Creatine Expert: Creatine Is The Secret To Weight Loss

A healthy brain likely doesn't need any creating. But what if you're stressed? What about sleep deprivation? Night shift workers? University students cramming for a midterm? Then all of a sudden the healthy brain becomes a metabolically stressed brain. And most people fall into the stressed environment. And that's where creatine comes to the rescue. And we'll talk about how much, but no more stress it is the higher the dose seems to come into play. And is there anyone that shouldn't take creatine? Well, a publish over 120 papers just on creatine alone. Wow, we've done at least 30 to 40 studies in our lab. And I can't find anybody that can't or shouldn't take creatine. So for example, I'd recommend that those who just creatine can not only have potential anti-cancer properties, but really speed up rehabilitation. And there's a lot of hope especially around Alzheimer's. And what about kids? The current body of evidence suggests they want to get at least one gram per day because in children they want to have optimization for bone health as well as muscle development. And so I'm fascinated that this nutrient discovered in 1832, like boring for the longest time as having these profound benefits we never even thought would happen. And so your viewers today will be surprised those some of the things I'm going to talk about, including microdosing. And we've got this thing here in front of us. This is the dosing dilemma. And I want to talk about how much I need to take for all these things. And I want to talk about nutrition protein, weight training, etc. But before that, you've got five myths in front of you. Can you reveal one by one what they are? So this is thought I can't believe you did this one to me. Creatine causes hair loss. I was going bald before I started taking creatine. Myth number two. Oh, so this is by far the biggest myth. And that is... Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this one right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much. Dr. Darren Kandao. What is the mission that you're on in your life? I think right now would be to promote health and make people live longer free of disease. It's fascinating how we've transcended our understanding of weight training. And now weight training is seeming to have these profound effects that cardiovascular exercise has and it gives you a bit more. So really focusing now on the benefits of lifting things around the house and how exercise. And then, of course, nutrition. We're going to talk about creatine, but also how other macronutrients, especially protein come into play. And then when you combine those two, are we doing enough to optimize longevity and we hope that we are, yeah. And so what are the reference points we're drawing on? How do you know the things you know? Are you doing your own research? So I did my graduate school in Canada, a cell biology degree. And then I moved into my masters in PhD looking in kinesiology. So it's interesting that I fell into creating supplementation research by accident. I was doing my masters on an amino acid called glutamine. And at the time, about 20, 30 years ago, glutamine was the biggest rage. Everybody was taking this non-essential amino acid and hoping that it would have body composition improvements. And I sort of determined it was worthless in young healthy individuals from a body composition standpoint. And at the same time, a good colleague of mine was doing creatine. And I started to know that these young biological males were getting bigger, stronger, faster. And then another study, bigger, stronger, faster. And then when you go to the research on creatine, it was very stimulating in a sense that we're now improving things that we know with aging go down. So then I turn my focus completely to healthy aging and trying to get, you know, grandparents saying, great-grandparents, and your parents to live longer free of disease. But wait, let's start young. Start as early as you can and move forward, yeah. And so you got really compelled by creatine. I want to talk about all these things, nutrition, protein, weight training, et cetera. But on this subjective creatine, what was it that compelled you so much to start? You did start doing your own research on creatine. I did. And I started to take creatine. So, you know, it was this natural metabolite that we're synthesizing in the liver and brain. If you take a little bit more, not a lot, just a little bit more than what we're probably taking in from the food, sources such as red meat and seafood, can it have benefits? And sure enough, it's now the most research supplement out there. It's overtaken protein and caffeine from an organic perspective. And it's gone global, not just for males, but of course females and centerians and elderly. So it's very fascinating the explosion in this research part. What is this sort of, I'm not evolutionary backdrop, but I guess physiological backdrop of why humans need creatine. But also why they might not be getting optimal amounts. Yeah, that's a great question. So, adenosine triphosphate or ATP is the energy currency of all ourselves. And think of your muscle doing work or shoveling the driveway or walking. You're using your muscles and you need to maintain that level of energy to maintain exercise. Well, creatine comes to the rescue to help maintain your energy currency. So, if Batman, which gets all the press, is ATP, Robin is creatine. Creatine comes to the rescue. It's his best friend to help maintain these levels now. When you exercise at a high intensity, sprinting, weightlifting, those ATP stores do become jeopardized. And that's why creatine sort of sacrifices itself to come to the rescue. So, that's why anaerobic sports, the World Cup just started. These individuals will be using a lot of creatine stores in their muscle. The question is, do they have enough? And if they had more, could they play better? And so, our body makes creatine naturally. That's correct. It is making about one to three grams a day, but only in two areas. So, this will be quite shocking for people. We're only actually making it in the liver and the brain. We don't make it in skeletal muscle, but you store 95% inner muscle. So, when it's being made in the liver or brain, the brain will keep it there, but in the liver, it will get transported in the blood up to your skeletal muscle. The question is, well, what if we need more? And that's where dietary creatine from red meat or seafood or supplementation comes into play. So, are we deficient in creatine? There are small populations with, unfortunately, they were born with the inability to synthesize creatine. They would have a deficiency and they are required to take supplementation. The other unique population is vegans and vegetarians. So, vegan and vegetarian diet is extremely healthy. The downfall of those, they're not getting any dietary creatine because creatine is only found in animal-based flesh, so red meat, seafood and poultry. They're naturally synthesizing about one to two, maybe even three grams a day through amino acids in their food, but vegans and vegetarians respond literally the best on the planet because now they're taking in a supplement to allow that in. And as it thought that historically, we would naturally have consumed more creatine. That's a good point. So, back, you know, hunter and gatherer agent, a lot of meat, they were consuming quite a bit through dietary products. Just say if you only wanted to get three grams of creatine through food, you'd have to eat quite a bit of meat to do that and then it comes into the dilemma of what if you don't eat meat or you just can't afford it, you know. Creatine has exploded over the recent, I've been cut last couple of years. I saw a stat that said, I think in women, it had gone up to about 3% to women take the creatine and in minutes slightly higher. It's still a little bit lower in terms of consumption in women from the stats that I saw. And I think that in part is because there's still some prevailing myths about creatine. When I speak to some of my friends, people know that I interview a lot of health experts and scientists and PhDs that have done research and supplements. They asked me, the first question I get asked a lot is what are the supplements should I definitely take? And when I mention creatine, it's always met with a certain set of rebuttals because there's some prevailing myths. You've got some myths about creatine on the cards in front of you. Can you reveal one by one what they are? So, this is definitely the number one myth creating damages your kidneys. So, when you take in creatine to the body, it gets stored as creatine. But when you metabolize it, sort of thinking leaking from the muscle, it gets leaked out as creatinine. And most people watching is like, oh, that was on my blood requisition form and right below creatinine was something called EGFR. So, glomerary filtration rate is an estimation of your kidney health. So, the problem is when individuals on creatine supplementation, they go to their doctor for their annual blood work, their creatinine might be a little bit elevated. And that's only from the breakdown of the compound. And then, unfortunately, their filtration rate is lower. So, then their doctor gets really surprised and they're like, stop taking creatine because it's hurting your kidneys. What typically happens is they go back or stop in creatine and then they check their kidneys again and it's fine. So, I would say 99 out of 100 times that it's a false positive. So, this is by far the biggest myth. And there's been randomized control trials for several years showing that creatine causes no detrimental effects to the kidneys. I had exactly that twice on my blood test. Yes. And if you're also creatinine could be elevated if you're on a high meat diet, a little bit dehydrated. So, those that are exercising is very, very elevated. So, always tell your doctor you're on creatine supplementation because your creatinine could be a little bit higher. Okay. Yep. Myth number two. Creatine makes you retain water. So, this is really important. And I think this is one of the main reasons females were really hesitant to take creatine. If you take too much too soon, it can lead to an increase in water retention. So, you've probably heard of the creatine loading phase. This is where