Transcription
When I asked you before this conversation started rolling what you're really excited about at the moment, your response to me was there was a few things, but one of them which lit up your face was creatine.
Yes. And it's funny because it lit up your face again.
Yeah. It's it's funny because creatine has been around for I mean ever for decades and it's always been in my mind it was like one of those gym bro things. I'm like I don't need to be swole.
Yeah. I don't eat creatine does get get swole and you know this is this was the thought for for many many years and then over the last five years or so the effects of creatine on the brain started to really get my interest. Anything that affects the brain I really become interested in. And so that's kind of what did get me the most excited about about creatine. But also I started doing a lot of resistance training. And so I was like okay here I am now. I'm like one of those gym guys. I'm doing I'm doing the barbells. I'm doing the, you know, the squats and the deadlifts and all that. And so, so why not give myself some of the creatine?
Well, what is creatine, right? Why is it important? You talked about earlier, you know, why doesn't our body just make more of these things that are so beneficial? We do make creatine. We make about, I don't know, our liver makes about 1 to three grams a day of creatine. And our brain also makes creatine. And those are the two organs that make it. Creatine gets consumed by other tissues like the muscle is probably the one that's the greediest because creatine is stored as phosphocreatine, but it's used to make energy essentially. So, it can increase muscle mass. It can increase muscle strength in combination with resistance training because you're able to regenerate and make energy faster. So, for example, I became interested in it after reading studies where people that supplemented with creatine that were engaged in resistance training were able to gain more lean body mass. They were able to gain more strength. It was increasing their training volume. So, you can do one to two more reps, right, of of whatever exercise you're doing. And it seems to decrease the recovery time between those those sets as well. So, you're able to increase your training volume. Well, anything that's going to in increase your training volume is going to then have the downstream effect of, you know, increasing the adaptations like increased muscle mass or increased muscle strength.
I started supplementing with creatine about a year ago and I started supplementing with it for that reason, for the my training and I was doing about five grams a day because that was really what was shown to to be beneficial for muscle health in combination with resistance training. And it's important for people to realize that supplementing with creatine by itself, without any type of resistance training, isn't going to grow your muscle. It's not going to make you stronger. You have to put in the effort because what creatine is doing, it's helping you make the energy quicker, right? And that and then being able to make that energy quicker means that you're able to then do that exercise better, um, harder, more of it, right? So, um, it's sort of sup supercharging your exercise routine. And five grams a day was like, okay, perfect. That's what I'm doing. I'm doing five grams a day. And definitely noticed an effect on my training volume where I was, you know, doing more more reps.
So that was like, okay, a year ago, I had already been aware of the effects on the brain. I thought maybe the five grams a day would do that. So what are the effects on the brain? Well, your brain also consumes a lot of energy, you know, needs a lot of energy. So it does make its own creatine. But it turns out if you can if you can give your brain more of that creatine particularly under a period of anything that's causing stress. So let's say lack of sleep or let's say emotional psychological stress or in my case high cognitive load where you're just every day learning concepts, complex things. you're trying to remember them. You're putting ideas together and coming up with new hypotheses and you know, you're just you're just you're studying a lot and it's very cognitively demanding and it's it's a type of stress on your brain. That's like my life, right? Um under this condition of stress, depression is another one that's a stress on your brain or neurodeenerative disease, that's a stress on your brain. So any kind of stressful condition, that's where creatine shines in the brain. I would argue that I mean all of us who who has the perfect amount of sleep never has stress nobody, right? There's always some sort of stress in the background. So, um that's when I was like, okay, so if you're the perfect person, you have no stress, you get the perfect amount of sleep every night, your brain makes enough creatine to kind of do what it needs to do. I know that I'm constantly under stress. So, um I'm like, okay, well, I think I need a boost. And this is where a lot of very interesting studies have come out of many different labs. Um, some out of Germany that looked at the dose of creatine and how it increases creatine levels in the brain. And this is why I now supplement with 10 grams a day.
So the study out of Germany found that five grams a day of creatine, if you're supplementing with five grams a day, your muscles are greedily consuming it, particularly if you're working out. They want it. They want it. after about five grams a day, especially over a few months, like you're you're saturating your muscle and that's enough, right? Anything above that kind of spills over to the brain. And so they what this German study found was that 10 grams of creatine increased creatine levels in several different regions of the brain. And that was probably the most exciting, you know, I would say evidence that supplementing higher than five grams a day was actually doing something in terms of getting creatine into the brain. There have now been a variety of studies that have looked at different outcomes, right? So, if you supplement with 10 grams of creatine or even go higher than that, like 20 grams of creatine, how does that affect cognitive function, right? And so, um some of these studies have been been done by uh Dr. Darren Kandow. He's um at the University of Regina in Canada and it's looked they've looked at things like sleep deprivation and it's been found that if you take someone and you sleep deprive them for 21 hours and give them about 25 to 30 grams of creatine, it completely negates the cognitive deficits of sleep deprivation. Actually, not only does it negate the cognitive deficits of sleep deprivation, it makes people function better than if they were well-rested.
That's where I was like, wait a minute, there's many times when I'm traveling, I'm jetlagged. Uh lots of times when I'm sleepd deprived and I have to be doing a podcast or a presentation, whatever. And in those situations, I go up from my 10 grams to more like 20 grams. Today, for example, I wasn't really sleepdeprived, but you know, there's a lot of high cognitive demand. This is a long podcast. There's all that stuff. And so, I went up to 20 grams today on my creatine. And I well, I will say even at the 10 grams for me, we were talking about this with respect to being in ketosis. I don't feel that mid-after afternoon crash when I have the creatine, not being on a ketogenic diet, not being in ketosis. It's very clear for me and I've done this where sometimes I only do five grams and then if I do that I'll notice I'm like why am I tired right now? So there's something interesting and maybe it's placebo. I'm going to throw that out there. Very possible. But I don't know maybe the creatine is again it's able to regenerate that energy quicker and so that's also beneficial for the brain.
And now I I would say all these creatine researchers a lot of them are shifting to the brain. It used to be all muscle focused and now people are super interested in what creatine is doing to the brain, especially if you're supplementing with more of it. And you know, this is important for people that are under a stressful situation, but also for vegans because creatine is found in food, mostly in animal products like meat and poultry and fish, dairy. A lot of vegans don't eat that. And I've had so many of my vegan friends, I've got them on the creatine, and it's changed their lives. I mean, they're like, "This is like incredible." You know, can you imagine someone who's not getting any creatine from their diet because they eat no meat and all of a sudden they start supplementing with 5, 10 grams of creatine and it's like they have energy. Some people say they they require less sleep, which is kind of interesting. That's kind of a comment I've heard many many times from people is that it's like their brain doesn't need as much sleep. They have more energy. So, um, I've been a big fan of the creatine, um, not only for the muscle, especially because, you know, working out is something that's very important, but for the brain as well.