The Link Between Creatine, Brain Health & Longevity

Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I have a little sleep secret I want to tell you about. Look, sleep is crucial for your fitness, but it's crucial for just plain old everyday life and function. And I find I sleep great unless I have a migraine. And I've had more than my fair share since perimenopause all the way through postmenopause. My secret weapon was Blue Sky CBD sleep gels. Each gel contains 25 milligrams of CBD and 25 milligrams CBN for deep restorative sleep. Something about it helps to reduce inflammation, which I believe for me was key in helping me get to sleep. But the biggest thing is so many of the over-the-counter solutions, whether for sleep or migraines, can ruin gut health and liver health. Neither one of those did I want to be problematic for me. So this option is recommended by healthcare providers worldwide and backed by thousands of happy customers, many of whom come from our Flipping 50 community. There is zero THC, so it's non-habit-forming. It's made by a trusted family-owned company that we all can feel good about. Third-party tested for purity and potency. And if you're interested, you too can try a sample for just $6. But even better, you can get 30% off forever with discount code FLIPPING50. That's FLIPPING50. Just go to flipping50.com/blueskycbd. We'll put that link in the show notes and you'll find it everywhere on Flipping 50 at my favorites. What are you waiting for? Good night. Okay. In this episode, really quick, I have to give you a tip. I released a YouTube video very recently about, hey, this is my experience with creatine. I tripled my dose for 2 weeks and here's what happened. So if this topic interests you, it's because it's been top of mind for me too, most likely. And I will put that video into the show notes so that you can hop over and back and forth. But right now, stay with me because I have a fantastic guest who is going to answer a lot of questions, whether you are beginning to dabble and get to know what creatine is, how you might benefit from it, and probably a lot more benefits than you might have ever considered, even if you're using it. So stay tuned for this episode. You're in perimenopause, menopause, or post-menopause, and you're not slowing down, you're just getting started. But the old rules don't apply anymore. The workouts that worked before, they're working against you now. The advice you've been given, incomplete at best. I'm Debra Atkinson, and I'm the founder of Flipping 50, the pioneer in fitness for women in midlife. For more than 40 years, I've been in the trenches with women just like you, and for the last 12, right here on this podcast and, and the founder of Flipping 50: The Stronger Way app and membership. Welcome to Flipping 50: The Stronger Way, where science meets strength, where you'll find the tools, research, and real talk to build the body and the life you want in your second half. Each week you'll get evidence-based exercise and nutrition strategies, conversations with leading experts, and honest answers to the questions your doctor didn't get. Answers to in medical school and doesn't have time to answer in an appointment. This is your show. Let's get stronger. In this episode, we are diving all into the link between creatine, brain health, and longevity. Yeah, not just creatine and muscle, or creatine and does it really leave you bloated or make you bloated, or creatine, do you do mono or do you do HCL? And My interviewer— interviewee, I'm the interviewer. My interviewee knows all the answers, so full of wisdom, but also able to relay it and relate it to us and to life and to goals in a just a very down-to-earth way. I think you're going to love this episode, especially if you've heard about creatine. Maybe you've been discouraged about using it. You are Maybe somebody who's tried it and experienced some bloating and/or you fear it and/or fear that it's caused you to gain weight. We're unpacking all of it today. And let me introduce to you Dr. Dan Pardi. He's the Chief Health Officer at Qualia Life Sciences. If that name rings a bell, I've tried a few Qualia products. Told a few of you about them behind the scenes. You'll probably be hearing more from me on that because, shh, they work, okay? But at Qualia Life Sciences, Dan Pardi leads education to advance healthspan and peak performance. He's the founder of humanos.me and host of Human OS Radio, the official podcast of the Sleep Research Society. Dan has advised elite military units, Fortune 500 companies and startups through his consultancy Vivendi Health. He holds a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from Leiden University and Stanford and speaks regularly at events like TEDx, VC firms, and the Institute for Human Machine Cognition. He's kind of a big deal, y'all, and he's here down to earth and really opening up the conversation on creatine And you can tell from hearing this conversation, at least I could tell from being in it, he knows his stuff, he knows his science, but he also knows people and how to relay it in a way that makes sense for the decisions that we make day to day on whether to take it or not take it, how to take it, and how to benefit. I think you're going to like this one, and I hope that you let me know behind the scenes. I listen and read all those DMs behind the scenes in Instagram, by the way. Dan, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me, Debra. It's really nice to be here.