supplement companies want you to take about 20 or 30 grams a day for about five or seven days. That has been shown to increase water retention acutely. So, maybe it'll reside there for about three to five days. But after that, when you go on a maintenance phase of about three to five grams a day, that water retention goes away. So, in the initial stages, if done improperly or too much, it can cause a little bit of water retention. The good news for everybody watching is after about the first week that water's inside our muscle. So, now we're volumizing the size of our muscle, sort of like a balloon here, it's full of water. Now, after a while the water's now going into our muscle, it's a lot bigger compared to a deflated balloon or muscle that didn't have any water. So, creatine is osmotic. Water likes to follow creatine. So, by taking it into the muscle, it gets a lot bigger. And that's good because a swollen muscle stimulates protein synthesis to get bigger and stronger. Oh, really? The swollen muscle stimulates protein synthesis. Yeah, so when you have water coming in, that's a really good thing. And creatine does that, and that's one of the main mechanisms why it works. So, what does that mean? Does that mean that if I have creatine in my muscle and I'm more likely to gain muscle? That is potentially the factor because when you're having or trapping water, it turns on all these signaling pathways that are involved in protein synthesis and one of the biggest robust evidence is that creatine increases lean tissue mass and regional muscle thickness with weight training over time. Oh, okay. Yeah, because a lot of people ask concern that they're going to put on lots of weight to be bladed with creatine. The interesting thing there is if you take smaller, more micro dosing, there's hardly any effect. And this might come surprising, but if you did a six week study, pre and post after creatine, you only increase mass by 0.86 kilograms. Oh, wow. And the majority of that is lean mass. So, at the end of the day, a pound and a half is not a lot. Lean mass. Lean mass, yeah. Which is, we think of lean mass. Most people think it is muscle, but lean mass in our body that includes water, connective tissue, organs, as well as skeletal muscle. And about 50% of our lean mass is muscle. Okay. Yeah, great. Okay, myth number three. Creatine is only for men. This is 100% false. When you go through the totality of all the evidence, females respond extremely robustly to creatine supplementation. They get profound benefits and strength endurance and performance. They lose a little bit of body fat. So, there's another idea that people thought water retention was causing an increase in fat mass. We've done some meta analysis now showing that creatine reduces fat mass. Females get an increase in lean mass as well. And happy this one came up because from our lab with bone health, females do respond very favorably with creatine and bone. And we can talk about that as well. Myth number four. Oh, I can't believe you did this one to me. Creatine causes hair loss. So obviously looking at me and prolific creatine researcher and taking creatine religiously for the like the last two and a half decades, people would look at me and say, well, obviously looking at him, creatine caused this. And I was going ball before I started taking creatine. This myth came from a study in rugby players decades ago where creatine about 20, 25 grams a day for seven days increased a hormone called DHT. It's a precursor for testosterone, which unfortunately has been linked to hair follicle loss and thinning. But the ironic thing is when creatine was given to these young males, the hormone went up, but it was still within the biological range and no measure of hair follicle thinning or loss was done. The cool thing is just a few years ago, they started to put this theory to the test. And five grams in young males for about six to eight weeks of training caused no detrimental effect from hair thinning, follicle loss. So my appearance was probably based on something else. So there's no evidence to that as well. Myth number five, creating causes muscle cramps. No, I think this is so overplayed. When creatine is taken into the body and water will follow it, now you're super hydrating the muscle. So one of the main issues with muscle cramps is it could be dehydration in the muscle. Some people have heard of sodium potassium. That's why Gatorade was invented. But if anything, sodium decreases muscle cramps and it's super hydrate. So in the hotter environments, June, July, August, creatine is going to be one of your best friends. So those are the five myths. We talked there about weight training. What is this very curious graph? It seems to show that creatine helped gain muscle mass through a training region. Oh, yes. So this is actually showing now that when you take creatine supplementation, you're actually getting an improvement in training volume. So when you go in the weight room, you look at the lower your lifting by the reps by the sets. So it actually goes up. And then when you don't, obviously it would go down over time as well. So the cool thing here is that one of the main reasons you get an enhancement in performance is that creatine seems to enhance training capacity. So a lot of people say I've taken creatine. Now I got an increase in the number of reps or sets that I can perform. And that probably leads to stimulation over time. So this is a eight week study. That is an eight week study, very short term as well. So you can see that the number of weeks came down when they weren't taking creatine. And then when they started to take it, it went up as well. And this leads to another important point. So and it's often not talked about when you take creatine for at least a month, people say, well, how long does it stay in my muscles if I go on vacation? What if I can't take creatine and in scale the muscle, it takes about a month for those elevated levels to come back down. In the brain, we don't have a lot of evidence, but it's speculated it takes about anywhere between five weeks to about three months for those elevations to come back down. And this essentially means that if I take creatine, I will be able to train harder. Harder or longer or more frequent. So one of the things with creatine it allows the muscle to recover quicker. So you might be able to get back to the, you know, if an athlete trained twice a day. So either one of those seems to be one of the most plausible mechanisms. And why is there a big dip in the middle of this graph? So that is actually showing where the individuals would train and then without creatine and then take it over time as well. Oh, okay, so that's, that's don't. It's a detraining and then taking it again, correct. Okay, so they start taking it. I've taken it at week four and then that's where the elevations go up. Yeah. So it goes to show that when you have creatine, everything is elevated. If you stop taking it, it takes about four weeks to come back down, but you'll know to set it was at the same level as the placebo. And then when they take it again, they get a rebound effect. So I think this has application for people who have injured themselves and they now need to go back and start training. If you take creatine, it can they celebrate the rehabilitation program? Hmm. And does it, I guess because it makes your training volume increase? Correct. It makes your muscle mass gain increase? It can gain increase in muscle mass. It's not great. That's probably going to be a bit surprised into a lot of people. A lot of people take creatine for huge increases in muscle. You get an increase in lean mass by about 1.2 kilograms. But as I said previously, remember only half of that is skeletal muscle. So creatine, yes, can with weight training improve muscle mass, but it has more robust evidence for muscle performance. Is there anything else we need to know about creatine's link to muscle mass? I think one of the big things is that it decreases something called protein breakdown. So that might allow the muscle to maintain its integrity or recover quicker. But overall, when you combine creatine with a standard weight training program, you should expect a greater increase than weight training alone, absolutely. And that's across all ages, which is really important. Okay. And the studies you've done in your own lab, what are those? How wide varying are those? And how many have you done? We've done at least 30 to 40 studies in our lab, I publish over 120 papers just on creatine alone. And the interesting thing is that from young individuals to middle age to older adults, we see a very common theme that combined with weight training, creatine, about five grams or more, we use typically a little bit more, seems to have beneficial effects on muscle mass, muscle strength as well as performance, absolutely. Can you show me what five grams looks like? Absolutely. So this would be a standard five gram dose. Which is one scoop, three, one scoop. Now keep in mind that can be found in meat or seafood, but you're gonna require a lot. Okay. So five grams is one scoop. One scoop. And you're saying we don't necessarily need to do this loading phase that bodybuilders would do. Correct. So the loading phase is the most rapid way to saturate your muscles. Now that's very beneficial, but that would be four scoops. So four scoops is a loading phase per day and is very effective, but the issue is can it cause some adverse GI tract irritation, things like that's where anecdotally people have reported that. But a lot of people from a muscle perspective will start with just five grams a day and that's very beneficial. And at five grams a day what benefits am I getting? Five oh, across from a skull and muscle perspective, you get a whole plethora. So you definitely get an increase in lean tissue mass or muscle size. And then a good muscle performance, muscle strength, power and endurance. And the other one that never gets a lot of press with should is functional ability on older adults to sit to stand. This has applications getting off the toilet out of the bed, out of a car. So as we get older we're losing muscle strength and performance as well as functionality and creatine and weight training seems to come to the rescue there. And is there anyone that shouldn't take creatine? You know, I can't find anybody