Creatine Explained - Ask A Nutritionist

Transcript:

LEAH: Hello and welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition's “Ask a Nutritionist” podcast brought to you by Nutritional Weight & Wellness. My name is Leah Kleinschrodt. I'm a Registered and Licensed Dietitian, and we've been thrilled to celebrate 20 years on air discussing the connection between what you eat and how you feel.

Thank you so much for your support and listenership over the years. And if you've been enjoying this show, let us know by leaving a rating or a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback makes all the difference and helps others find these important real food messages. On today's show, I will be answering one question that we received from one of our Dishing Up Nutrition listeners.

And this listener asks, “What are good sources of creatine?” It's a great question. I feel like creatine has been having more of a moment in the sun recently. And I have personally been doing a little digging into creatine. So I was excited to see this question. So let's do a little background as to what creatine is, why we care about it. And then we'll get into where we find creatine in the diet.

What is creatine?

So creatine is a natural peptide, or this small little protein fragment that our bodies can make on its own. Our kidneys, our liver, and our pancreas are the big organs that make creatine. And then creatine gets stored mostly in our muscles. So the body makes creatine by combining a few different amino acids, notably methionine, arginine, and glycine, and then that creatine again gets stored in our muscles.

Creatine helps with energy & muscles

But we also consume creatine directly from our diet and that creatine also goes into our muscles. Now, creatine is important because it helps the body make and reuse something called ATP, which is our energy currency in the body. This is the energy that all of our cells run off of. So our body makes this ATP from creatine. It can also make it from other things like our carbohydrates, like glucose, and from some of the fatty acids that we make or that we eat.

But the creatine pathway has a bit of an advantage because it makes energy the fastest and it regenerates the fastest. So this is why creatine is really big in the sports performance world. Having a good amount of creatine on board and available for the body to use is crucial for sports and physical activities that require fast, powerful action. So think weightlifting, think sprinting, think powerlifting, those types of things.

Creatine can also be helpful for recovery after these efforts. So think athletes and exercisers putting forth some kind of effort in the gym or out on the field. Creatine can help in the recovery process also.

Creatine provides brain health & anti-aging benefits

Then, not necessarily recently, but again, it's just coming onto my right radar a little more recently, there’s been a lot of talk for creatine and some of the benefits of that around brain health and from an anti-aging perspective. So just like our muscles, our brain uses creatine for energy, but unlike our muscles, the brain can make some of its own creatine.

So this makes sense because the brain actually is such an energy hog in the body. It makes up about 20 percent of our energy expenditure each day, which is mind blowing thinking that this one organ out of all the cells and all the organs and all the tissues in our body, the brain takes up a fifth of our energy expenditure. So the brain is a pretty important organ to keep running.

So I guess it does make sense that creatine, the brain having its own private supply of creatine, it's a good thing because we want our brain to have that backup generator system.

Creatine may provide benefits for neurological conditions

Now, research has been digging into the benefits of creatine consumption and supplementation for conditions like traumatic brain injury and concussions, chronic sleep deprivation, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, depression, anxiety, just anything neurological.

There was a narrative review that was published in the Journal, Nutrients, in March of 2022. They said that the most promising results for creatine and creatine support is coming in the areas of depression, kind of general cognition and concussions and TBIs. While there is more research and more digging that needs to be done for some of the neurodegenerative conditions like ALS and Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and the like.

So just know that there is a big interest in this area as well. And from the anti-aging perspective, anything we do to keep our brain healthy and sharp is going to have great anti aging effects. Same thing with our muscles and our muscle mass and our muscle strength. Anything we can do to preserve our muscles as we age means we're much more likely to age better in the process. So creatine is a big deal.

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Where do we get creatine & how much do we need?

Let's think about where do we get creatine from and how much do we need? Our best sources of creatine come from meat and fish and seafood. So think about the foods where you are eating the muscle of that animal. So just like humans, we store creatine in our muscles. The same goes for animals.

So about four ounces of fish like salmon or tuna will get you about a half a gram of creatine. If you love herring, you're in luck because that is the fish that has the most creatine. You get about one gram of creatine per four ounces of herring. Beef, chicken, pork, some of those other muscle meats are about the same as fish. You get about a half a gram of creatine per four ounces of meat.

We do get some creatine from things like cheese, milk, yogurt, eggs, but not a ton. Also, if someone is eating a vegetarian or a vegan diet that is low or it doesn't have any animal products in it, creatine will be difficult to come by in large amounts.

Some plant foods contain trace amounts of creatine, but mostly these populations will have to try to get adequate amounts of those amino acids that I mentioned earlier, the methionine, arginine, glycine, in order for the body to really continue to produce its own creatine.

So the body turns over about two grams of creatine per day. Now our bodies can make half of that creatine up through those amino acids through making its own creatine. The other half, so about one gram of creatine, needs to come through our diet and or supplementation. So we at Nutritional Weight & Wellness, we've long recommended that our clients aim for at least four ounces of cooked protein at most meals of the day, which would get us into that required one gram of creatine per day.

If we're for sure doing those four ounces twice a day at two meals of the day, like we would be hitting that one gram of creatine. And of course, you can also supplement with creatine. There's a lot of creatine supplements out there on the market. Creatine has been out there for decades.

Creatine monohydrate is one of the most well studied and well researched supplements out there, which says something. And creatine monohydrate just means that there is a creatine molecule bound to creatine a water molecule. So it's generally well absorbed into the body. And when we think supplementation, whether we are doing it more for the muscle side of things or whether we're doing it for brain health, generally supplementing with something like three to five grams of creatine monohydrate per day is a great place to start for most people.

Some people may need to start a little bit lower and ramp up a little more slowly if you have a sensitive stomach. But generally, again, this is a well tolerated supplement. And I'll just mention that at Nutritional Weight & Wellness, we do carry a Creatine Monohydrate product from Progressive Laboratories. And if you are taking that three to five gram amount per day, the bag will last you over three months. So again, you get a lot of mileage out of that one purchase. So that's always a plus.

So hopefully that's some great background information on creatine and why it's in the kind of more in the sunlight these days and why it's important actually in the research literature also. So I want to thank you all so much for listening to Dishing Up Nutrition's “Ask a Nutritionist”. And if you found this episode helpful, be sure to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast app.

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