's why super interesting because I would think the without the if the training was uh matched then you would speculate how much water retention or self swelling was cause the creatine was causing that anabolic environment to go up uh without exercise we think anytime you measure fat free mass or lean mass is primarily water um because there's no stimuli for protein synthesis so a you you should really publish that that's a really good exactly because that's the thing sorry it's turning into my you

know my great study which has never been published so you know I think this is a good time to say to people because I actually saw like uh 10 hours ago or something you sent out someone's preprint and I want people to realize that and and I know you know this B I want people to because it's got to the point during Co there'd be all this arguing and stuff oh this preprint excuse me a preprint means it hasn't been peer-reviewed or whatever so don't take notice of anything I'm saying about my great study because

it has not been peer-reviewed and indeed the stats we're having some problem you as I said because it's so many groups so many time points it's hard to show the differences so you know what so I could whack that out there like literally we've written it I could whack that out there now and say Here's a preprint and people would be like oh okay so creating on its own social media that's right yeah yeah yeah and it's like no we have haven't published it yet so it's a good point to say you know what don't

go with what I'm saying now because it hasn't been published and indeed we're having trouble with with showing significance and that yeah you know it it needs to be done properly and and that brings up the social media idea nowadays it's gotten kind of scary what's being promoted or talked about and if if it's not justified by evidence-based research it can be very dangerous what some of these products are out there and if it's been shown to do something in a mouse and never shown in a human you can't correlate it from a practicality standpoint

and um sometimes I get quite nervous actually every day you turn on Twitter or Instagram and it's yeah it's it's yeah I'm actually a bit bit worried now I've said all that so I just want to make very clear that that study is not published and and as I said um large reason for that is that even though it looks like there was differences wasn't significant so you know I don't want people thinking if you take creatine and do weights and even if you match training you don't train hard because I mean people would be

like great I don't have to train don't even have to train hard yeah exactly exactly that's tot total bolic so I want almost retract all that so anyway but what my point was there that is we were wondering if the creatine by itself because of that osmotic effect you mentioned with sodium Etc causes cell swelling and turns on protein synthesis now we didn't measure that but but you're saying that the cell swelling and then having effects uh is is part of the mechanism so is is that has that been shown or is that like a

theory and and why therefore wouldn't it happen if you just took the creting because you should still get the cell swelling right without doing the resistance that's right so the theory is if it does uh swell the cell and Mark tulsky lab has shown that Ballam way back and ingal you brought up that was in the mein and act and heavy chain but that was in chick embryo so that's a little bit different but um if the if the creatine does cause swelling it still needs the mechanical stimuli to turn over the muscle protein Pathways

of synthesis and breakdown to really cause the repair process to occur um so some of the genes can be turned on without exercise but they really become synergistic with the mechanical stimuli that also begs the question what about intense aerobic exercise doesn't that cause muscle contractions we don't know maybe it doesn't cause as much mechanical stimuli for hypertrophy or strength gains maybe it causes the kreb cycle to re enhance um and that's something that's sort of the theor is emerging over time yeah okay so yeah different stimuli different different okay I actually yeah yeah I

actually like the sound because it makes sense because you know how muscle um is is use a lot of energy so you know we talk about use it or lose it because if you're Arnold Swartz Niger you got these massive muscles and you stop stop exercising I mean I know there's more recent bodybuild um then then why would you keep it because there so much energy to keep it right so you lose it and it kind of makes sense why would you if you're taking creatine why would you want to increase your muscle if you're

not actually there's no signal you know you're not needing more muscle muscle's not you know when you're doing resistance exercise or or manual labor or something the muscle's like oh crap I need to get bigger and stronger because I've got to do stuff it doesn't make sense to even exactly so physical inactivity will reduce your muscle creatine stores but performing exercise doesn't increase them it just helps maintain it so that's an interesting thing that if you're inactive or you have muscle atrophy there's probably a logical thing that your creatine stores will come down because your

muscle not using it uh like I like your analogy lose it or uh use it or lose it the brain may be a little bit different but that's so in its infancy we have no idea yet on the the efficacy of many of those aspects but from a skeletal muscle perspective we're pretty confident the exercise is the main thing and creatine may be a very small adjunct to it okay so I'm very keen to talk the brain stuff but I still W to yeah I got to get my little make sure I'm clear on everything

and and move on from that now what I wanted to talk about as well is I see a lot of studies and you mentioned earlier know five grams 10 grams the classic stuff with Paul greenh half showed I thought pretty clearly that you do like five days of 20 grams a day and then you know you only need two to three gram so you get it up and then you you know you're 20 20% maybe 40% in in vegetarian vegans and then two to three GRS to keep it there and I remember seeing there' be

all these I won't say names of products but the companies but I'd see them saying I'll take 10 grams a day and everything and I'm like yeah okay because you know you could say they've been nice by not saying 20 grams for the first five days but obviously if you take 10 grams a day or five grams a day you're going to use more product yeah why do why do people talk about five grams 10 grams like you know what I mean yeah in my opinion there's a few things so the the studies you mentioned

Roger Harris Eric Holman Paul greenoff they elegantly showed back in the 90s when before Instagram and all that social media that 20 grams a day for five to seven days completely saturates fills up your your skeletal muscles but that's what's often left un uh told is that that maximal saturation rate occurred after two to three days they just did it a couple extra days to make sure they were doing so if you're think at 20 grams a day and that's about you know almost 10 times more than we're naturally synthesizing per day that totally saturates

your muscle and then since we metabolize about 1 to three grams a day it kind of makes sense and Eric hman clearly showed that three or two to three grams a day will maintain those stores so if you're an athlete and you you load with creatine for 20 grams a day and then go down to two to three days high five yourself no issues that's uh way more than enough I think the five gram dose uh came into light because the theory was well wait if Eric show that three grams a day in addition to

your diet can increase creatin stores in a month and we're metabolizing through creatinin of it one to three grams if you look at the difference having a surplus of three is where five grams a day seems to come from and the other uh justification for that is Roger Harris clearly showed that a single five gram dose elevated creatine in the blood and repeated five gram dose just maintained it and and of course Paul did the same thing so that's kind of where the evidence showed two to three to five grams a day with or without

the looting phas from a skeletal muscle perspective is is more than enough um and they even show that will get you to saturation levels in a about a month all right so so you would still say because I my feeling is why not just do that way but you're saying do five is is safe you do a loading and then you say five when you probably only need two or three yeah so if you're doing a loading and you do five you can rest assured that some may trickle into your bone and and and brain

um some will be going down the toilet per se but I think some people say 5 grams is just easy it's like half a teaspoon um so and there's no detrimental or adverse effects from that dose whatsoever the other Theory though has been postulated is that the larger you are you may have more Transporters so very similar to the glue four if you put on more muscle mass or larger so there was one of the best uh creatine papers by Anam persy he's put it a few in the late 2000 or early 2000s the theory

was the larger you are you may actually require a higher dosage so our lab is primarily looked at a relative dose 0.1 gram per kilogram so if you're 70 kilograms that's seven grams a day if you're 100 kilograms like a lineman you're taking 10 we've seen that to be very effective and safe as well the question is is that any better than two to five grams a day or higher we've never done that dosing study so it's hard to to speculate um I like that because it's it's exactly the same I think it was us