that can't or shouldn't. The safety profile is exceptional. If they have pre-existing medical conditions they definitely need to speak to their doctor. Besides that, I'm not seeing any reason a healthy individual can't take or shouldn't take creatine. Unpregnant women? So that's an interesting colleague of mine, Dr. Stacey Elriot of Australia is now finally looking at human trials with pregnancy going into breast milk into the fetus. So it's still in its infancy, the jury's still open because it currently stands, it seems to be relatively safe and well tolerated. Okay, so not all creatine is made the same. Right, correct. There's lots of different types of creatine. Some people take creatine gummies. I mean, I have some different types of creatine here, creatine monohydrate, creatine hydrochloric. Okay. I remember looking when I was in a show for a couple of months ago and seeing like five or six different types of creatine. What is the optimal type of creatine to take and why? And so by far, creatine monohydrate. And that goes against all the new marketing forms. So creatine monohydrate is simply creatine linked to one water molecule. When you take it into the body, the water molecule dissolves as identical to what's being produced in the liver and the brain. All the evidence that you ever hear about the safety and efficacy of creatine is based on the old boring from 1832 creatine monohydrate. There's new market forms of creatine such as hydrochloride which does have evidence behind it. There's many other forms. But the only downfall with all these market forms is it's never been shown to be safer or more effective than creatine monohydrate. The other big thing for your viewers is make sure it has create a pure or some form of creatine monohydrate on the label. And then it's also third party tested. Create a pure. Create a pure is from Germany. It has the highest standard of qualification and scrutiny and then NSF certified or another third party certified. So those are the three things that I personally would look for. Monohydrate, create a pure is the type and then NSF certified or third party certification. Which is that little logo at the bottom? That little logo here at the bottom. That's right. So NSF is a national sanitation foundation. It's a third party organization that will independently take the supplement and then third party test it. And then you get a certificate of analysis to make so there's no contaminants like lead or arsenic or things like that. So that's something for the consumers watching to definitely be aware of when you go to the store. And we've got this thing here in front of us. This is the dosing dilemma. We talked about muscle there. Have we checked muscle offer? Is there anything else to cover? No, so how many scoops do you think is optimal for skeletal muscle? Oh, skeletal muscle. Yeah, you're bicep, you're tricep. You know, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Five grams, five grams. So that's only going to be one little scoop. Okay. Okay, that's probably very viable and you're correct. Across the lifespan, five grams has been shown to be effective. But here's a little bit of caveat. If you're over the age of 50, maybe you want to have a little bit more. Because as we get older, the creatine in our lower legs is more jeopardized and therefore you might need a bit more. Okay. So this is without the loading phase. So this is if you just want to take a little bit per day. And do you have to take it consistently? Good question. So ideally, yes, there is evidence that you can just take it on the training days. But we haven't talked about the brain yet. And the reason why I think you should take it every day is it likes to go to other tissues on a daily basis. So that's about seven grams? That's about seven or eight grams. And that seems to be very safe, and viable dose to be shown to be effective for improving muscle mass and performance. I do have an issue sometimes when I take a little bit more creatine, which is I feel I wouldn't say light-headed, but I get a little bit dizzy almost. 100%. What is that? So there is a mechanism. So creatine is the biggest methyl scavenger in the body. And without boring your viewers, but methyl groups are used for everything. They're also used to synthesize something called adrenaline and are neurotransmitters. You know the things that we get excited about. So when you take in too much creatine, typically on an empty stomach or in a dehydrated state, that will spare methyl groups in the body to be used because you're taking so much in. And then it says, where can I go? So since creatine is now being taken into a supplement, these methyl groups are available in your body to go elsewhere to do work, and they like to synthesize adrenaline. And that's why you feel more energetic, so to speak. When you say synthesize adrenaline, what does that mean? Yeah, that means you're creating more of the hormone called epinephrine. And that, you know, you hear about fight or flight or you're nervous or whichever it is, it gives you a little bit more of that. So that's why sometimes you feel a little bit jittery or things like that. Yeah, sometimes I can feel a little bit sick because I don't know if I do too much. Yeah, and so that's where it's sort of the new area of interest for me is this micro dosing based on that. So we're starting to see some evidence now that if you take smaller amounts all throughout the day, it does not have any adverse effects. If anything, it seems to be a little bit more tolerable. So you could take a few grams in the morning, a few grams in the evening or whichever. I think one of the best ways to take it that never gets any press is I put five grams in my water ball during my workout. And so now I'm consuming a little bit of creatine as I do my weight lifting or cardio and then I'll consume a little bit in the morning as well. So I take it about 10 grams a day at minimum on a daily basis. Other people will take more or less, but that's just how I get it in you. I find that if I do take a little bit in the morning and then a little bit later, it's much better. 100%. And I don't get any weird feelings. That's correct. And it seems to be more consistent and appreciate it for individuals because if you do are susceptible to any fluctuations in weight gain, water retention or GI tract irritation, they'll seem to definitely go away. And we've got, we've assessed over 1,000 individuals in my lab and that seems to be a very viable approach. Not a lot of taste to it is there. It's not the best tasting. It's very bland, very boring. But there's other companies trying to make it more flavorful things like that. The cool thing is with creating, you can put it in anything. You can put it in yogurt, a juice, whichever it is. You can now put it in coffee. There's a little bit of controversy over the dose of caffeine. I think anywhere lower than 350 milligrams is fine and that's going to be most standard coffees or teas as well. So whichever allows you to become consistent is a great way to do it, yeah. Okay, so bone, tell me what I need to know about. Okay. Now we talked about muscle. How many do you think for the skeleton here? Um, that's the same. Okay. Unfortunately, the lowest dose ever has been shown to have bone benefits is eight grams all the way up to 12. So now we're in a dosing dilemma already. We just started. We have a little bit disconnect between muscle and bone. Three to five grams seems to be really good for muscle a little bit more is fine. But bone needs to be a little bit more. And that's primarily based on some of our work from our lab where we've shown that about eight to 12 grams a day, with exercise and that's crucial. If you do not exercise, there's never been a study ever shown to have bone benefits. But if you do perform weightlifting, one of the very cool things in postmenopausal females is that creatine seemed to reduce the rate of bone mineral density loss around the hip region. So it didn't increase bone density, but it decreased bone density loss. And it also seemed to maintain or improve the structure of the bone a little bit more. So that has profound beneficial effects, especially as we get older, if those individuals on creatine were to fall, maybe they might not fracture their hip. And as we both know, if you fracture your hip, you're gonna be placed in long-term care, you're gonna be inactive for at least six months. So creatine has some bone benefits. They're not great. They don't improve bone density, so they're not gonna be an osteoporotic cure. But there is something there, especially if you're prone to osteoporosis or osteopenia. And what's the mechanism of it? Just stopping by and loss. Yeah, it's very interesting. So if you understand a 24-hour cycle that creatine sort of stimulates these bone-building cells to become more energized, think of supermerial. The original Nintendo, when he got the mushroom, maybe he came energized, creatine does that as well. And then on the flip side, creatine seems to decrease the osteoclast or bone breakdown cells. So by a synergistic mechanism, it seems to cause this turnover to go a little bit better, causing the bone to maintain its structure. It's very similar to a bisphosphonate that someone would be taking to maintain their bone health. A bisphosphonate. Yeah, it's a drug that a lot of individuals will take if they're prone to bone loss. Obviously, creatine's not a drug, but it has some of those similar properties. So we've got muscle. I need to take about seven or eight grams to get those benefits. We've burned it's a little bit more. A little bit more. You don't mean additionally? No, in total. So now this is where we get into the daily dosing dilemma. We've gone from three to five grams, or a little bit more from muscle. Bone is maybe eight to tenor a little bit more. So what do you think on the brain? The hottest topic. Ten? Ten, okay. So that would be two scopes. I'm just assuming this increases. Yeah. So the interesting thing here is that the brain will naturally make its own creatine, very similar to the liver. So since the brain is actually making its own creatine, it may not require as much or any on a daily basis. So here's the brain, obviously, and in different regions, creatine is being synthesized and being used all throughout. So this organ is about two kilograms, but uses 20% of our daily energy at rest. So just think about that. 20% of the amount of energy we're consuming from food or using is being used by the brain, but what if you're stressed? Sleep deprivation. Your dog got you up in the middle of night to pee, and you couldn't fall back to sleep. University students cramming for a midterm. Now, all the countries look at the World Cup. They're gonna be up stress, different time zones. Then all of a sudden, the healthy brain becomes a metabolically stressed brain. So your guest about 10 grams on average is fine because the brain on a non-stress day is naturally making it enough, and it's healthy. But now we get into a more difficult what about those metabolic stressors? So again, all the neurons in the brain are being used. So what about sleep deprivation? 