Well, you just wait till I grill you. You'll, you'll answer differently at the end.

Maybe. Here we go.

Just kidding. So, all right. This topic, I think one that I would say over the last 2 to 3 years has really been okay. It bubbled up a little at the bottom and then people are like, should I really do this? They dabbled in it a little bit. Some are experiencing bloat, some are experiencing really good results. But here's what I want at the end of this show for every woman who is on it or who is choosing and making a decision not to do it, that she knows exactly why in either case. So that's your task. But before we're done, not letting you out of here without that. So first of all, let's start with just ABCs for a listener who would say, I've never heard of this before. And so for some of you listening, if this is a review and a refresh, excellent. I think it's great. And you can nod your head and say, I knew that, I knew that. Perfect. What is creatine and what role does it play in the body?

Okay. So just to address the point of the— what people know from the start. This is such a cool subject because what is most commonly known is, I think, just the tip of the iceberg. And so there is a lot more to creatine that is most commonly understood. And I think this molecule overall has tremendous potential for human health. So I'll start with that big statement. But what is it? So creatine is a natural compound that your body makes and that you eat if you are an omnivore. So your body will make about a gram or 2 grams of it per day, and you'll eat, if you are an omnivore, you'll eat about a gram or 2 per day also. And now if you're a vegetarian or a vegan, then you really don't have creatine as a source in your diet. So you're left up to what your body can make, but, but what is it? So it is a very simple compound that is made of 3 amino acids, arginine, glycine, and methionine. And what it does is it is serving your, your cells, particularly your muscles will store it and it will still be stored as something called phospho Creatine, and the phospho stands for phosphate. And if you think about ATP, which is the main energy currency of the body, adenosine triphosphate, what creatine is doing is, is helping to buffer against energy shortages. So when you're doing intense or even long-lasting activity and your body's having a hard time keeping up with energy production. Creatine donates— phosphocreatine will donate its phosphate group so that ATP can be restored and your body keeps using energy for whatever it's using. That's the main idea of what creatine is and what it does.

So suddenly you might be making somebody say, aha, I could use a little of that. Yeah. Where is that point where someone would say that versus Is there another basis that— or criteria that I would say, how do I know I need it? Can I measure the amount my body is making now to know I need it?

Yeah, those are really interesting questions. And it might be interesting to start with some of the history because the story of it and our understanding evolved. And what is nice about that is it gives us an insight into what this molecule is really for. But it, you know, it started mostly as a supplement for sports performance. So the earliest storyline is that it was discovered in the 1800s, and that's when it was named. So it was named kreas, after flesh, because it's found in muscle. About 95% of your creatine in the body is stored in muscle. And then it just sat in textbooks for a century, and— or longer, actually. And then in the early '90s, the 1990s, a researcher named Roger Harris started to study it for sports performance and found that it could improve sports performance on ballistic activities like jumping and sprinting to a small but meaningful amount. And so he shared that researcher with a man named Steve Jennings, who was a sports scientist who was working with the British Olympic team. And at that time, there was only 1 kilo of creatine available in the entire global supply. That's it. And so they had, they're like, wow, this could really help our athletes. We need to figure out how to make this. And so they had 47 days to try to figure out a way to make it and deliver it to their athletes at a time that was relevant for them to improve their training and their ultimate their performance in the Olympics. And they did. And so that story is really cool to tell. And one of the most story-worthy points of that is that the 100-meter dash that year in the Olympics was won by a British man named Linford Christie. And the story broke afterwards that he was taking creatine. And guess what happened? Every college and professional athlete wanted to get their hands on it. And so within 2 years, the US market increased to about $30 million. And then 3 years after that, it went up to $150 million. So it— the, the first 10 or 15 years of the creatine story was really all around sports performance. And in that time, because there was demand, a lot of research started to go into it. And the first study that I ever took part of in the mid-1990s during my master's degree was on creatine. And so in that study, you would do something called the Wingate Power Test. So I was both an assistant and a participant. And in that study, you have to sit on a bike. There's people all around you yelling, and you go as hard as you possibly can for 15 seconds. And then you wait a minute and then you do it again and you wait a minute and you do it 5 times. And it was so exhausting. I was teaching a spinning class at that time. And I was never this tired in my life. Yeah. You know, because they, that's how much they try to get you to absolutely go at your max level. And I don't need to go into the details of the study, but what that study showed was aligned with what we knew at that time, which was that yes, indeed, that this was not just an effect on increase in body weight because the, we can go into this, but when you take creatine, you do store water in your muscles. It's a hydrophilic substance that pulls water into the muscles.