but it may have been someone before us but with carbohydrate ingestion it was always in fluid would everyone was doing like 250 Ms every 15 minutes and and then we had these at one stage we had 100 kgr participant and we had a 50 kilogram participant and we're giving them both 250 Ms every every 15 minutes during prolonged exercise it's like it doesn't make sense so I think it was asked the first time so we said why don't we do three 3.5 Ms per kilogram yeah per 15 minutes to make it 250 Ms every 15

minutes and then you know now it's it's it's happening with creating which makes sense because again if you got very different Siz people why would you give them all the same amount I that something that and we used to think that the skeleton muscle had a ceiling on average is 140 to 160 milles or or think of grams but there was one subject in Roger Harris's classic study that went to about 185 so more times than not we say most people you know we always throw these numbers and then obviously there's this one outlier on

the graph it's very clear in figure four from 1992 and he goes up to 185 milles so it just goes show that there's a lot of variability some individuals can actually take in more creatine at a higher capacity but if you're 250 pounds compared to a 100 pound person my guess is that person can metabolize or utilize more creatine it's kind of similar when you start coffee and you're on a small coffee and now if you're a chronic coffee drinker you need a lot more to get that same stimulating effect to the receptor um we

don't know if that's the case but these dosing studies need to be done and that would be very important yeah I'm very glad you keep saying Roger Harris and and Eric H it's my bad I keep saying Paul greenh half it's Paul greenhoff is often the first author but these guys and Roger Harris was the first study so it's great good on you so um now what I wanted to say as well was um creating transport it was something I wanted to mention earlier we actually did a study with Robin Murphy years ago on that

and um it was her study and there was there was a bit of a hooa because it was the wrong protein and things like that but um basically I haven't followed that literature my my feeling at the time was um that the when you're creating supplement you would actually downregulate your creating Transporters is that is that been shown or 100% correct so it's upregulated when you're putting more creatine in but just like anything when the muscle becomes full uh there's evidence that the transporter can be downregulated therefore you may need a little bit more or

be more consistent with a regular dose to just maintain what's being metabolized but uh there is evidence that the transporter can be saturated or the expression is down regulated over time okay so I guess then people start thinking about a you know can you trick it trick it by you know not taking any for a few days and things like that what are people thinking about that yeah the the study that needs to be done they ask me all the time is cycling better than continuous and there's no evidence to suggest otherwise but to that

point there was a lot of people thought do I downregulate my natural production with creatine and Mar tulsky clearly showed that's not the case in humans there was an animal study that did show it a super physiological amount but if you take creatine you're not going to downregulate your mRNA transporter um but the the transporter to the muscle and we have no clue about the brain or bone um can be downregulated with continuous chronic high dosages when you don't need it and that's probably why it may be more sensitive to a little bit if you

need it so again a small daily dose um and again that's from a skeletal muscle perspective yeah and people don't have to worry about that right they go oh my crine transport is probably down regular so I need to take more and more the whole point is it's because your muscle's already saturated it doesn't need any more so I don't think you know people don't have to think oh I guess need to keep upping and upping my dose no just need a little bit yeah yeah yeah okay now the other thing I think I saw

was um that females tend to have higher muscle creatine is that right and so this is an area of controversy so I I want to be very clear here there's minimal evidence to suggest that females actually have lower or higher intramuscular creatin stores some studies suggest they have lower some actually say they have higher and that led to the speculation maybe that's one of the main reasons some females don't respond as well they don't have that greater room for capacity um but it depends on age sex vitual dietary intake it's not really any different than

males when you look at the totality of studies but there are some that show differences and there's also some studies that show uh aging males and younger males have differences in creating at the end of the day I don't think those differ Es are very meaningful or large both sexes do respond to creatine um however when we get into an older population we do see that older females for some reason don't seem to stimulate lean tissue mass or reduce measures of protein breakdown nearly the same as males the only logical reason would be the cessation

of estrogen but I don't think it's the differences in intramuscular creatine to start with I think it's probably having to do more with estrogen uh factors there because estrogen decreases you know inflammation oxidative stress and when you take it away from the body that's probably why um but females respond very favorably to creatine um and the evidence showing that they have impaired metabolism I'm not really buying it okay okay now just I I realized I've kind of glost over this a little bit so when we talk about creating supplementation during resistance training increasing muscle mass

and strength how much are we talking about there are we um over 10 if you do a 10 we training study or something how much you yes so the problem is we never measure muscle this is the big thing nowadays we measure lean mass or fat free mass and at best I think whatever the measure you're getting 50% might be dry muscle at best so if we say it went up by lean mass we never know if it's water bone connective tissue but we theorize 50% would be muscle the the per increase is very small

we've shown in metaanalysis uh in older and younger individuals with training maybe three kilograms so it's not a lot um however uh strength Sor this over how long sorry on average yeah we always like to talk about meta analysis so that could be from seven to 104 weeks is the longest time period but on average I think if you're doing a six or eight to 10 we train training study you may put on a couple kilograms from a whole body perspective um thickness regionally has been shown to go up a few centimeters uh but strength

is the one that seems to go up by about 20% so that's something that's really important for older adults I think strength by far is more important than any of the measures of lean mass that we're seeing that's interesting I had I had a guess I had a guest on it was Jeremy lencki we talking about Blood Flow Restriction and business exercise and he was saying I can't remember exactly that that strength and and muscle mass weren't going hand in hand have you got thoughts on that yeah his Blood Flow Restriction uh research is very

elegant and he's shown that a number of times he's actually shown that hyperv might go up before uh strength and and that kind of contrasts everything from Digby sale to Duncan McDougall way back in the 80s but the theory is that now there's also evidence in the sarcopenia um community that muscle mass is a poor predictor of functionality and strength um so I will agree I think the emerging evidence is now showing that there is a relationship there's no doubt but but I don't think it's nearly as impactful or correlated as we once theorized and

there's actually new evidence to suggest that they're they're not so can you be strong without or with minimal muscle yes can you have muscle mass and not strong probably but is it really muscle so those those are areas to to look at that's true and when we go back to whim to Raves uh podcast I learned a lot from that and whims exceptional and and Andy Galpin in California is also shown now that we don't even have type 2 x fibers and of course you got to change all your exercise Fizz teaching and you know

we have the gene for it but it makes sense the more contractions you do with oxidative capacity and blood flow uh we're actually getting rid of type 2 x fibers and so now we're left with type one and 2A and I think some of that new technology allowing us to enhance our ability I just why you love science it's always changing and and challenging the paradigms which is great yeah well that's right yes that reminds me yeah so Jeremy was saying and I think again it's it's the kind of thing it it almost makes sense

because Jeremy was saying you can get hypertrophy by not doing not much exercise if you've reduced your blood flow but again you think well if you're not actually doing that much exercise then maybe it makes sense you wouldn't get that much stronger you know because it's like a different stimulus and then also with uh Mor hrop that I just had on a couple weeks ago he was saying if you take beter Agonist so you know like the ventalin you can get increases of muscle mess even without doing resistance training which I thought was amazing but

he was saying you don't get much strength so again makes sense if you've actually increased if you've done like good honest work to increase your muscle mass and your and and and your strength or you know it would make sense that they both get sort of bigger but if if you've done if You' sort of tricked it by taking these you know venin but you haven't actually done your exercise it makes sense even if you get the increase of muscle you won't get much stronger because you're not actually doing anything yeah and again going like