10 grams? For sleep deprived? When was the last time you slept 10 straight hours? It's been a while. It's been a while for even you to pause there. You know, that's alarming because you're thinking, when was the last time I got a really good night's sleep? What if you were up for 24 hours? Gosh. An ER doctor traveling different time zones, all these come into play. You remember on a healthy brain, you know, adequate sleep, the brain is actually making enough. But when you're stressed, night shift workers, military pilots, ER doctors, whichever it is, that's where the brain starts to rely on supplementation. So unfortunately for the brain, creating really struggles to get through the blood brain barrier. But if it does, now you might need longer or higher dosages. So what about sleep deprived? I have no idea. Okay. So let's say there's five, there's 10. What do you think? It's gonna be more, isn't it? It's gonna be a lot more. Here's 15. Couple studies showed some benefits. Now let's do 20. Remember that loading phase? The best overall studies currently right now that use an MRI for the brain have showed about 20 grams seems to have some effect acutely. But there's two studies last show to Germany, even show this. There's 25. And here's 30. So a classic study was done last year when they gave 30 grams to a group of young individuals who volunteered to be sleep deprived for 21 hours. And that level of creating increased, creating levels in the brain and it offset some of the negative effects. Remember that was an acute episode of 21 hours of sleep deprivation. They've done a subsequent study going down to about 0.2 grams or about 14 grams. It didn't have the same effect. So remember a healthy brain likely doesn't need any creating. But a stressed brain likely does. And the more stressed it is, the higher the dose seems to come into play. There's a lot of nuances with the brain. Obviously we just show different regions which we don't have a lot of information. But overall, it seems that 20 grams seems to be the most viable dose when the brain is stressed. We basically need to start dumping out quite a bit more. So when you get from this area on the brain healthy, likely doesn't benefit from any type of supplementation because it's making its own. But in these areas when you're stressed, it likely does. The area of nuance or why it's become so popular is I think most people fall into this stressed environment. And if they're not getting enough creating through their diet and or supplementation, that's why this big explosion on, let's take more to sort of check off all the boxes. So I take 10 grams a day at minimum to check off muscle, right? That checks off bone for the most part. And I'm pretty sure over time, 10 grams would do the most part for stress. Now, since I just flow different time zones, today I'm taking 20 to 25 grams based on this, acutely. And then when I go back to a non-stressed environment, back to Canada, I'll go back to my regular 10. So I look at the 10 gram dose or a little bit more as kind of being like a safety net. If you're only taking three to five, you definitely will get muscle benefits. Will you eventually get brain benefits? There's a small chance, but taking a little bit more and remember the cool thing for your viewers, we're not talking about protein. If we were talking about protein, the entire thing would be hundreds of grams. We're only talking about maybe 20 grams. And that may only need to be done acutely. You know, when you're really going through metabolic stress, look at university students. Five follow exams, hardly any sleep for a week. This is where this would come into play. I look at flight attendants or pilots. They'll fly from Canada to Europe and then they go back home. Their circadian rhythms are all over the place. So I think of all these scenarios. The area that I was surprised, I watched one of the episodes of the Ares tour. And you know, money can't stop circadian rhythm. So as much as Taylor Swift would have, I was marveled by three hours of performance in 90 to 100,000 people of all her running around. And then when you see her, they're totally gassed. They finished a concert, they're totally mentally exhausted. That's a situation where this could come into enhanced performance than you think of celebrities. You think of athletes. These a lot of high pressure things. Like imagine being in the World Cup final, the pressure, the mental capacity. That's where creatine seems to come into play. There's a lot of nuances. We still don't know a lot. So I think the big take home for people is that if you're going through periods of stress, a little bit more is okay. We don't know any adverse effects. We don't think there are any. But again, if you're just taking creatine for muscle bone in the brain, you're likely going to be checking off all those boxes. And when we start getting the brain benefits up at this end, what are those brain benefits that they were recorded in the studies? Is it I'm going to feel like I slapped? Or is it something more internal? You likely won't feel anything. Ah, okay. However, when you get to task the next day, so for example, you're up all night, you take a high dose creatine, then you have to go right to the final or the midterm, or you can't remember, it's those things when you're memory and doing puzzles or basic tasks. Or what about a stroke test? What's a stroke test? So I'm going to get you to do this. I apologize in advance. It's one of the most fatiguing things that you can do. And it was one of the most robust studies to show the efficacy behind creatine. So all I simply want you to do is you can see that there's words and then corresponding letters. But you'll notice that the color is incorrect. So up here, you would see, you know, you have red, blue, green, blue, black. But the stroke test is now looking at the bottom part. Okay. So I've tried it, I can only get the line two without making a mistake. Okay. So I want you to do this out loud, but as fast as possible. And am I reading the words or the color? You're reading the color. Okay, so the first one's green, yeah? Yes. Okay, fine. You want it as fast as possible? It's as fast as possible. Okay. What do you do? Gosh, this is confusing already. I hit the second one and I got it wrong in my head. The pairs are much creating, you're talking. I don't think I've had reasons today. Okay. Okay. Green, red, yellow, green, blue. Black, orange, red, blue, green, blue, pink, black, grey, yellow, red, blue, green, and a fuck. There you go, see? The study that they did get this, they had to do this for 90 straight minutes. Oh wow. So you can imagine how fatiguing that is for someone studying for the MCAS for medical school or midterms being sleep deprived and you're not sleep deprived and you struggle and you've got slower. Now you have to do this for 90 minutes. Wow. And in this classic study, they gave 20 grams of creatine before they did the tests and then after and it really improved their ability with speed and cognition there. So it's just a simple example to show, wow, our brain is seeing one thing. We got to maintain memory and cognition and creatine can help maintain some of those a factor. So you won't feel anything but performance of activities like that come into play. Do you know how much it improved the performance on the screen? I would have to get the graph but it did prove statistically significant, yeah. What else is there for me to know about the impact that creatine can have on the brain? Yeah. I think as a podcast, you sometimes sit here for many, many hours interviewing people on a range of subjects. If there's any way that I can perform better mentally. Yeah. So it doesn't boost the brain. It likely just brings those levels back up to normal levels before stress and it might give you a little bit more. So there's been populations Alzheimer's disease, clinical depression, concussion. When those populations are evident, one of the biggest factors is that they have reduced creatine in their brain. So maybe supplementation can get through the blood brain barrier. The brain says I need help and that's why you see some improvements there as well. So I like to think of the brain that creatine can act as a safety net. And it certainly won't cause any detrimental effects but it's always good to have that because you never know when I give you a stoop test. Like I'm going to find you tomorrow and give you this and say you're going to be practicing all night. Will you perform better? But that's just an example of something that we go through on a daily basis. If someone's working on Wall Street or whichever it is really high stress demand, you know, stuck in traffic for two hours, these all add up and it's a cascade of stressors that unfortunately most people go through and now we have a nutrient that is being made in the brain but during times of stress it likely needs a little bit of help. For the last couple years I've been working on something that I realized every podcaster listening to this but actually probably every creator listening to this might just need podcasting is difficult for many reasons and one of them is that these hosting platforms don't give you much information and also because they're so fragmented you kind of have to go through every single platform uploading it to YouTube and then taking the same big old video file and uploading it to Spotify's platform it takes huge amounts of time and that friction means most of us don't do it. That is the problem we set up to sort of and so we built something called Flightcast which you can