Mm-hmm.

But it wasn't just a weight effect, it was also an energetic effect. And so there was actual benefit in performance. And really until the 2010, maybe that was the story for creatine. And at that point people started to think, well, is, since it's contributing to energy, is this really the only thing that it's good for? Or could this be good for other things? And that's when the story started to widen and we started to look at other parts of the story too. And really, I think we're still— and we're not at the tip tip of the iceberg, but we're— a lot of the iceberg is still underwater. And so I think the lot— the future of everything we need to know about creatine is ahead of us.

Okay, so there's so much to unpack there. So first of all, when you were doing the Wingate test, and we probably had very similar master's experiences, so not only that, but I also had to do underwater weighing day after day, and I would say, blow it out, blow it out, blow it out, a million times. But tell me about— were you testing like with creatine and without creatine? Did you get to do both?

Exactly. So it was a within-subject design where you would do both with and without. And then what they did is they would— you take creatine in a loading phase, we would measure with limb weight because we really wanted to see, is this just— is any ergogenic effect from creatine simply due to an increase in body weight from water. And, that was what the question was at the time. Again, this was very new, so we didn't really know what the answer was. And, that was the nature of that particular study.

Okay, got it. Could you tell a difference? Like, when you were doing the testing, do you recall, was there a distinct difference for you in the ability to go harder, longer, or reach a capacity because you were on it versus not?

It's a great question. I couldn't really discern that then in that fashion. That was a test that was better— the performance differences were better determined through objective measures. What you can— what I could more clearly see after I started to take it was differences in repetitions that I could achieve when I was doing weight training. So I could— what I could only do 10 reps of before, I could now do 12 or 14, and that was really clear. Um, but because the Wingate is just work as hard as you can I was working as hard as I could in one context and working as hard as I could in the other. And so how many revolutions I actually did was harder to tell. Uh, all I was trying to do was not throw up on the bike.

That used to be kind of the level of success though, didn't it?

Right? Yeah. Yeah. I was maybe a little disappointed that I didn't. Exactly. I kind of copped out. I was real close. I'll tell you that.

Yeah. So true. Okay. So that begs probably some additional follow-up. And you mentioned, you know, when you were taking it later, you could do more repetitions to fatigue. So question on that: was there also a difference in your recovery, your bouncing back between— Hey, real quick before we get started, did you know 3 out of 4 US homes have toxic chemicals in their tap water? Even though contaminated water looks clear, it could put you at risk for devastating health concerns, including fatigue, hormone disruption, cognitive decline, even cancer. Surprisingly, standard fridge and pitcher filters do little to remove most contaminants, and bottled water contains microplastic. So what's the solution? Introducing AquaTru, the countertop water purifier tested and certified to remove 84 contaminants, including chlorine, lead, forever chemicals and microplastics. Its patented 4-stage reverse osmosis system goes way beyond ordinary filters for pure, healthy water you can trust. No plumbing, no installation. AquaTru has been featured in Business Insider, Popular Science, and named best countertop water filter by Good Housekeeping. Join 98% of customers who say their drinking water is cleaner, safer, and healthier. Go to aquatru.com for 20% off your purifier using promo code FLIPPING50. Aquatru even comes with a 30-day best-tasting water guarantee. That's aquatru.com, A-Q-U-A-T-R-U dot com, promo code F-L-I-P-P-I-N-G-5-0.