that the low load high volume training so they get the same hypertrophy which a lot of people still don't believe but if you do low load or high load or Blood Flow Restriction just say if you get the same hypertrophy there's a clear difference in strength if you train with heavier weight you get stronger so you there again there's evidence that they can't be completely correlated there's a relationship but there's big distinctions yeah it makes it as you say so if you do low if you do like tons of volume but not much weight it

makes sense you'll get you might get big but you're not going to get strong because you have that stimulus to get that's right exactly and when we talk about strength the proper definition of strength is one repetition right yes so it makes sense if doing like 28 you know 50 reps or something of a low weight you're not going to get much better at doing one rep now what did you actually say so to bring it back to creating what did you say about creating that your in regards to that dissociation what are you saying

there regarding muscle mass and strength so the the yeah so at best you're going to put on a few kilograms of lean tissue or small amount of muscle thickness but strength will go up and I think it was about 20% uh Eric rosson and Jeff fck put out a good review it was about 20% increase in strength for creatine compared to about 8 to 12% for those on Placebo so the percent increase in strength is by far more important okay do we know why that is the theory with strength is that if the muscle is

being activated it seems to stimulate or recycle calcium a little bit more and then again that brings in the neuromuscular system does creatine influence the axon the myelin sheath the neuromuscular Junction we just don't know that okay now I saw you put out uh first auth systematic review met analysis finding that adults under 50 combination of resistance exercise and creating is likely produce a very small reduction in body fat percentage without corresponding decrease so what did you find there if we start talking about we've been talking about muscle bit with fat Etc yeah we we've

looked at two populations under 50 and above 50 and it's is the mirroring effect so creatine and resistance training basically has no effect on body fat or uh absolute fat Mass it decreased percent body fat by less than 1% so at the end of the day it's it's clinically and meaningful uh significance is is question um but a lot of people refrain from creatine because of the weight gain that can typically happen during just the loading phase so a lot of people think oh God I'm putting on fat mass and we wanted to see is

that true and when we looked at all the data uh primarily using dexa or bod pod or things like that we didn't see any increase in fat mass and we saw a very very minimal decrease so we concluded sign scientists creatine has no influence on body fat in humans yep yep so so the weight is just water retention ideally or fluctuations in mass or whichever it is that's right yeah okay now what about endurance exercise so because I've actually we did a study years and years ago with endurance exercise and we found no effect on

so we did like you know submax exercise then a performance belt and there was no effect of the creating supplementation which is probably what you'd expect you touched on it earlier but I feel like there's been a bit more studies with endurance training um you know you touched on the mar conour effects yeah yeah we put out a good review this year uh uh a number of individuals looking at the effects on Sport and aerobic performance and if the sport encompasses some of the anerobic Sprints like swimming or soccer or skating that seem to have

some potential with agility and or recovery um but the area of Interest was in Long duration aerobic exercise so Triathlon or extended marathon and when those individuals consume Creatine Before the Race they had a huge reduction in cyto kind so tumor necrosis Factor Alpha interlan 6 after the race compared to Placebo so although those cyto kindes are really important to stimulate the recovery and muscle protein synthetic pathway chronic elevations May jeopardize recovery and accelerate or extend protein breakdown and that seemed to cause a a an idea that creatine may be good for Recovery more so

than performance when it comes to aerobic Sports okay okay because um all right because I saw there was something about the timing because at first I thought that's ridiculous people were talking about oh I'm going to have my creatin straight before exercise I was like why would you do that because you just want to you know we talked about the loading phase and all this stuff but you're saying it may actually have anti-inflammatory effects in some few studies in Aerobic individuals has shown that have some anti-inflammatory effects uh the majority of that come from the

animal model there's a lot of studies that show no anti-inflammatory effects as well so it has potential um but when it came to the timing so they just happen to give it to the individuals as they're preparing for the race but when it gets to the timing of when you take creatine we see no real reason that there's a a specific time the only theory is that Roger Harris's paper in '92 clearly showed that exercise or muscle contractions stim ulated or augmented creatine into the muscle so a lot of people says oh wow I need

to get creatine as soon as I can after my workout because blood flow is going in transport kinetics but then you would argue well what if I took it before a workout it's gone through the digestive system now it's in my blood when I'm actually working out would it get into my muscles greater uh in the current body of literature and there's only about five or six studies uh there's no difference you can take creatine before during or after exercise you can take it in the morning or evening uh we're not seeing a Time issue

whatsoever you're saying Roger Harris did though in that initial study is that right yeah he he what he showed is that exercise augmented creatine uptake so the theory is prior muscle contractions would stimulate greater uptake and maybe over time that could lead to an improvement in performance uh but when we've compared post exercise creatine to pre-exercise creatine we see no differences so essenti yeah okay all right that's um interesting yeah I I was going to say well maybe it's to increase blood flow but yeah you're saying it's not really having effect I think basically the

only one out there is you know a carbohydrate intake post exercise caffeine before we now know timing of protein is irrelevant timing of Omega-3s is irrelevant like I think at the end of the day emphasize food first and and and just go about your day and try to get through it yeah I think um Luke Van Lon I'm dropping I'm you know plugg in my own podcast which is probably fair enough uh made it very clear as well that um you know this and and and um the window you know as as Stu Philip said

you know Stu Philips said the window after exercise it's not it's not a window it's a garage door or something so it's almost like and I want to get this to people things end up being so complicated right people think oh I've got to do this before and this after I got to this during and I've got to have my protein every every five hours or three hours whatever it is is it fair enough to say generally with these things even if you are supplementing with protein and you may not need to and if you're

supplementing with creatin you may not need to just keep it simple you know like just yeah yeah 100% because I think we're getting to your point you know they're running to the locker room some people are plugging in a blender and they think they're going to deflate and waste a whole workout at the end of the day if you're getting a total daily amount of protein that you need a total daily amount of creatine or essential fatty acids emphasize food first enjoy the meal with friends and family if you need a supplement to get you

that total daily amount that's fine but please don't worry about it like you can go home and enjoy your meal after a workout several hours later you're going to respond well at the end of it I guess caffeine would be the only one because you kind of want that in the blood peaking before you do the work it doesn't make any sense to have post exercise caffeine um and most people enjoy a coffee or whatever to sort of get that jolt in the morning or before a workout but the rest of it can be found

in food a serving a salmon has protein Omega-3s creatine calcium and vitamin D I mean at the end of it I'm not sure how much more you need with vegetables and rice or whichever it is so emphasize food but for those who need a supplement please note there's no timing effect it's not going to be a magical cure okay just just thinking back again with the vegetarians I meant to ask you this earlier so based on what you said that vegetarians vegans have lower muscle creatine and we know that creating phosphate is very important for

Sprint and and endurance train and weight training Etc so do you find that there's very few I don't know if you know this but vegetarians vegans that are sprinters that are because I know that in the Tor of France for example I actually happen to see on the SBS coverage here in Australia they interviewed a chef they did this thing they interview like a a chef every stage and they'll say what food are they making in this region and whatever and at one stage they actually interviewed a chef for one of the professional total fance

teams and said what sort of challenges do you have and he said well one of the challenges is um you know the different foods people like but also two of the eight cyclist we have are actually vegan so he actually had two of the eight cyclists on that Tor of FR team right a vegan I was like wow okay that's pretty pretty interesting but I guess are you saying that you wouldn't really expect to see many sprinters many um you know assum me they're not supplementing yeah that that actually a vegetarian that's an excellent question