find at Flightcast.com and today Flightcast is also one of our show sponsors and some of the world's biggest podcasters are now using our platform to run their shows because it gives you an edge it saves you time it gives you analytics most people won't typically get it allows you to use AI to be more informed on your show and it has growth tools that other hosting platforms don't have so podcasters that are using Flightcast have this unfair advantage so go to Flightcast.com slash D O A C now of all the things I thought would ever turn up on my desk a red light toothbrush was not one of them here we are this is made by our sponsor bond charge and you'll probably know of their red light face mask and their infrared sauna blanket because I used them religiously and I've spoken about them on this podcast before but their toothbrush is new to me I was someone of these a few weeks ago and ever since then I've been using it religiously because I love their products and this is the first toothbrush that combines both red light and near infrared light with sonic cleaning at the same time the same red light technology that's used for skin and inflammation is now built into a device you already know so well and I'm using it at least two times a day at the moment to clean my teeth it's great for your gums for stimulating gum circulation and for soreness and the best part is it's not an extra thing to add to your routine it just replaces your current toothbrush if you give it a try you'll get 20% off at bondcharge.com slash D O A C and also you'll get free shipping at a one year warranty at bondcharge.com slash D O A C what about inflammation yes somebody's inflammation and is there a link between creatine supplementation and inflammation either it so unfortunately I'm 49 so at the age of 40 I have this systemic inflammation that went up and we all know this because around the age of 30 where you know you can work out and nothing hurts and all of a sudden you wake up one day when you're in your 40s and 50s and things hurt and so systemic inflammation is happening all the time and unfortunately it accelerates aging we're more sore more often and it can lead to a lot of arthritis or joint pain and things like that creatine does have anti-inflammatory effects but a big distinction creatine is not like a acetaminophen or ibuprofen which directly as a drug effect blocks that but it has been shown to decrease markers of inflammation specifically during long duration exercise so this is an important distinction weight training is too acute but when you do iron man triathlon things like that those individuals who took creatine 20 grams a day for five days beforehand they had reductions in inflammation markers so that might allow that individual to recover quicker not get ill and then perform more optimally from a weight training perspective we see that it decreases markers of muscle damage so it has these anti-inflammatory and anti-catabolic effects as well interesting yeah and what about people that have neurodegenerative disorders yes so Alzheimer's is is the area we're really starting to focus on in a couple single arm studies came out last year by Matt Taylor and Aaron Smith showing that 20 grams a day for eight weeks did increase brain creatine levels in Alzheimer's patients and it seemed to improve measures of memory and cognition there as well so again using the same mechanisms it decreases inflammation it maintains brain bioenergetics and it might actually have a neural protection effect as well there's evidence and cell cultures and in rodents that there's some lines there but in humans we're still in in the infancy but if you can have any benefit to any neurological disease it's huge and there's a lot of hope especially around Alzheimer's there was an eight week trial and Alzheimer's patients that also showed modest muscle gains there are 1.9 kilogram increase in hand grip strength yeah which is a key predator of survival in dementia patients right which was a landmark study of 20 Alzheimer's patients found that taking 20 grams of creatine daily for eight weeks increased brain creatine levels by 11 percent and significantly improve the cognitive test scores they showed that's the journal of psychiatry and brain science and that one's really exciting and I think more future studies will come out the limitation with those is that there was no placebo to compare to but again I just showing that yes creatine can be used as an effective adjunct yeah and because there is impact on our brain is there impact on our mental health with creatine excellent point so the best lines I have it is here come from clinical depression and anxiety the group out of Utah in the United States have clearly shown that creatine in addition to other therapies so this is important creatine by itself has never been shown to be a standalone but with SSRIs or cognitive behavior therapy or methamphetamine use in populations under medical supervision the addition of creatine seem to improve symptoms and it's likely going back to all the ones we've already talked about where it improves bioenergetics it improves neural transmission or neuromodulation but it also in animals has been shown to improve a protein called BDNF so this protein is involved in brain plasticity so there's a whole bunch of emerging evidence and hope that creatine one day will be used as a treatment in the toolbox for a lot of these clinical issues PTSD also comes to my mind there was a study in gay trade sports science institute which PubMed published that said a study of over 200,000 adults found that those who consumed the least amount of creatine in their daily diet had the highest rates of depressive symptoms yes that's correct and the common denominator those with clinical depression or anxiety when you measure their baseline creatine stores very similar to concussion or Alzheimer's they're reduced so therefore obviously this condition or series of conditions is causing a disruption at the brain bioenergetics level and creatine levels are decreasing there's another improvement that said in a clinical trial of women with major depression adding five grams of creatine to their daily anti-depressant double to their remission rate over eight weeks that's correct yes and that group is from Perikent Renshaar's group out of Utah they do great work our hope and I'm collaborating with some colleagues now to look at creatine as a standalone treatment versus placebo could it have some beneficial effects there so that's very exciting to come out if I don't want to be supplementing with creatine is there what are the foods that I can eat that are high in creatine naturally they're primarily animal based so seafood and red meat you know herring is going to have one of the highest concentrations salmon as well as beef very small amounts in milk and dairy so you'd have to drink all the the milk in the jersey cow to get a sufficient amount so it definitely comes down to animal there's some of the studies that I that I love that I think I've heard you talk about before one of them was young athletes who took five grams of creatine daily slept in average of one hour longer on training days yeah we did that study a few years ago in a young biological females who were healthy and on the days that they trained until creatine this is interesting because they actually slept an hour longer compared to a placebo so this is a very interesting fact so creatine you know we now know what has brain bioenergetics and there's two arguments if it's making the brain recover wouldn't you need less sleep right now in this study it's show that improved so maybe these individuals trained at a higher capacity and allowed the brain to have more homeostasis to come back so this is an air a study that needs to be replicated in males as well to see can creatine improve sleep quantity and if it is I think that's a game changer I think everybody on the planet would raise their hand and say hey I need more sleep is there anything else we haven't covered as it relates to creatine you know the expected gains versus the hype gains I think there's evidence there that creatine can have an effect I think it's getting over hyped especially around the brain for what it can do it's one tool in the toolbox and I think it's one of those things that I'd like to show or you know talk about for sure you know well what you mean by so if you think of a toolbox when it comes to a plan whenever you need to go fix things you simply say where's my toolbox you can't do anything without a plan and the way I like to preface this is the most popular tool in anybody's toolbox is the hammer now from a lifestyle perspective what do you think the hammer represents what would you decide that the hammer represents as in like a is it weight training is a cardio is it creatine is it protein is it sleep sleep okay so I say weight training is going to be the hammer okay now what about the screwdriver always need a screwdriver creating no I think a roll big training or sleep comes way before creatine okay but most people say hey I can fix a lot of things with that now remember we have a nice big toolbox I like to think of creatine as the multifactorial wrench or screwdriver because creatine has profound benefits for muscle a little bit for bone of course brain and other areas of the body so you can hit something with this you can open it up and fix something with this it's heavy you can also pull it the measuring tape your argument sleep this could be protein whichever it is so when you put all these things in your toolbox you're now having a greater comprehensive plan to improve health so you said weight training was the hammer I like to consider if you were to choose one modality of exercise weight training is a little bit superior to cardio you get pretty much all the same benefits of cardiovascular exercise and then you get more with obviously an increase in lean tissue mass and performance weight training if done effectively can actually improve mitochondrial health you can improve VL2 max if done correctly and you don't need a lot of it so I think we've switched from just doing cardio to now incorporating weight training to be effective so weight training yes what are the sort of misconceptions about weight training and why are you so positive about it yeah I think one of the biggest myths is that you