Yeah, so I was young at that time. I was probably 24, and that part was not as much of a constraint as it is now. So I'll be 52 in 2 weeks, and now I notice if I do any sort of hard exertion, even, even yoga, like a tough yoga class, it takes me a couple of days to really feel back to full strength, um, sometimes longer. But I, so I've been focusing on how well I recover as a very good marker of resilience and as a reflection of my health. So I do now a variety of things, but creatine I think certainly helps. It contributes to, I do know this, I am now recovering better than I was a few years ago, even though I'm older. And that is probably a combination of creatine, magnesium, NAD, uh, red light, So these are all things that I do regularly now. And the reason I've added those together is because individually I felt that they made a difference. And, and so I'm sticking with them.

Okay. So I want to be careful in how I ask this. So I'm not asking you to make claims, but if you were a marketer and you were going to say, you know, here's to a group of older adults who are either rapidly approaching 50 or over 50. Here would be the reasons I would take this to potentially counter, you know, X, Y, and Z that occur with aging if we're not doing something different. What would be the biggest assets or benefits? And maybe because we all love immediate gratification, what am I going to feel first?

Yeah. So I think the most immediate effects that one can detect when taking creatine has to do with sports performance. So if you're working out, not only can you do more reps, but the, the workout is— causes less of a burn. It makes working out easier. It feels easier to do the work, even if you're getting to work harder. And so I think the real magic from creatine is enabling more work. It's not that you take it and then you don't have to work out anymore, but it makes work easier, and it makes you— your ability to do more work possible and easier. So both of those. And we know, of course, exercise is, if not the most, close to it, probably the most consequential, uh, component of lifestyle on our healthspan. So anything that makes you feel better doing it, I think, is worth considering. But there are a lot of other aspects to this. So gut health. We know that creatine has a direct effect on the single-cell lining of the enterocytes that line the gut, which then makes them stronger at doing their job. And some of this work is— was preclinical, some of it was in animal models, but the evidence was convincing that it would make an animal's gut less leaky because it is enabling better energetics in, in those tissues. It's the same system. I did a podcast last week where we were really focused on skin. And of course, a lot— there's, there's about 10 studies looking at creatine and skin. Most of them are actual topical applications, so less oral consumption. But the skin has the creatine kinase system, which is the enzyme that is both resynthesizing phosphocreatine and also helping break it apart so that the phosphate can be dedicated to— donated to ATP. And so that is this bidirectional system that is like a backup battery, essentially. And, um, so there's really cool evidence there. There's great evidence in the immune system. So the immune system's, uh, cells are hungry for creatine and they have the creatine 1 transporter, which is a type of, uh, transporter, something called SLC6A8, uh, which is a big family of— there's only 400 different SLC transporters in the body, and then they're broken down into 50 subgroups of families, and that helps commu— uh, help to bring in compounds from outside of the cell to inside of the cell. And that particular SLC transporter is called the creatine transporter 1, and they, the immune cells have that transporter on them. And so some, we've, it's been identified that they do take up creatine and it does then improve the efficacy of the immune system in certain contexts. That's really interesting. Uh, and then the brain, and we know, we know that if you do take creatine and load with a loading dose in particular, that you can increase brain storage of creatine somewhere between 5 and 15%, where muscle stores can be somewhere between 20 and 40. So it's not as much as muscle, but it's still a lot. And the effects there, uh, are Wonderful. So you're seeing an improvement in a variety of cognitive functions, um, working memory, especially memory seems to be most sensitive, but you also see reaction time improvements, you see planning improvements. Even in skilled rugby athletes that have undergone significant sleep loss, they have a preservation of their skills during sleep loss. And so while creatine isn't a stimulant like a caffeine, It's helping to maintain energy under stressed conditions. And in some ways, aging is like a stressed condition. So should this become a canonical fundamental part of one's aging routine? There's not enough evidence yet to say that, but from a biological plausibility standpoint, I think that this makes great sense to become a compound that becomes standard for anyone who is, you know, in midlife or beyond.