I've never thought of it I I don't I I guess in theory if their muscles were only half full of creatine may not excel at the same level but that's an interesting uh question I have to guess some world champion uh sprinters of vegans males and females so that's an interesting question that I don't have any uh science behind anything but it's an interesting way to to theorize it for sure yeah it's inter because you you'd think that they would have you know we talked about downregulating craning transporter You' think that if you weren getting

much you've only got your endogenous production in your own body you probably have creating phosphate sorry the creting transporter would be really elevated in the muscle because it wants more right but but you know that when you do biopsies you find that they are lower so it's not it's not enough yeah okay it' be interesting for sure yeah now um sometimes I actually sometimes I think oh she'd come out when I'm interviewing people think oh she'd come because I'm kind of in this I haven't really talked about on the podcast but I'm kind of in

this no man's land right three years ago I took a package and I'm not working full-time I'm Meritus and I never planned to do that it's it's crazy how often I I think oh I should come over we should do the study yes um yeah so wondering about at one stage we s sort of talked about not tricking the muscle what was it cycling so um you know changing the creating dose and maybe stopping for a few days I meant to say at that point how long does it take to actually come down again if

you stop supplementing yes so the the body of evidence uh again Eric H Holman uh clearly showed this and there was another another study by vandenbberg that in young individuals it takes about 30 days once you're fully saturated to come back to pre-supplementation levels so if you wanted to cycle it fine no problem if you're cycling off it and you want to maintain activity or eat salmon or you know seafood or red meat that's going to help Elevate as well we think in the brain it takes a little bit longer about five to six weeks

and the theory there is maybe the blood brain barrier really stops creating metabolism or being metabolized into the into the bloodstream because it utilizes or very picky but it takes about four weeks for muscle and we theorize about five to six weeks in the brain all right well I'm me I'm ining to get to the brain don't worry we will get there um I what what I wanted to ask first was is there any evidence of any side so I know 20 years ago they were talking about the kidney and I think it was Portman's

it was saying that there was no side effects where are we at with that so even if you take Mega dois is there any evidence of any side effects you know yeah uh nothing's really changed we just have more clinical trials uh uh with more data on liver and kidney enzymes as well as uh complete blood counts and I think our recent study where we looked at about 11 grams a day for two straight years in postmenopausal females might have the biggest weight because it was adequately powered High sample size and we measured liver and

kidney enzymes annually and there was no detrimental effects compared to Placebo so keep in mind we gave a high dose for two straight years in a population whose organs may be susceptible to deterioration and we saw no uh um detrimental effects from estimated GFR to creatinin to any of the liver kidney enzymes and then there's been study after study clearly showing that at normal recommended dosages uh creatine is metabolized to creatinin of course that gives a lot of false positives when people go get their blood work because they need to tell their GP I'm taking

creatine make sure hopefully the GP or nephologist knows well that's going to be metabolized to creatinin and pretty much any hospital around the world only uses the estimated equation and if you have high creatinin that's going to say oh you have poor uh kidney clearance and nine times out of 10 that's not it was just the supplement so it alarms people um but for anybody listening if they are taking high amounts in the diet or supplementation please make sure you tell your doctor you're on it because there's a good chance your creatinin levels will be

higher that's true that's true okay good point okay now I am as as as we know itching to get into the brain and also you've touched on bone yes just quickly I guess because we've been focusing on muscle and you touched on psyopia a little bit there why don't we just talk a little bit more about psychop what is psyopia first and then yeah yeah it's a multifactorial condition so now the emphasis is on it's defined as the age related reduction in strength or your ability to produce Force muscle mass and functionality so performing activities

a daily living and um pretty much anybody on the planet may be susceptible to it I think exercises are are sort of force field against it and of course dietary protein is right there as well but older adults who are susceptible to Frailty or caia or inactivity will likely jeopardize or get an increase in sarcopenia and that's catastrophic that's being placed in long-term care facilities um very uh prone to osteoporosis and and Frailty resist absolutely great f y and so resistance training and creatine has been shown to be a therapeutic intervention for older adults primarily

by improving strength muscle mass and functionality the only area of concern is we've never really measured it in diagnosed ccop penic adults these are individuals in long-term care facilities or measuring the volunteer to make sure they have established sarcopenia um more times than not these are healthy adults free of disease uh and that's why creatine and resistance training have been shown to be effective I would be very interested in do a clinical uh study where we take Copic adults put them on an intervention and then maybe some of those individuals come back to pre cyclopic

um um data kind of like going from diabetes to pre-diabetes that would have massive implications for the global Health Care system and of course to the individual themselves but that's an area that we're trying to get government funding for we've submitted grants for it um and that's something hopefully we get funded down the road okay but again is it is it the creating plus resistance training because you touched on the neuromuscular Junction or something earlier what what what were you saying there and do they get you know just like younger people they tend to get

bigger well okay not bigger do they maintain their muscle more and get stronger with creatin plus resistance training versus resistance training alone yeah and that's an excellent question we speculate resistance training has to be there to be foundational um that creatine in addition to resistance training will give a small greater effect but by giving an older adult creatine without mechanical stimuli that's not that's probably not going to overcome the anabolic resistance to exercise that's probably not going to stimulate any of the major anabolic Pathways so my guess is alone over time is not going to

preserve muscle mass just like it won't preserve bone mass unless you have that exercise component okay great right so why don't we talk about bone um yep let's do it yeah let's move on from muscle at last we've been we've been moving in that way yeah okay yeah so there's a a small body of research and I've been fortunate to work with again Dr Phil chilc and kind of looking at the effects of creatine on bone and it was by chance because when you measure dexa as you know you get bone mineral density and content

lean tissue and fat mass and there was a cellular study done about 20 years ago showing that osteoblast cells or the cells involved in putting calcium into new bone became very energized in the presence of C creatine so the speculation was wow if a human would take creatine would those osteoblast cells get energized and could that have any uh bone building effects and so we sort of did a a few proof of principal studies actually markk tarnopolski did one of the the first studies in rodents clearly shown that these rodents on a creatine andrich diet

improve bone mineral density in the spine um and they measured that uh through wet weight so the theory was wow if the rodent could respond maybe the human could as well there's been a few studies now but there's a clear distinction with the studies if you take creatine without exercise even up to two years no effect to the Bone but if you combine Crea with resistance training and the lowest dose was 8 gram all the way up to about uh 11 um you can get some small favorable effects to the skeleton and this is primarily

around the hip region in postmenopausal females so it doesn't increase bone mineral density all it's been shown is maybe it decreases the rate of bone mineral loss okay and it increases bone geometric Properties or makes the bone a little bit stronger and I had to preface this with a little bit of caution the amount of preservation or increase is very very small however the individuals who were on Placebo and exercise they almost approached a clinically significant decrease so at the end of the day at best creatine may help preserve bone Integrity that may help offset