always need to lift heavy to put on muscle mass and we're all renowned researchers in this area have clearly shown now that lighter weights perform to a lot of effort almost to fatigue if done correctly you can get as the same increases in muscle mass as then compared to lifting heavy weights however if your goal is just to get stronger lifting heavy is always there so I think this is a cool thing for people some days if you have a little bit of soreness or you don't have a lot of energy you can live lighter weights but just to fatigue whereas other days you come in Monday you've had your coffee whichever it is you're ready to go you can lift heavy so I think there's not one concrete way there's a little bit of variety here as well and why are you putting it above cardiovascular work yeah I think the benefits there is that cardiovascular exercise will make you live longer and healthier but the downfall with cardiovascular exercise it doesn't stimulate strength or the muscle skeletal system as much as we we hope so improving muscle mass and that is very difficult to do with cardio maybe sprint interval training will do that but the cool thing with weight training is you get cardiovascular benefits but you also get those profound muscle skeletal benefits so if I was to tell anybody if there's one form of exercise to do with weight training but you got to do cardio as well so do both and if I just do weight training what am I missing from not doing cardio training yeah if you do weight training improperly where you're lifting heavy heavy weight with low repetitions all the time you're likely going to jeopardize capillary density or mitochondrial health these are things that sort of move blood flow to and from your muscles you could decrease VO2 max or a fitness parameter for metabolic health fitness so at the end of the day everybody should be doing both but if you only have time to do weight training or cardio you still benefit because the majority of the population doesn't do any and how how much how often yeah it's amazing that it's a small amount so let's just do cardio most countries will say 150 minutes of physical activity at a moderate level over a week I'm okay with that I'd like it to be higher I'd also like the intensity to be a bit higher so when you tell an average individual 150 minutes a week most people say well I'm going to do 70 or I'm going to do 30 I'm going to hold the couch down and watch Netflix so we give 150 and we say you know if you can do 21 minutes or 22 minutes a day for seven days a week that's going to be a brisk walk or whichever we'd like to be at a higher intensity if possible now when it comes to weight training this might be surprising but two days a week or more is all you basically need and you can do a whole body routine so you don't need to go in there and just do chest and biceps Monday and then legs Tuesday you can but if you say I want to do whole body of training Monday Wednesday Friday that is great as well so a little bit of volume or frequency goes a long way especially as we get older that's the key why especially as we get older well based on this graph here it's clearly showing a detrimental effect so if you can see here you know you have muscle mass on the x-axis or the y-axis and then you're having all the catastrophic effects as we get older so unfortunately you know 20 and 30 looks great when you're 20 40 is old when you're 20 and 40 years old or all the way from 22 40 you can see great that's probably the area that you're going to have the most muscle yeah but look what happens 40 age 60 80 and if you live to be 100 it's catastrophic you're losing muscle mass at an accelerated rate on average is about 1 percent per year after the age of 40 even if you're training so if you're training you're maintaining that so this is the average sedentary inactive population you lose strength at about 1 point or 1 to 3 percent even faster now if we were to maintain resistance training that muscle mass with plateau so I can't stress this enough although we focused on creatine if you were to choose one thing to do today is exercise and the only form of exercise that really maintains muscle is weight bearing or resistance training and if that's the case you're going to have way more muscle later on in life so you can pick up the grandkids you can walk those stairs you can do more functionality things later on in life can you not just I don't know 60 years old start training then you can absolutely and you get profound benefits you can be 80 or 100 and you still get benefits it's never too late to start but one of the things we've already talked about is if you do weight training and add in a little bit of creatine it gets a bit higher if you added in protein it gets even higher so again nutrition you know if exercise is king the queen is going to be nutrition they go hand in hand all throughout lifespan you gotta have both and on the subject of protein you're saying that when combined with creatine it's a force multiplier it's a force multiplier when it comes to performance and lean tissue mass so there's been a few studies when you combine a high quality protein with creatine they've been shown to increase lean tissue mass and muscle performance a little bit more than each alone yeah does the average person get enough protein through that diet you know I think nowadays we do and and I think this is overhyped as well I think if you're getting about 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram so you know if you're 70 kilograms that's going to be on average about 84 to about 115 grams of protein I think we're so conscious now of the health benefits of protein that most people are I think if you're training really intensely five six days a week and you take a gram per pound that's probably the max but a lot of times when you take an excess protein it doesn't go to your body area that you're probably hoping it doesn't all go to your muscle issues for other things like hormones and blood cells things like that but I think nowadays most people are likely getting enough protein the question is are they getting enough high quality protein so vegans and vegetarians can definitely get enough protein they might just need to eat a little bit more to get all those essential amino acids which we need much of the reason most people haven't posted content or build their personal brand is because it's hard and it's time consuming and we're all very very busy and if you've never posted something before there's so many factors in your psychology that stop you wanting to post what people will think of you am I doing this right is the thing I'm saying absolutely stupid all of these result in paralysis which means you don't post and your feed goes bare I'm an investor in a company called Stan store which you've probably had me talk about and what they've been building is this new tool called Stanley that uses AI looks at your feed looks at your tone of voice looks at your history looks at your best performing posts and tells you what you should post makes those posts for you you can also you just use it for inspiration and sometimes what we need when we're thinking about doing a post for us social media channels is inspiration building an audience has fundamentally changed my life and I think it could change yours too so I'm inviting you to give this new tool a shot and let me know what you think all you have to do is search coach dot stan dot store now to get started menopause yes we talked a little bit briefly about menopause bringing both together the subjects of muscle but also of creating yes how how does those two things impact women's journey through menopause yeah so we know from animal cells that estrogen is highly involved in creating metabolism sessions seems to be implicated in the enzymes that are neat to make creating and then estrogen also has a huge impact on not only brain bio energetics but muscle metabolism as well so as the female goes from a premenopausal stage to perimenopausal stage to the postmenopausal transition if estrogen is decreasing and then independent of their diet we think creatine has bone effects and muscle effects and of course we talked about the cognitive effects there so from a whole skeleton perspective I think everybody should be but of course the perimenopausal postmenopausal transition is good and then that brings up a question what about really young premenopausal females you know optimal health what if we built up their tissues more maybe that would offset the rate of this decline over time as well so that's what we're hoping to get to it's crazy and safe for kids so it's interesting you bring that up and the current body of evidence suggests yes that recommended dosages good researchers in the United States put out multiple reviews at looking at creatine in adolescent children and teenagers proves balance a jolly body composition if anything they want to get at least one gram per day because in children they want to have an optimization for bone health as well as muscle development but again if any parents are watching obviously talk to their medical practitioner but all the current reviews currently suggests that it's safe and we're talking about we're not talking about babies here we're talking about yeah we're talking about adolescents all the way into teenage years when it comes to baby or infancy out of australia staciology is starting to do that work there as well but we don't have a lot of data in humans yet but that is an area to pay attention to for sure yeah what is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about dr yeah i think one of the big things is the safety profile of creatine uh there's been uh you know hundreds of randomized control trials now on creatine the safety profiles is exceptional last year they put out a study looking at over 25,000 cases and creatine even over 10 grams a day for many years has been very very safe and effective uh one area that comes up is what about the timing doesn't matter when i take it and the cool thing is we just got a paper accepted two days ago putting the nail in the coffin on this and at the end of the day you can take creatine at any time of the day you can take it in the morning with breakfast you can take it right before workout i take some during you can take it after go to bed it doesn't matter when you take it as well