In a very recent episode, I was sharing a story where I accidentally, like, tripled my dose. So basically I was loading and I did it traveling to a conference. And so I was a little sleep deprived. And it was, you know how it is at a conference, it's like drinking from a water hose and you're like, I need to retain all this. I don't want to miss these sessions because that's what I'm here to do. But like, this is an overwhelm. It's like And I find I tune out, you know, at certain times of the day. And there was, back by the water fountain, somebody had left their samples of creatine. So I, every time I went back, I was like, you know, I'm just flavoring my water with that. And I kept adding it. So 3 times during the day, and I'm like, I am like firing on all cylinders, like, still. This is highly unusual. But I found it was, you know, a huge difference from, you know, normal just brain and end-of-the-day fatigue for me while I was using it in that context. Now, I don't do that every day. It was just situational, but I found it to be really helpful.

Me too. So yeah, that's— it has now become my go-to when I don't get a perfect amount of sleep. So we all know the feeling of the sluggish mind, the relentless tiredness when you miss out on a couple hours of sleep. And particularly, if you don't get great sleep a couple nights in a row. We're more likely to withstand an imperfect amount of sleep if you've been sleeping well generally. If you're struggling with sleep, you know, last couple of nights and then you get another bad one, you really do feel the effects. And so, So there's been now a couple of really good studies. So the first one was in 2007 by a researcher named Terry McMorris. And this is one that I was referencing some of the benefits of improved reaction time. This was in a group of— so it was cognitive performance in elderly individuals that had undergone sleep loss and great results. Again, it's not boosting your cognitive performance beyond baseline. But it's sustaining your baseline under very challenging circumstances. And then the next study was the one that I'd mentioned in the rugby athletes. This was from Christian Cook in 2011, and, uh, he published in the Journal of International Society for Sports Nutrition. And that was really cool where these elite rugby athletes got 3 to 5 hours of sleep, and in this placebo group as you would expect, when they were— when their rugby skills were tested, they performed terribly when they've been on 3 hours of sleep. Horribly, right? They, they could not perform their skills. If they had taken creatine, they performed fine. And think about a professional athlete. They're having to stay in a different hotel room all the time. It could be too hot or too loud. You could easily imagine how a professional athlete is challenged from conditions of sleep, imperfect sleep regularly. That was really cool. And then just about 2 years ago in 2024, a researcher named Ali Gordi-Najjad, he works at this massive center. I forget the name of it. It's— I can't even pronounce it, but it's kind of like the NIH in Germany, but it's even bigger. Not only do they do nutritional work, but they also do energy work for like nuclear and solar. It's a— it's the— it's the largest research center in all of Germany. And so he did his work out of there. And what they showed is that it was the same performance and benefit of creatine under sleep deprivation, but they showed why. So they had studied, and they say that what the brain under these conditions of sleep loss— and you see that ammonia levels rise and acidity rises during sleep loss conditions. But what that does is it actually makes the brain— those physiologic conditions make the brain more absorbent to creatine in the bloodstream. You— the brain is ready to pull it in, and so it affects the creatine transporter. You— it gets into the brain more. And just like in those previous studies, you see a preservation of cognitive skills under these very challenging conditions, 21 hours without sleep. So again, just 3 hours of actual sleep, which is Brutal.

Can you say a little specifically about— okay, they were using creatine and it helped their cognitive skills, their reaction skills. So did they, when they quote unquote woke up in the morning, take it, or had they been taking it for days on end? How did that look?

This was a single oral dose, and so this was taken in the morning and after sleep deprivation.

Okay.

And And the dose is 0.35 grams per kilogram. So for about a 150-pound person, we're talking 25 grams. For somebody that is my size, I weigh 210 pounds, that's like 35 grams. So it's a lot.