fracture uh um later on in life it has some small anabolic effects to Bone but we're only seeing this primarily in postmenopausal females or those with the cessation of estrogen in healthy males we see that creatine decreases a marker of bone breakdown this is antal peptides and it has a small favorable effect at increasing bone area so both sexes do respond it's very very small not nearly the same magnitude as muscle okay because yeah you did have a study was it twoyear study 10 grams a day of creatine with exercise and postmental puls of woman

did not improve bone mental density but did enhance other markers hip fracture what what was that what are the what are the markers of hip fractural risk yeah we looked at buckling ratio so the the amount of strain under or a load that would cause a fracture uh creatine preserved that but unfortunately the females on Placebo they got an increase ins susceptibility to fracture from the Bucking ratio and the other one was sort of bone strength uh creatine had a small increase compared to no change in Placebo so they did not even come close to

a clinically significant Mark uh they didn't meet the standard deviation of the minimal amount detected to be significant but they did show uh some beneficial effects so at the end of the day all we can conclude is that creatine and of course resistance training may help preserve the skeleton um but again what about a population that isn't performing resistance training they may be losing bone and that's catastrophic okay so it's when you look at the you look at the fact that if you don't do it you'll go down and if you do do it you

go up and it's it's minimal bit you look at the difference in the groups it's and sadly most of society is not even performing the recommended amount of physical activity let alone uh taking uh an adequate diet so that's something we really got to try to get across the message please exercise uh that's going to be the sort of the Fountain of Youth yep okay now is that is there any more on bone or do we think about the brain um yeah the the bone area is kind of at a standstill right now now those

studies take so long and they're so costly to do bone turns over very slowly but as it stands right now uh a low dose of creatine without exercise will have probably no effect even a high dose with exercise will only have a small beneficial effect but again the key word there is beneficial for populations that may be susceptible yep okay now early on you said um when I said how much of an increase in muscle sorry get back to muscle again um do you get with creatine dur with resistance training versus resistance training alone you

said we don't have good data because it's mainly uh Dex but don't don't people do MRI now um to look at actual muscle they do but not a lot of researchers on creatum will do MRI studies they'll do some biopsies uh not anym now we've kind of got the fancy brain MRI the mrss to look at brain creatine content that that's kind of where most people's attention is but there are some MRI data out there in pqct data we did one uh with CT and showed that the muscle area went up uh with creating so

that is very nice to complement the ultrasounds out there and the dexas and things like that great right that actually makes me feel a bit better about my 20-year-old study because we need I thought everyone's doing MRI now yeah okay so let's talk about the brain um okay so yeah you've touched on a couple of times about uh blood brain barrier and things like that so if we if we sort of do the same with the muscle when we say okay does it get in you know how much gets in whatever what do we know

about that and then maybe cognitive function things like that so the preface that our skeletal muscles act as a vac they suck up pretty much all the creatine they can unfortunately our brain says Whoa We got a a really protective force field called the bloodb brain barrier and ineal cells we're very selective to what gets in those astrocytes in the neurog Gia are very strong so the interesting thing with muscle compared to brain the muscle does not make its own creatine whereas the brain does so the enzymes that are responsible for making the creatine molecule

that are in the liver and kidney are also expressed in certain parts of the brain um but the brain also lacks Transporters to allow creatine in so you got three things working against Brain it's the bloodb brain barrier the lack of Transporters in astrocytes is only present in certain cells and then of course the brain makes its own so the brain might say why do we need anything from the blood you know go to your muscle go to your bone whichever however there's new evidence and suggestions by uh magnetic resonance spectroscopy that creatine can accumulate

it takes a long time and maybe a longer dosing pattern to accumulate in the brain um it does not nearly the same magnitude as muscle it's about half so if muscle will go up by about 20 to 40% we're only seeing in The Limited body of research maybe brain creatine content going up by about 10 to 20% um so it is limited and then the question comes well what if the brain doesn't even need will they take it up so I think it comes down to the pathophysiology of the person or the condition I think

a healthy brain making its own creatine you're not going to notice any effects a compromised brain concussion depression anxiety that's the areas we see some efficacy with creatine supplementation uh not a lot but there is promise where the brain is stressed it may respond to supplementation or need more coming in so okay and what did you say about the blood brain barrier it can get through there or it can't yeah it's very resistant so the endothal cells in the blood brain barrier those astrocytes don't have the transporter the bloodb brain barrier is resistant to uptake

and it only seems to take it in by half so when you look at the really good studies that have used enr uh from Brazil or Norway those studies in in healthy individuals only increase creatine content by about 10 to 20% compared to about 20 to 40% in muscle so it's a smaller amount um that's why speculation higher doses dosages may be needed Andor longer supplementation protocols okay now we' you know we've talked about muscle and how muscle we've tried to emphasize it's not the creatin per se it's the creatin phosphate probably which is important

for the contraction although I guess the total creatin might help with the recovery but in the brain you think well why does it need creatine you know it's not like anerobic metabolism yeah what so what's what's going on and I saw something about possible neurotransmitter yeah yeah that's new too specul so the brain what is it about 2% of of body mass but it uses 20% of our total energy and it uses just the same Pathways fossil creatine ADP buffers hydrogen of course makes ATP so during times of metabolic stress sleep deprivation writing grants Academia

you said you're jet legged uh um concussion depression one of the common denominators when they look at the magnet is these when the brain is stressed it has a reduction in resting brain creatine stores so just like muscle maybe the brain could suck up and take in more creatine when it's metabolically compromised and that's where the best evidence it's limited but that seems to be where the best evidence has been shown to have some Effectiveness for creatine um but in the healthy brain um the theory about cognition we've published a few studies Now not showing

any benefit even at 20 grams a day probably because the brain says I don't need it it's very healthy and it's not compromised but that also leads to speculation what populations may have compromised creatine Alzheimer's dementia Parkinson's we need long-term randomized control trials there's evidence in mice and rodents who are predisposed to Alzheimer's or of course I put out a tweet today that there's a new pre-print looking at a traumatic brain injury and creatine may help decrease oxidative stress uh but we need long-term trials in humans with different dosages and then you also need to

look at the gray matter versus white matter different areas of the brain where it's being taken up so I think the big focal point for the the next 50 years if not longer on creatin will probably be from the neck up okay and and soorry so do we know creating um so in humans um do we know creating levels are um reduced in disease States and things or was that based on sort of mous studies or yeah primarily Mouse but uh in the human studies with depression and anxiety the creatine Baseline stores are a little

bit more compromised um and then when we look at Parkinson's Huntington all that we just still don't have the sample sizes there's no studies in Alzheimer's there's one potentially coming out but again animal data is Good from a mechanistic standpoint but we got to get it into the human trial because that could be so massively important to have any uh beneficial effect to neurological diseases some studies show some benefits primarily in muscular distrophy in in young boys uh there's a couple studies in children with concussion but again those children may have a great repair process

already because they're growing and healthy what about the adult who's already on the tail end in the compromised area that's the area we really need to focus on okay and when you're saying they're measuring creatine in the brain is it creatin phosphate using NMR or they they're measuring total creatine and then they can measure PCR and free creatine as well and the variability there can be minus we've actually seen studies where they take creatin supplementation and it reduces for some reason but on average it can go from anywhere about minus 4% up to about 11%