so you can take it right before sleep you can't and it won't impact your sleep no currently we haven't exactly assessed the effect on sleep but uh another study looked at it in the evening and it had no detrimental effect there as well and what else what else is the other questions that you get messaged with or asked most often yeah can i spread out creatine all throughout the day so for example we have like if we were to take creatine in the gummy form or a candy you can actually have you know one or two of these every hour all throughout the day you can have it uh as periodically so you don't have to take creatine all at once you can take it in smaller amounts all throughout the day and if anything there's been a study a few years ago showing that one gram every 30 minutes up to 20 gram dose uh seem to retain more in the body and that was beneficial as well what do you think of these gummies you know there's only been a few companies that have actually shown some validity and reliability um as long as the third party tested they're very very effective you want to try one are they they they're party tested their third or the green ones yep and the bottom was the third party test yep well but you know the stuff that makes a gummy is that stuff good for you so the issue there is does the manufacturing trying to keep the uh creatine together uh influences it can and there's only been a few uh uh companies out there the one you're eating is by create from the United States they they've had multiple trials they're the first uh company to actually look at a randomized control trial to show improvements in volleyball players with the gummies children love them older adults this has become an area of interest where uh chewing ability or taste sensation has gone down uh they seem to be very convenient and effective uh you can have these at your desk whichever you don't need the white powder to mix so their companies are coming up with more viable ways to get creatine in there but to your point you always want to make sure the companies third party tested it uses a high quality creatine and it actually has a source of creatine in there as well because i remember watching a YouTube video by guy called James Smith he's been on the show before and he did some testing on the off the shelf creatine and found that a lot of them didn't contain any creatine 90 percent and there was only a few and the one that you did uh consumer did yeah 1.5 it's not crazy that you can go by creating and it has no creatine yeah so that's why i think for the consumers watching you got to do a little bit of homework and and look at those three things make sure third party tested it has a logo clearly on the packaging if it doesn't i would strongly advise you not to consume it of all the of all the studies that you've encountered on all the subjects we talked about muscle protein creatine are there studies that were pivotal in how you think about these subjects yeah there was so the the landmark study came out in 1992 and it clearly showed that 5 grams elevate a creatine in the blood but if you took multiple 5 gram dose you just it maintained that throughout the day so this is where the dose of 5 grams seems to be very very viable and the other one showed that hey i don't want to take 5 what if i only want to take 3 grams so 3 grams seems to be the lowest most effective dose and you just need to take that for one month and you'll saturate your muscles so again you have options to take it as little amount or a high amount as you want over time but i think one of the biggest studies is that we did was a two-year trial in post-menopausal women where we gave .14 grams of creatine and it really seemed to improve or have an effect on bone preservation as well as muscle performance so these are the the studies that seem to come to my mind we've done quite a few but they seem to be the landmark ones yeah and what are the supplements that you take outside of creatine yes for sure so on a daily basis it's a probiotic with food in the morning and evening and that's something i just recently learned i was taking it on an empty stomach but probiotic i take two forms of magnesium one before bed and then one in the day three and eight for cognition and function i take two thousand international units of vitamin D i always take protein on a sufficient basis as well and then i take it before grams of omega-3 fatty acids and i always take one of the omega-3 fatty acids post exercise because that seems to be the best time to take it so omega-3 magnesium vitamin D vitamin D probiotics of course creatine and protein i take powder and or through dietary food every now and then i don't need a lot of red meat so i'll take iron um but um not on a consistent basis and you know and i'm hoping the new one is this is an area of controversy NAD this is the you know it's a precursor for a main enzyme that's highly involved in metabolism there's been evidence to suggest it goes down with aging so my eye is closely on that uh the see if that's going to be something to come up in the playing and a multivitamin you know started with flinstorm vitamins as a kid and i take a multivitamin day as a safety net i noticed that when i looked at your video in the interview you did with doctor under patchy a lot of the comments were from people in their 60s 70s and 80s and i wondered why that was if you just i was just looking at the top three or four comments and it's a 71 year old it's an 82 year old it's a 53 year old who's um containing without sinus right why is that yeah i think it's the awareness and education now in social media is really helped with this getting our evidence-based research out to the public and the awareness that creatine is just not for young males to get bigger stronger faster you have anything when you go to an aging body and they're predisposed to an agent related muscle loss, strength loss, functionality, bone loss and atrophy in the brain creatine has been shown to have effects there as well so i think a lot of older individual populations are becoming more aware of the effects of creatine and of course as we produce more research it gets out to the public more often so i'm really excited and encourage that creatine is sort of taken on a life of its own in the last decade and are the direct weight benefits if i'm trying to cut fat by taking creatine or is it indirect? it's indirect so it seems that if you increase lean mass it might stimulate energy expenditure or turnover and then in animal models it just has been shown to have some beneficial effects from a cellular perspective on fat but at the end of the day if you are seeing a reduction fat it's likely that you're proving your metabolic health with lean tissue mass. do you think much about how to get these habits to stick because i imagine there's lots of people that are aware by now that creatine is a useful thing to take before whatever reason they still don't take it exactly and i think that's one of the biggest reasons people don't so we got to come up with ways to maintain consistency and i think whatever vehicle you want to choose to maintain that in the in the run of a day is the best so if it's putting in your coffee in the morning because you won't forget it great if it's putting a little bit in Greek yogurt if it's used in the gummies whichever it is as long as it's a viable source of creatine that makes it very practical and consistent for you that's the best way yeah i found that i'm having it unrooted to where i'm going yes being really really important so when i come to my office in the morning it's all on my desk yes and so i have the supplements just on my desk and actually even before i walked into the studio today in the green room that i have it's on the green room right when i'm at home it is where the coffee machine is correct yeah and that has radically helped me yeah um otherwise i if it wasn't within my my routine it wouldn't happen yeah we have a jug on the counter with all our other supplements is in the pantries close by because if it's in the garage you're like i forgot about it i think the other thing is with some things like creatine it's hard to really notice the difference sometimes uh excellent point yeah this is not like caffeine you know it's an immediate effect so unlike uh caffeine creatine takes a wall to notice the effects and they come in direct you don't immediately notice a massive increase in energy or alertness it's like after a week of weight training or even two you're like wow i did more repetitions i could do more weight uh i recover quickly is one that we hear uh quite often you'll never notice with with your bone but we have heard anecdotally with cognition especially sleep deprivation people do notice the effects and i'm an end of one but i notice jet lag goes down quite a bit uh when i take a high dose of creatine and you know when you start taking it if you start taking it today yes if i start taking so three to five grams of creatine today am i going to notice the differences today no it'll probably with three to five grams you'll probably notice it in a few weeks if not to a month from a muscle perspective from a brain perspective that low you're likely not going to notice any effect because the brain is probably making enough but if you're really metabolically stressed then you might notice some memory or cognitive benefits after a few days but that's such a low dose you need to be a little bit patient but again three grams could saturate your skull of muscle in 30 days so it's not that long of a weight and on the cognitive side yes the cognitive benefits that were observed when doing these stupe tests had they been taking it previously or was it just administered on that particular day when the test happened yes so that one was in a week in advance with the loading phase so they really saturated the body to try to get the effects okay so they were taking it for some time yeah but on the sleep deprivation study from germany they just gave it one boldest mega dose for 21 hours of sleep deprivation and those individuals did perform better from a number of tests like this the next day so if you're like wow i got something coming up Friday unfortunately i'm not gonna get any sleep at best one or two hours then a high dose might come into play and then you can go back to your more consistent routine i think