It is a lot.

Okay. That's a lot. Um, but that is the dose that they tested that, and they did something called the psychomotor vigilance test, which is research that I did during my PhD. Um, and I'll tell you a little bit about that. Study or that type of, um, test. So you're holding this box in your hand and there's a screen and a button, and the screen is tiny and it has numbers on it. It's actually blank, there's nothing on it. But then as soon as you start to see these numbers count up in milliseconds, you have to push the button. This is a really good test because your alertness underlies all other cognitive skills— memory, executive functioning, all of it. And it's also a test that does not improve with, uh, with practice. It— so you could take— you can give it at any point in the day. A person could have done it 100 times. It is just testing your alertness in that moment. And if you're really tired and— but caffeinated, you actually will have what are called errors of commission. So you actually push the button before the numbers even start to count up. You're like anticipating— you're like tired and anxious and wired, so you like But you're still really tired and making mistakes. And so that's a, that's a test that they did. They did something called the n-back working memory test, also a study that I test that I did in my own sleep research. So really well done. And they measured brain creatine levels also with imaging. And they did see that you could, they could quantify this radiolabeled phosphocreatine in the brain. So really well done study. And, um, yeah, so that was convincing to me to give it a shot. And now that's, that's why I was saying it's my go-to when I'm sleep deprived.

Well, amazing. And so for so long, I, I think I wrote about this in You Still Got It, Girl, which was almost a decade ago now, but that of course blood chemistry doesn't change, but in the sleep deprived individual, like if 2 hours, but what happens if it's up to 4 it's almost like you're operating drunk, you know. I mean, your reaction skills are so bad, which makes you think, oh my gosh, healthcare professionals who have that night shift, this is not good for those of us who have to go to the hospital. But it makes me concerned because we want, we want older adults to be doing agility and rapid movements, and then You gotta say, but not the day after sleep deprivation because your reaction skills are going to be poor. And if you're also estrogen deprived, your ligaments and connective tissue are more prone to injury. So go for a walk that day. But now if we were looking at, wait a minute, maybe there's a solution so I can continue to maintain my, you know, drive for agility reaction skills without the risk of injury. If creatine were involved.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So this is one of the reasons why I'm so excited. You just nailed it, is that it's what it's enabling. So it's having direct and indirect effects. Indirect effects is it enabling a person to better engage with a consistent physical activity practice where they're able to push where it doesn't feel as, as much, where they're able to recover faster, where the reaction time is better, less prone to You know, just tripping over a weight they didn't see. And, um, there are, as you mentioned, real effects on, you know, not, not only the rest of the body when hormones change, but even the creatine system. So the— this is why I think women, uh, are particularly an interesting group to benefit from creatine. Maybe even more than men.

Yeah. I want you to say a little bit more on that. What are the nuances and differences from women to men and why is it so much more potentially beneficial to women?

Yeah. So due to hormonal fluctuations, whether it's in menstruation, perimenopause, and menopause, we do see that there are energy fluctuations and some of those are gonna correspond with changes in monthly hormonal cycles, um, and then also the, the weirdness that takes place during perimenopause and of course menopause. But yeah, so a couple of things that I think are relevant, and they, they have to do with going back to the transporter. So we know that estrogen— when estrogen is dominant, you have an increase in the synthesis of enzymes, uh, that are actually helping your body synthesize creatine. And even the transporter itself is upregulated, so your body's more likely to take creatine in. And the enzyme creatine kinase, which is the one that is making the reactions occur, that is upregulated too. And everything is opposite when progesterone is dominant. So creatine kinase slows down, the production of creatine slows down. And, and so it's kind of feels like why you're running through sand when you're in the luteal phase. Workouts are harder, mental edge is duller. All that is real. And that's a very creatine-focused perspective, but it's interesting because it does reflect the experiential, you know, what people feel in when those hormones are fluctuating. Yeah. And so that, that I think is a real potential benefit of being able to help stabilize creatine by loading with it so that you experience less fluctuations even though your hormones are fluctuating. You don't have to depend as much on whether or not your body's making it because you're taking it. And so that helps even out your energy over the fluctuations in a month. That's really cool.