so the variability is quite High okay and and is there this idea that it could be a neurotransmitter that that has been postulated it meets all the aspects of a transmitter for the the theory is that you know it can speed up um neurom muscular transmission it acts as a as a neurotransmitter released from the axon to the neuromuscular Junction but until it's been replicated in human trials over time in theory it can be a transmitter it meets all the criteria um but until it does its transmitting activity uh we're not really sure with that

and before I forget one of the big things with muscle and brain is yes we talked about vegans there's a huge difference between muscle creatina and in vegans and omnivores but now there's good evidence to suggest that the brain doesn't respond differently from a vegan and omnivore diet so vegans and omnivores may have the same level of creatine in the brain it's very interesting okay that's good I guess it is a factor um okay so just to summarize on the on the brain so I I saw you had a tweet more more evidence that Abit

dietary intake of Crea likely does not influence brain function measures in young adults and then here just I think it was just yesterday great summary of the high variability in brain Crea in response to different doses across populations by Eric rosson additional paper on Long Co showing four grams over six months increased brain creating levels so I guess where does this sort of leave us are you saying that there isn't much evidence that it affects cognition brain function that we know of but there's variability in the brain where did what's the s take away on

this yes so the current summary if I could is that if you're a young healthy individual you're probably not going to get any cognitive or memory uh benefits we've seen a little bit of Promise in older adults and those that have compromised brain bioenergetics uh such as concussion or even some older adults but sleep deprivation or hypoxia seem to have some better evidence from an effect size um so if the brain is not compromised you're sleeping well you're you know living well um you're probably not going to get or notice any of the effects the

theory is the more compromised the brain is um working uh graveyard shift overnight sleep deprivation jet leg hypoxia that's probably where it might have some benefit and the big potential is neurophysiological conditions Parkinson's Huntington Lugar disease Alzheimer's uh those have a common denominator in theory that they have reduced brain bioenergetics okay so sometimes when I'm looking at Twitter and things you get the feeling that it's almost like everyone should be taking creatine yeah I'm trying to think um so for example I don't take any creatine supplementation but I do go to the gym I've been

going to the gym we've just come back from Copenhagen while I was in the gym and I've got to think about joining up here um if someone's young healthy not going to the gym not not not exercising that much yes no and then if you don't have Alzheimer's you think you might have Alzheimer's increase risk for Alzheimer's like what sort of population my feeling is not everyone should needs to be taken Crea but you can almost get that feeling from talking you know oh I'm vegetarian I need to take creating I'm going to the gym

I need to take creating my mother's has out ofs is I'm at greater risk I need to take creating like what do you suggest on this yeah no that's a very interesting point because people say I come across as salesman I could probably sell snow to a Canadian and and as a full disclosure I sit on some uh company boards that produce creatine and of course that doesn't influence any of the evidence-based research that's really important whatever we're discussing today is based on science and and of course on Twitter it seems like creatin is is

going to save the world it seems like it has no downside and it can sort of do everything and and it has always the potential to do certain things but to your question a young healthy individual that's sleeping well they're not going to get any benefit from creatine especially if they're they're not working out I think in in select populations that have inborn creatine deficiencies vegans and vegetarians that are not consuming creatine or if you have any uh metabolic stressors uh covid came to mind depression anxiety any uh um mental health issues could creatine provide

any benefit I'm buying it if it does because I think nowadays in society uh we're so metabolically stressed and stress as Society but please note if it does benefit you it's going to be very very small and it may only be overcoming a natural deficit from your human physiology I don't think you're going to be taking creatine and suddenly wake up and say I don't need to sleep for a week I'm running around that's not the case it may help the mechanism in the brain is decreasing infl inflamation and oxidative stress um but there's good

evidence in older adults it can improve some aspects of Health in young adults and and there's evidence in of course now you're back in Australia Stacy Ellery is now reporting that it can have some benefits to the developing fetus and pregnancy and that's an area that's emerging and a lot of caution needs to be there in children I think there's some preliminary evidence so I always say there's in theory there's maybe no one on the planet that may not benefit and I use the word may um you can get it through your diet you're naturally

producing it and at the end of the day it's up to the person to determine if they need it or not and for most people they don't okay yeah I was just thinking about the the vegetarians vegans I keep getting back to this maybe because my wife's vegetarian and I'm pretty much vegetarian because you know she does most of the cooking and I should be doing more cooking yes okay um basically I'm wondering you said that vegans and ve vegetarians looks like they have normal brain creatin levels so if you're vegetarian or vegan that's not

exercising and not worried about trying to get you know one more kilogram of muscle mass with your resistance training we know that it's not going to do anything to your muscle if you're not resistance training so if you're a vegetarian or vegan that's not actually doing resistance training or Sprinter is there any rationale to take it and they're healthy and they're healthy y yeah uh I doubted it would even increase cognitive effects because I'm not I would not see in that population any reason to speculate the brain is compromised um so those individuals uh bone

is not going to respond with the mechanical load if they're not exercising my guess is they probably would not utilize the supplement especially yeah see it sounds like that that's a population that doesn't need it even though what I'm trying to get at is again it just doesn't feel right to me I'm not a big fan of supplements I think anyone watch the podcast would know that and indeed I get I get offers from amino acid companies and things to to actually plug their their product and I say no because I've had stew Phillips on

and Luke vanloon on saying you don't need you know so um just to me almost just intrinsically or something I just feel like know again we've done so well for all these years without creatine surely you know we don't need to be taking creatine and the other thing I wonder sorry I'm not I'm not dismissing anything you said it all makes sense and I'm actually a done like I said I did the study and I was amazed that it does look like it's having positive effects I guess I I wondered is anything I know there's

no side effects in terms of looking at the kidney and the liver right but you know just just because we're all we're beautifully in homeostasis we're beautifully balanced is there you know it seems like if you're throwing a whole bunch of one um molecule into the body it must Stow out the balance of some other things but is there no evidence for that I'm just a devil's advocate here yeah yeah no we're not seeing any uh from an excretion standpoint so that's a really good point we're only looking at the excretion standpoint we're not seeing

any strain on the cardiovascular system or blood blood uh platelets or blood cells or uh liver kidney enzymes um now the question is are we going to have any detrimental effects in the brain tissue that's an area we haven't even got to I mean that's like you know a decade away and no one's doing a brain biopsy or a bone biopsy to see the effects that creatin has over time but you know it hydrates the the body we're not seeing any uh uh detrimental effects from a whole complete count of course we do see GI

track issues and some acute stressors during the loading phase so we can't say no there's absolutely not we we do see that uh when people take a a high dose for about five to seven days um and that's why a lot of studies don't use the loading phase anymore because that's just usy for the athletes and things like that I see um and then when you look at the dose for bone well geez we've already now double it compared to muscle and then the brain the theory is you need higher dose to get in there

so I think that's where that 10 grams or more came about muscle is low but those other tissues that only get less than 5% going in that's the big thing 95% go to your muscle uh trickling amount will go to those other areas so it's sort of looked at as a total body supplement but look at the vegetarians in in the world and I know a few they're extremely healthy extremely fit they work out great sleep no aders effects so at the end of the day to your point does a vegan or vegetarian need creatine

no the brain traps it in and they're producing about 1 to three grams a day and maybe that's all they need so at the end of the day um they live a long healthy productive life um do they if they want to take supplement will they get a greater response probably um do they need it the answer is always no it all makes sense I'm not giving credit in our time and indeed I just saw my next point was um nature reviews in adapost tissue creatine controls thermogenic respiration and loss of this metabolite impairs whole

