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Posted by surprisetalk 8 hours ago

Does creatine make you smarter?(dynomight.net)
244 points | 214 commentspage 4
6thbit 7 hours ago|
Why is creatine so popular lately? what changed?
throwup238 7 hours ago||
It’s always been popular among athletes and weight lifters but now nootropic influencers have gotten ahold of it. It’s one of the few supplements with robust scientific evidence of a strong effect but that’s in athletic performance not nootropics.
6thbit 6 hours ago|||
and that scientific evidence is new? like a new study boosted this or just resurfacing?
throwup238 3 hours ago|||
No, creatine has been studied for decades and it’s been part of fads before (I remember Mac making a joke about creatine shits in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia a decade ago).

It’s just resurfacing as a general health fad/marketing campaign.

exhumet 7 hours ago|||
another upside is its also hella cheap so its a very easy addin
pandaman 4 hours ago|||
JRE mentioned it several times recently, I imagine it could have spiked interest but overall it's been growing over the past decade because of the advances in fitness trackers, IMO. It's been very easy to see its effect with trackers measuring FTP and VO2max.
matwood 7 hours ago|||
I've been taking 5g/creatine daily for nearly 30 years. In weightlifting circles it's always been popular because it's cheap and one of the few non-steroidal supplements that actually works.
gedy 7 hours ago||
Health fads come and go
perrygeo 6 hours ago||
Creatine is a health fad? No other supplement has been this widely-used for such a long time. It was considered safe and effective when I started using it 30 years ago. The benefits are/were well established, the mechanisms well-known, the safety is impeccable. If anything, it's the most well-established supplement on the market - the exact opposite of a fad!
gedy 5 hours ago||
OP was asking why the attention now though specifically. I'm not calling it quackery, etc.
131012 7 hours ago||
I think another source of variation on the results is the actual nutritional intake of the subjects.

The vegan/vegetarian is a big spectrum. A vegetarian eating plenty of dairy products and eggs should in theory be much better creatine-equipped than a poor vegan student feeding on noodles and ketchup pastas. A lot of pseudo-meat for vegans are full of processed shit.

Confusion will be even higher if you include fish in the vegetarian diet, which is odd but some people do that.

Could the cognitive effect works in the case of creatine deficiency (vegan) and not in the case a vegetarian (low creatine but not deficient) ?

ErroneousBosh 7 hours ago|
> if you include fish in the vegetarian diet, which is odd but some people do that.

Meat Is Murder but Fish Is Justifiable Homicide.

dotcoma 3 hours ago||
It's OK to eat fish cause they don't have any feelings

- Something in the way, Nirvana

eudamoniac 6 hours ago||
I experienced dramatic and obvious hair loss in my late twenties after starting creatine supplementation. I'm talking hundreds of hairs coming out every shower. It stopped when I stopped creatine. No I didn't make any other changes in diet or lifestyle at the time. I hadn't even heard of the link before that. This is actually one of those things that made me start doubting "the science" in general because it's supposedly not true, but, it obviously is true for my head beyond a reasonable doubt.
eduction 3 hours ago||
> This in turn may increase the long-term gainz from strength-training exercise

Why is "gains" spelled this way? I found myself suddenly trusting the whole thing a little less. But maybe I'm missing something. Is this jargon in the body building world or something? Author being cheeky?

igor_nast 7 hours ago||
Nope, but makes a producer's pocket heavier :D
croes 7 hours ago|
When you realize that, you got a little smarter
msie 7 hours ago||
I just ordered some yesterday because I saw something that reminded what my friend said recently about it boosting cognition. Then this morning I saw it mentioned in some health segment on tv. Now I stumble upon this discussion. Hmmm.
brcmthrowaway 8 hours ago||
I remember learning about Creatine as a weightlifting teen

I never ended up doing it because you had to cycle it, and it was just one more thing to track

Is it the same case in 2026? Is there a simple pill I can take?

domhudson 8 hours ago||
You don't have to cycle it. You also don't need to load it (a marketing ploy to get you to buy more).

You can just take 3-5g daily.

windward 7 hours ago||
Cycling is also a marketing ploy, since it makes it sound more like a PED and less like a compound found naturally in meat. It's the same reason people say they 'take' whey, when Miss Muffet simply ate it.
matwood 7 hours ago|||
Cycling creatine was the guidance from the 90s. 5g/day and drink plenty of water is all you need to do.
F7F7F7 4 hours ago||
I don't ever remember needing or being advised to cycle it.

