Creatine Expert Reveals Why 5g Isn't Enough (and how 25g combats sleep loss)

I'm interested in the brain and we've gone from we've gone from the the role of creatine it seems to have multiple roles um anti-inflammatory anti-catabolic right um it's obviously important for producing ATP regen you know regenerating the ATP um what about the brain what's super exciting like this is such an emerging area so from the neck up I think the next 20 to 30 years we'll be focused almost entirely on this so um liver produces creatine and our brain actually is unique it also produces creatine but the brain is very resistant we have the blood brain barrier for a really important reason um and the Brain says you know what circulation we don't need creatine in the blood we're making our own so an individual getting adequate sleep no chronic disease no metabolic diseases no neurogenerative diseases is producing adequate amounts of brain creatin it could be as as little as 1 to three grams um now our brain is small from stature but it uses 20% of our daily energy and of course as we all know when you're really tired sleep deprivation running around chasing your children most people that I know are really U metabolically stressed primarily from a cognition perspective and that's where creating seems to have the best lines of evidence sleep deprivation hypoxia I jet leg I was up at 3:00 this morning and flew down so I'll be taking a really high dose today to hopefully offset the the chance of inflammation or uh cognitive decline um so when we look at the totality of emerging evidence it's split some studies don't see any effect but the ones that do is in a population where they're either mentally fatigued sleep deprivation or during times of aging and that's where memory comes into play and the common denominator seems to be the more that the brain is stressed the more creatine seems to come to the rescue same analogy from a muscle and bone perspective so uh we can talk for hours just on the brain and uh it's a very exciting area for sure yeah so the brain is stress so so brain aging brain older adults that's that's that's aging is a stress on the brain it is so supplementing with how much creatine can improve cognition in let's say older adults yeah as little as about five grams has been shown to have some potential but this is interesting I just you know 20 minutes ago said that the loading phase wasn't needed for muscle the best studies for the brain look at 20 G a day for at least a week so now you're in a conundrum I'm looking at muscle bone and brain and the theory here is that since the bloodb brain barrier is very resistant to creatine and unfortunately we have this really important gal cell called astrocytes which are the most the biggest in in our uh central nervous system it sort of acts as a filter from our blood into our cells and it really determine what gets in and it says Hey foreign pathogens no you're not getting into the the neuron or the cell uh so unfortunately they don't have the creatine transporter or doorway so that's why uptake into the brain is very blunted so the thought is to get an improvement in brain creatine stores you need longer duration of supplementation or higher dosages so the best lines of evidence using mrss have shown that higher 20 grams a day seem to be the most viable there's been a single study looking at about four grams a day but it took 3 months to accumulate in the brain uh unlike our muscle which acts as like a vacuum it sucks in all the creatine from our blood our brain says no no no I'm only going to take what's in our blood I.E supplementation when need be so that's why sleep deprivation seems to have the best lines of evidence or mental fatiguing challenges yeah okay so let's if you're if you're someone like myself who's been supplementing with five grams a day for a year okay that's enough time for it to eventually accumulate into the brain presumably yeah like that low dose remember you need about two to three grams now I'm not sure about your diet but you're going to need that just to Main M your muscle and then comes down to your genetics what's more in Jeopardy is it your bones or brain so again the 5% that's remaining throughout the body is in your testes heart uh uh bone uh uh and brain so for me as a biological male it's going to different areas compared to you as a biological female but my hope is wait a minute let's go a bit higher so we're sort of sort of uh checking off all the boxes my guess is 5 G you'd have a small increase in brain creatine content um but if you have a really non-stressful life the brain says no go to the Bone or we'll excrete it down the toilet but if you're metabolically stressed it's begging for more I'd like you to be probably higher than five but I think it'd be interesting to look at some prepost uh mrss scans and um it's viable it could be there the study that did four grams was in Long Co these individuals brain fog fatigue headaches things like that so the brain was really begging for Recovery okay so you just mentioned the best studies showing any Improvement in and when we're talking about Improvement we're talking about cognition we're talking about like memory memory okay you said 20 grams right which is definitely what I don't want the the swelling part of that um which happens around 20 grams so have there been studies looking at 10 grams is that like a sweet spot the seminal study was out of Germany and they did four two versus 4 versus 10 and this is where I personally take at least 10 and they use mrss studies and they only they showed that about 10 doubl the percent increase in brain creatine content but they also measured it in the gray matter the white matter and I believe the phalus and it all improved by about 10% now it was a small sample size because the run on mrss is super expensive so statistically it wasn't there but the percent improvements were were a lot higher and when you look at all the other data 10 G seems to be a very viable dose to not only check off the Box definitely for muscle we're now checking off the box for brain and now we're or sorry bone and then we're also checking off the the box for uh uh brain as well so I personally take about 10 grams a day on average but during times of metabolic stress sleep deprivation or uh um jet lag I'll increase it to 20 so today I will take 20 grams CU I flew down from Canada I'll take 20 grams again tomorrow but when I get back home I'll decrease it back down to 10 if any is being extruded on the toilet I'm totally fine with that creatine is very cost effective but I want to make sure I'm maximizing all my abilities and the immune system especially in Canadian Winters is really heightened and uh activated and I really have found in the last few years I'm I'm not getting flu like symptoms hopefully that's from exercise or Diet but uh who knows maybe creatine is helping because there is some anti-inflammatory effects you um you you went to another area that I definitely want to talk about but like before that so 20 gr then you're saying Ely when you're in this sleep deprived State jet lag you know let's say fill in the blank type of you know extreme stress um is that immediate so let's say like you you miss you're like up late you have you're up late one night you have something to do the next morning or the next day you have to be like on your game if you take that 20 grams either at night would you take it at night like before you go to sleep or in the morning or does it matter and will it have an effect immediately yeah and I love learning and this is just so 20 GS might be too low it's surpris L your view so another study came out of Germany they did is very elegant design it was a crossover and they gave 0.35 G per kilogram so even if you're only 70 kilg that's 25 grams in a bow of dose and they measured it for 21 hours of sleep deprivation and it really improved memory cognition and it increase brain creatine content so that higher dose not only does it get into your plasma or blood really quickly probably in about 3 hours it's peing when your brain is stressed it's being taken in quite readily so during times of metabolic stress it seems to work now the argument is how do I know I'm going to be stressed tomorrow how do I know I'm going to have a bad night sleep you don't so that's why I think taking a higher daily dose might be a safety but the days you're like oh I didn't sleep at all and I have a big presentation later or me as a professor teaching four classes a term I've really increased the amount I would say I might be the most saturated person on the planet cuz I've been taking creatine for decades uh there's no reason to stop uh we can talk about cycling or or continuous um but I'm even taking more in hope that it's getting into my brain again 20 years ago it was just muscle then we've evolve into the bone and now we're getting into the brain and I think a University students midterm week at final exam staying up all night cramming maybe creatine could really improve their ability to score better on tests and when you look at the mental fatiguing uh studies that's when creatine seems to work after you've done a whole bunch of fatiguing exercises or sorry taking creatine before it really speeds up your abil ability to maintain memory and cognition and uh we can talk about neural filament um things in the brain or bdnf and and that's some of the mechanisms primarily in Rodin so there is some mechanisms showing that creatine is decreasing oxidative stress or really having some uh potential for neuronal health which now you think of Alzheimer's dementia neurogenerative diseases so I'm super excited to see where this is going for the next 20 or 30 years yeah