body energy expenditure leading to obesity so now they're going to say I'm plugging this thing and maybe getting money we also cover the various roles that Corum metabolism has on cancer cell survival which you touched on and the function of the immune system right so now I'm actually you know going the other way and saying well hang on is it also affecting uh you know obesity do you know much about that I know it's not your area but you so that was the the uh uh the sort of the motivation for the fat mass metaanalysis

and that was primarily done in uh there was a human study actually done and then in RADS as well so it increases thermogenesis or energy expenditure and of course with the things to drivers maybe a muscle mass when up goes up it also has some Direct effects uh going to the immune system that's an area of really promising and primary uh interest for me it has a lot of anti-inflammatory or anti-catabolic effects primarily shown in in rodents but there is some human D data as well um so there's a lot of potential from a whole

body an anabolic or anti-catabolic effect and that's probably why to your point when you go on social media um people think this is like the Holy Grail it's this white boring powder that's sort of got a life of its own uh recently probably because the bone and brain seems new uh it goes back to the protein we're pretty confident we're running out of areas to look at what protein and uh we think we have a good idea with that creatine is is was there it was very boring for 20 years because we thought we knew

everything it did and then all of a sudden there's population seems to have a little bit more and um it's a roller coaster and now with the brain and focus on bone and maybe um um the immune system um I'm on a paper with long Co it's starting to have some really interesting uh promise for specific conditions and here it is you know a boring nutrient that we're naturally producing is found in red meat and seafood um or you could take a boring white powder or now it's probably candies and and gummies and things like

that and um it's starting to have some promise but I really want to emphasize 99% of any benefits someone's going to get is based on the exercise component stimulating the magic of creatine yeah actually so so just back to that nature review so you saying that that even though they said you know may have promised for reducing obesity Etc you didn't find that in your metalis no we saw a less than I think it was 1% body fat and less than 0.5 kilogram reduction in body fat in healthy individuals so over time is it going

to be an anti-obesity um um compound absolutely not and that's even with resistance training now people might say what if we want on a low calorie diet added in aerobic exercise and resistance training we don't know that's a great study design and that'll probably be look that down the road we also don't know can creatine rescue the low protein intake of some population in other words if you're on a low protein amount the RDA and you take creatine could that have some comp compensating effects we don't know that as well so there's a lot of

potential uh areas of research we're interested in so how would it do what what were you thinking there how would it do that so creatine can be anti-catabolic it has been shown to decrease protein breakdown so if you're not getting enough protein um maybe that's going to help preserve the Integrity of the muscle we just don't know that yet yeah it was interesting you did you did say that I did I did hear that earlier on and I thought well that's interesting because most studies they don't they they see that protein for example has effects

on protein synthesis but not so much on breakdown but you're saying creatine you're actually finding if anything the other way around yeah um Mark's group with Johnny P showed a whole body Lucine oxidation was reduced on Creatine and we've shown a Merica three methyltin has been reduced on Creatine as well so those are Ser at whole body markers but at least it showed there is potential to decrease protein catabolism it may not be M fibular but it's at least showing some preservation effect and then you flip it protein increases M fibular protein synthesis but creatine

hasn't been yet so maybe just a longer study needs to be done or more snapshots with the biopsy but that's something that we're thinking of doing it's interesting now you've mentioned caffeine a couple of times under different contexts but somewhere I don't know where you see these things on Twitter or somewhere someone said something about avoiding avoid should you avoid taking caffeine and creatine together what was the yeah it was probably me yeah it was probably me so so Peter hesel who you would know probably did the best study and he was the one that

sort of laid the foundation while caffeine and creatine play tug of- warar at the cirle plasma I remember that now I remember yeah it was a really good study where he clearly showed that uh um um creatine will basically cause calcium to be taken back in but caffeine likes to release it and when you take both they oppose one another so that's why jeopardize muscle relaxation time and then vanderberg study out of uh Europe also showed the same thing so there was some cellular data suggesting they play tug of- war with calcium flux and maybe

it's not advised to take calcium or sorry creatine and caffeine together now the dose of of caffeine was about two to 300 milligrams so that's going to be a large coffee um can you put creatine in coffee and drink it quickly I'm sure you can I mean the dose of of of caffeine in in a coffee is small however we don't know the the minimal or maximal dose that would interfere with it and then there's been studies Roger Harris of course thought about um the GI track irritation when you combine the two so we did

a small study it was a really underpowered study but it clearly showed that caffeine powder and creatine powder did not perform as well as creatine alone so it actually when you look at the series of studies out there there's only about six um when you take creatine and caffeine over a long term they may interfere with one another so since we don't really have good evidence long term I say why not just split it up take your caffeine before you work out and if you're going to take creatine just take it at another time of

the day okay okay that makes sense now just thinking then when you said about powders versus it made me think about Powers versus food is there any evidence because you know we want people to be eating food if possible because you know you're getting all sorts of other things that that you're in the food not just the straight powder and if anything that's more natural is there any evidence if you get your three G or five G or whatever it is from creating powder versus um food you get different effects yeah there's not um it's

the the reason being is if we said okay let's do a study with creatine powder versus salmon for example well God we don't know the anabolic effects did it come from the protein the Omega-3s or the synergistic effect and uh so we don't we do know there is some denaturation of creatine to creatinin with heat so if you're cooking the food and Char boiling on the barbecue you're probably going to be degre some of the creatine compared to drinking it in a solution or putting in something at at a lower temperature but that study has

never been done the only one that resembles it is Roger Harris in around the year 2000 looked at the effects of solution versus meat versus creatine in a Lage and the solution was Superior uh to even meat and an extract so that's why I think a lot of people mix up their powder and put it in a solution or whichever and just drink it all okay interesting now I want to go to some some Twitter questions here we actually had a pile come through um but one was actually I don't know it was it fits

with what you said earlier about coffee so someone said um and what about uh yeah so J Jacob or yakob it's yakob in Denmark I don't know where he's from I don't know if others are interested in this but does does the temperature of the fluid so he touched on that and he said can I you know can I put in a coffee so we just talked about that right so yeah I think at the end yeah so the temperature does de denature the creatine molecule but it would have to be for an extend at

a period of time and if coffee is the only way you're going to get creatine in and during your supplementation for consistency I think it's acute but the dose that's been shown in other studies is very high much larger typically than coffee okay yep and then uh this guy Mark um he's sent a lot of questions as usual he's he's great um one of the ones he said is there any other factors that might affect creating up so we talked about EX size are there other factors that might affect create an uptake yeah there's there

another big one is insulin via carbohydrate um but of course A lot of people are are a little uh scared if you will um of simple refined carbohydrates um but protein is very gluconeogenic you get a lot of benefits from protein that can actually stimulate creatin uptake as well so exercise and some macronutrients primarily carbohydrate and protein can help augment that creatine into the muscle okay so the insul do we know how that works very the theory is very similar to glute four so the theory was that more insulin would stimulate more Transporters to the

the membrane and allow creatine to get in through its transporter very similar to augmenting uh glute four translocation to the membrane wonder if it could also be because insulin stimulates the sodium potassium pump and you sodium yeah so maybe it's something to do with that as well and keep in mind creatine's really close in proximity all those pumps because you need ATP to be recycled yeah okay so another one from Mark does it make a difference if you're doing uh like a whole big volume I guess it's just more of a stimulation is is the