It was always start by 'loading' and then cruise at 5g. Of course GNC was filled with sugar filled "delivery" products like Celltech that claimed to forego any need for 'loading'.

btheconqueror 8 hours ago|||
I've never heard of cycling it. We're you a teen during the steroid arrival? Maybe people were confusing things. I've always just done 5mg a day, but now people are talking about taking mega doses of like 20-30mg a day, shrug
nick__m 8 hours ago|||
Creatine is dosed in grams not milligrams, otherwise your number are correct.
jdelfuego 7 hours ago|||
Homeopathic sports supplementation
krick 7 hours ago|||
Yes, they did, and many still do write it on the package, but it is, and always was a myth born God knows when out of precaution, because nobody really knows anything about how all this stuff really works now, and they did know even less than that 30 years ago. There never really was any evidence that you have to cycle it, and nobody (aside from the manufacturers) ever says it anymore. It makes about as much sense as cycling protein powder.

As for pills, yes, there is about every form of creatine supplement now, even chewing gum, but this is just dumb, how much of creatine do you think you can consume this way in a day?

solumunus 8 hours ago|||
That’s never been the case, you were getting bad information.
switchbak 7 hours ago||
It was certainly the case that gym bros thought you had to cycle it. But you're right that this was never necessary.
Helloworldboy 8 hours ago||
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zuzululu 7 hours ago||
if you are using to slim down it will hold on to water unless you are bulking i dont see creatine to be consumed regularly

if you truly want fuel for the brain nothing beats keto

garciasn 8 hours ago||
Saved you a click:

> Does creatine make you smarter?

> I don’t know. Maybe a little.

paulpauper 3 hours ago|
in other words, it doesn't do much of anything, similar to most powders, supplements, and minerals/vitamins

People are throwing away their money

nonameiguess 7 hours ago|
The conclusions aren't any different (it's one of the few thing that helps strength, poses no danger to your hair, and almost certainly does nothing for cognition), but the articles at https://www.strongerbyscience.com/?s=creatine are far more comprehensive, including the famous extremely long podcast episodes they used to do.

The one thing this misses is many supplements are tainted, which skews the popular perception of both upsides and risks. This was especially true in the US prior to 2005 or so when prohormones were still legal over the counter. Anything branded that wasn't just pure creatine was extremely likely to actually be a low-dose oral steroid, which really can make you lose hair and will increase strength quite a bit more than any dietary supplement.

This also misses caffeine as the other a-tier supplement that consistently shows strength increases in RCTs, though of course, caffeine is more frought than creatine because you build tolerance and it can disturb sleep.

switchbak 7 hours ago||
"poses no danger to your hair" I keep hearing folks say this, and even in this thread there's someone who's experienced that and had it stop when they eliminated creatine. I too have experienced exactly that with exactly the stopping of issues once I stopped taking creatine.

Perhaps you can say "danger to your hair is rare", but there's very clearly (to me at least) an effect there, and the way it gets hand-waved away is strange to me.

grvdrm 50 minutes ago||
Do you do anything else for hair? Like Minoxidil, Finasteride, or other serums/etc.

Just curious for other folks experiences as they are on or off creatine in parallel with other hair interventions.

matwood 7 hours ago|||
> This also misses caffeine as the other a-tier supplement

In college Ripped Fuel wasn't banned yet. We would take two, go to the gym for 2 hours, shower, then go out until the sun came up the next day. It's no surprise it was eventually banned. I think some people ended up dying by taking too many.

volkl48 6 hours ago||
> poses no danger to your hair,

Last I checked, the only study actually focusing on this is n=38, out of Iran, and has heavy conflict of interest issues (funded by the supplement industry).

That's not remotely sufficient to consider this a settled fact.

BizarroLand 5 hours ago||
I feel like you would need to find some correlation between dosing creatine and increased DHT production to find a link between the two.

Creatine is not an anabolic steroid and does not increase testosterone levels, according to Harvard Health, so while there was 1 suspicious study that claimed that creatine increased DHT, that study has afterwards not been able to be replicated, and since creatine does not manipulate hormones but rather energy instead, it seems to as closes a possible to being a settled fact sans the final nail in the coffin.

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