what happened or is happening is a lot of individuals were now thinking i need to take 20 or 30 grams on a daily basis based on those studies and i'm like wait a minute are you getting enough sleep the next day because i have that dose we don't know if the neuron will swell with water and if that's the case is that potentially causing any detrimental effects in the long term so again i would not recommend taking a mega dose for consistently over time could that down regulate your natural synthesis these are all questions that we need to look at yeah so outside of the realm of creating outside of the realm of muscle outside of the realm of i guess nutrition generally what are you doing to keep yourself healthy what is your routine yeah so i'm religious with exercise so i try to exercise at least three to four days a week with weight training and add in at least 20 to 30 minutes of either moderate intensity cardio or like a spin class i personally like to do alternating days okay so i'll do weight training like maybe monday wednesday friday and then cardio to say thursday and then on the weekends hiking things like that pretty religious with nutrients as well try to eat a really balanced diet and my god my failure is getting enough sleep so i've had to cut caffeine out quite a bit by past noon to allow me i'm probably a slower metabolizer with caffeine so i try to really optimize evidence based research take it into my daily life and try to promote it that way yeah and is there anything you'll particularly excited about in the work and research super fascinated with the movement from the neck up i think we know a lot about the neck down with creating an exercise or other nutrients i'm fascinated with the ability what about concussion you know cannon the ufc fighter take creating before they get hit could that decrease cte or concussion or brain trauma later on in life i think a boxing mahaman ali things like that so there's evidence in and road instead if you take creatine before head trauma it really speeds up concussion recovery so i'm fascinated with that as well like almost a prophylactic anybody involved in head trauma i think you should definitely look at creatine as something to be taking just in case you get hit and then of course everything with Alzheimer's or other areas of depression so i'm fascinated that this nutrient which was you know 1832 it was discovered boring for the longest time because we thought we knew everything and now it's taken a life of a zone and it's having these profound benefits we never even thought would happen yeah a lot of people continue to be the sort of leading expert on this subject for many reasons do you think there'll be a time where you you stop researching creatine and you move on to something else you know that's interesting i would have said yes about five years ago but now no there's too much to do even with skeletal muscle if you were to say what's the best dose there in the take i say i have no clue every creating researcher said i don't know we still don't know the best dose that every person can take that will check off all the boxes especially in the brain we're just giving an estimate that i take 10 maybe you take 12 someone might take 15 but at the end of the day we still don't know the best supplementation protocol the best dose uh so there's so many areas so for the next 20 years i bet y'all still be focusing on creatine with other things as well yeah and on that doses is that different for different people excellent questions so the thought was that the larger you are you have more storing capacity in your muscle for creatine so it makes sense if you're 50 kilograms and 150 kilograms you're gonna have a greater storing capacity so the dose on a relative basis is likely higher there as well the more stress the person is it's likely they're gonna require more because their natural machinery in the brain can't keep up so it is very individualistic i think we give out general recommendations to make it easy but again some people can take it very scientifically and base it on body weight and you can't go wrong with both of them i bet there's a lot of people that are this far into the conversation and their their central question is where i've got loved ones that i really really want to start um considering creatine supplementation for whatever reason it could be a cognitive benefits muscular benefits whatever all the things we've talked about they might end up sending this conversation to their loved ones right something that i do sometimes when i when i have episodes that particularly moving for me if they're loved ones and how listening yeah yeah and you have to make a case to their loved ones about why they should take creatine yeah what would you say i would say creatine is one tool in that health promotion toolbox that might help you live longer and better and allow you to maintain activities later on in life which you wouldn't have been able to do and unfortunately that leads us accelerate aging in a poor way to go it's like it's like saying i'm going to save everything for retirement and my question is why you might not make it to retirement so that's one of the things you know aging yes what is aging in your definition of the word it's catastrophic unfortunately i'm going through it you know i've noticed ever since i hit the fourth decade things hurt a lot more and muscle mass to retain it's a little bit harder so unfortunately think of the body's ability to withstand stress is not as high and things start to break down quite fast so we all know you know things hurt more we've lost muscle mass i can't run as fast so biological aging is kind of the deterioration of the human body we need to with this conversation and others come up with ways to stop the deterioration and if anything come up with ways to maintain that ability to live longer free of disease young we have a closing tradition on this podcast where they'll ask us leaves a question for the next not knowing who they're leaving it for this one's quite a tricky question okay what is reality what do you think all of this is all the stuff that we can see and all we experience with what do you think it is do you think it's a simulation do you think it's this is all real for sure because i think we can feel it it's not a big brother or anything that's a game show we all go through different emotions and things like that so i think you can feel it yeah are you religious yes Catholic yeah and you're a family man you've got some uh french bulldog in a cat as we talked about and wife and home yeah and uh really close to my family and stuff like that and what is your god if we get to the end of your career and this was your last day and you had been successful oh yeah i think it would be a lasting impression on my students that wow he changed my life in some way and if i can make one person live longer free of disease and happier i'm all for it you know you when you start to see the human body as people get older you're like oh that person used to be young and vibrant and then when you hear other people that can't do activities they live in or they can't travel or they're afraid to i'm like you need to embrace today i i love that quote from Morgan Freeman Shawshank get busy living or get busy dying because honestly we have the ability with lifestyle choices to improve optimization and i want to see people live to be 120 130 still active still going and i think we're on the cuss with technology and i think awareness around nutrition exercise sleep laughter oh jeez if i can ask anybody to do one more thing it'd be just laugh more often for me to be just a small piece of the puzzle promoting it i think it's if anything it's it's just beyond my belief yeah why did this pull you in i i asked that in public because it tends to be the case that the things that draw us in mumpulana make us curious the tends to always be a bit of a personal reason right yeah it was it was more that you know am i scared of death a hundred percent yeah i can't i can't think of it yeah why yeah i just think it's weird for me i get to a point maybe being religious and then you think about it and then i my brain stops i can't think about it really yeah and it's it's it's becomes almost like i want to live forever and if i can think of ways to make me live and partially get there obviously it's not reality but yeah i'm scared of death of dying yeah i've always been yeah hundred percent scared of death of heights and i can't even talk about the death experience because i think it sort of brings in a perspective things that you just don't know did you ever lose anybody uh just uh friends and things like that but nothing um specifically parents or anything like that yet but it's always been there i don't know if it's the roman catholic in me or not but it's like whoa i don't want that at all yeah you can't even talk about it can't even talk about it no no yeah really yeah it's kind of like i can talk about it in a sense i understand it and it's realistic but it's it's more um that for some reason i don't even want to think about it because i have so much passion for life that i don't even want to think about oh shit this could happen yeah and you believe you go somewhere after death for sure heaven yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah but if you do believe you're going to heaven that sounds like a good place and a great place yeah i just want to spend more time here this is still a lot things to do yeah for sure makes sense yeah well thank you thank you thank you so much this was great thank you yeah i have to say you know you've done so so much research on this subject that's so many of my previous guests sight and talk about okay so it's great to have the source here himself and i i applaud you for the work you've done because it's my day i think i think a lot of people do want to extend the health span right which is to live healthier for longer yeah there's a real sort of epidemic of people having short health spans being medicated from the age of 40-50 years old and then having that sort of last couple of decades of our life being incapable of doing the things we care about percent yeah and i think a lot of this research gives us an option yeah if we choose to take to live uh to live a better life thank you so much yeah it was great so thank you so much thank you