effect of hypertrophy and strength the same if you train three versus 10 versus 52 hard sets uh per muscle per week uh with the creatine is it do you do we know that sort of breakdown no that would be more of an a volume perspective as long as the creatine is is there to allow you to exercise higher um we we wouldn't we'd have to do a study to to basically see the effects of volume or frequency of training out I guess you're saying just to tie it back with earlier I guess you're saying the

creating would help you to do a greater volume it would so the the seven sets or 52 or whatever the he was getting at that's where it would probably show some benefit on recovery Andor performance of volume yeah uh how do you reconcile the com this is Mark again how do you reconcile the the conflicting evidence so randomized control trial showing no effect versus epidemiological showing effect of creating supplementation on improved cognition I so what he means I think is that habitual dietary andh data is shown that the more creatine in your diet or food

has been correlated with positive aspects to cognition memory and and potentially antidepressive uh ideas or flip it people with low amounts of dietary creatine have heighten increases of depressive symptoms um but those are epidemiological and subjective whereas when we see randomized control TRS unfortunately we just don't have those done in populations that are clinically diagnosed with depression anxiety so on and so forth or memory larger scale uh studies need to be done before we can extrapolate those data for sure okay it's true okay here's David um with the maltitude of demonstrated benefits of creatine what

benefits have surprised him and what did he think would show benefits but did not or not oh that's a good question yeah you know what's probably surprised me is we've talked about this where creatine was boring and gone away and then all of a sudden it started to cause benefits in other areas of the body that we just never speculated it was always scull the muscle and I I would say the surprise was its potential effects on bone definitely brain and potentially the immune system um so those are probably the surprises uh sorry what was

the second part uh and and has it been some uh situations where it hasn't improved and you thought it would I thought the timing would be very important with creatine uh when I first was looking at this I was like oh from Rogers data this will be by far post exercise is going to be superior um that's the area that I thought would pan out and study after study clearly shows it needs to accumulate it's not like caffeine and and that's the area I would that comes to mind anyway yeah okay now sometimes I ask

this question as well is uh what are the controversies in the field because obviously I don't know you know every week it's a different I don't know the literature well enough is there controversies is is there anything I guess what I'm saying is is there anything that you've said today that if if some other researcher might say well hang on a minute you know yeah yeah oh I'm sure people would argue against the the caffeine the creatin argument there and of course I I touched on why we theorize that we just don't know I think

the look at other forms of creatine there's a lot of companies that they're marketing different forms of creatine uh at the end of the day it has to be creatine the body needs to recognize that creatine molecule for it to be effective um but monohydrate is true and tested it's the safest profile with that as well uh but then you get in the areas where people swear that creatine causes baldness and of course you look at me and other researchers and you're like well it's got to be true and I've changed the way I answer

this I used to always say we have no evidence to suggest that creatine causes baldness uh based on that rugby study uh but I also say gez you know what the only way from a science perspective to answer to that is we don't know we've never had a study ever ever measure follicle loss or thinning um the only way I can answer it is I've assessed well over a thousand people uh half probably were on Creatine not a single person has ever come to me and said my hair was thinning um that's antidotal but it

it's the way to look at it of course when they see me they're like well there you go uh it doesn't destroy your kidneys um and but the big one I think is the false positive with creatine supplementation and kidney failure uh it does make creatinin and that's why so there's a lot of myths and misconceptions out there it's not a miracle it's not going to do everything that is on social media uh when you look at the science it has a small favorable effect if it's done correctly with exercise interestingly we've touched on quite

a few times that taking creating alone won't do a whole bunch won't put on muscle and strength do is that is that message out there like if people do people know that do most people know that they've got to do the business training or some people just taking it thinking they're going to get strong and big yeah unfortunately I think they think they can just take cre like an anabolic steroid and they're going to get effects the only area we see some promise without exercise is the neck up um but they're also performing activities of

daily living like daily contraction so um from a muscle bone perspective we really think exercise needs to be there we don't really know does exercise need to be there for the brain effects but there are a lot of people think this is like a Flintstone vitamin they can take and they're going to get all the benefits I'm like no you got to put work into the track the field in the gym and and then at the end of the day this is going to give have a small beneficial effect so if you're making a cake

exercise is the cake the icing is protein other macronutrients and maybe creatine provides a bit of sprinkles on top maybe you're going to get one to two% extra boost uh but if you take away the exercise nothing really matters yep okay now I think we've probably touched on this but one one thing I've started saying asking is um you know a large part of the reason I do this is I want to take on these influences that you know their information from the research experts not from influencers so I say is there is there something

you know that annoys you in this that's on social media but I think we've probably touched on that right is there anything else sort of out there that's that's annoying and you want to correct while you get the chance yeah I think the the danger of social media I think social media is fantastic for getting uh uh information out there but you got to be really careful about who and what you're listening to and we spend a lot of time doing research studies they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars thousands of research hours and we

typically publish papers that no one reads except for now with social media it can get out there so please go to science your podcast is exceptional I would highly recommend to come here thank the people you've had on here are exceptional so evidence-based research is the first place uh if it seems too good to be true it probably is um and the other thing is I think I always want to give respect to the people who have laid the foundation and and some of these nonsensical comments the goat the the the best creatin researchers out

there I like to use that as I talked about I wouldn't even make a hockey team of Crea researchers if you go back to the infancy and there's a lot of people out there that I admire and respect that have pretty much done all the research that we just use to adopt and and just because they're not on social media um so I think a lot of people are are very uh um um spontaneous to give some of these acronyms and uh if I can contribute one perent to the scientific Community with some research uh

I'm more than happy but the the Theo wallman's the turn aolis Paul greenh half Bruno gallano chilibeck Eric rosson Abby Smith Ryan rich kryder like I can go on and on Roger Harris Holtman Peter hesel all these people that a lot of people are not on social media a lot they are the best creatine researchers ever there's probably 30 others that we don't have time to get and if I could hold the water bottle on the bench I'd be more than happy so um I think you're being I think some of the foolishness that I

hear about is is comical yeah well maybe you're the creatine Resurgence goat or the messenger maybe I don't know you know like 20 years later and then yeah no I know you were doing stuff back then so it's not it's not you are on the team don't worry okay so just to finish up um I'd like to finish up with some sort of bottom line takeaway messages that you want people to get from this chat yes so one is that exercise is foundational two you produce creatine you eat creatine you can get some favorable effects

from supplementation it does not need a lot um and the third biggest one is that creatine will only work if you put the effort in to get the results and that's the exercise generally that's the exercise it's not a magic cure yeah all right but but I guess just to just to make sure we're clear on that so that's in terms of muscle but you're saying from the from the neck up it might be different is that right it might be different if the is compromised Crea can have some favorable effects but we need a

lot more data with that as well right well thank you very much you're a wealth of knowledge on all this stuff and and and I've really liked how you've you've you know been on top of everything but also over and over recognize the previous researches so but uh your contribution is big as well so thank you very much for coming on I wouldn't have asked you otherwise thanks for coming on thank so much yeah thanks for having me I had a great time thank you okay see you mate bye- bye yeah I hope you enjoyed

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