So let me say this back to you just to see if I'm interpreting it correctly. So if a woman was still cycling regularly, or perimenopause, we know, is irregularly cycling. You might suggest that during certain weeks that there was an increased load taken versus others. Am I hearing that correctly?

Well, that, that is a question that I pondered myself, and I think the actual— this— luckily, the dosing is simpler. Just take it regularly. But then when you're feeling particularly stressed for one reason or another, big work demand, poor sleep, etc., you can take more and acutely.

Yeah, got it. And I just, I don't know why, but I'm feeling called to tap into a recent episode we did with Dr. Abby Smith Ryan, and I think some of her recent research that says, you know, performance-wise, there really isn't as much variation. But what is different is a woman's perception of the difficulty of doing it during a certain week.

That's real.

And recovery capacity. Yeah. And it is, right? It's perception is everything.

Yeah. I know sometimes when I'm really sleep deprived, I can't even do the things that are going to help me because I'm just so bad at actually doing anything. I had a night like that a few nights ago because I'm testing a new sleep product. It's not a supplement, it's digital, and it just totally messed up my sleep. And that's one of the hard parts about being a sleep scientist that is also just personally testing tools and solutions that are in the marketplace, is that you have to test things that can oftentimes ruin your next day. It happened to me and I couldn't even— it was like one of the worst days I've experienced in a long time and I couldn't even go take my creatine. I was that out of it.

Yikes. Well, I don't know about anybody else, but a lot of women can relate. Not, not necessarily for that reason. I personally experienced this also last weekend because I'm a new grandparent, you know, and you get that call, could you come over? And you're already out the door running, you know, I know it's going to be so great. And I get there. And my son says, "I think while you're here, we're gonna do crib training." And I'm like, "What?" Like, that's not what I had in mind. I had co-napping, contact naps in mind. That's what I had in mind. So yeah, I was, yeah, there is a reason you don't have children at 61, just totally. But I want to open a little can of worms maybe, but I think to a lot of people, we've all heard of monokreatine, and it's probably the most widely studied. In fact, I don't know how many studies do exist on HCL, but we know that there are two distinct products out there, and to a listener that may be all we know. Can you help maybe talk about what is the difference between those and what do we know or what do we suspect?

Yeah, so creatine monohydrate is the gold standard. That's where by far the majority of all the research that we are talking about has been on creatine monohydrate. There are a couple other forms that have tried to create a niche for themselves in this growing market. So the two pro— predominant ones are creatine ethyl ester and creatine hydrochloride. And the reality is at this point is that there really isn't anything that is compelling evidence for why you would go with a creatine of that other form. And, you know, I'm, I'm cheering for all solutions to, you know, maybe in the future we'll find that creatine hydrochloride is better for a particular type of tissue. And we don't know that now. Um, but there really doesn't seem to be that big of advantages to at all, even in theory, to some of these other ones. So I think the right thing to do is to stick where the evidence is. And that is in creatine monohydrate. It's available everywhere. It's most of the forms that you're going to see are that.

Can you, and I will throw this in and maybe just banter that a second. What I've noticed with women who've like balked and said, I've tried it and it causes bloating, that sometimes they have a better reaction to the HCL.

Yeah. So I think if they're— the bloating part is interesting because from the beginning when this started to become a thing in the mid-'90s, there was a couple of concerns: bloating, cramping, and kidney issues. And the kidney issues is because a breakdown product of creatine is creatinine. Creatinine. So if you increase your amount of creatine from supplements, then you're gonna see an increase in the breakdown product creatinine. The reason why that was thought to be a concern is cuz when you typically see increases in creatinine on blood tests, it actually has to do with kidney dysfunction. And so that was improperly associated, and this has been tested directly. Now there's no signs of kidney issues. If you look at glomerular filtration rates and, and markers of kidney function. Everything with kidneys is fine. In fact, you could even make an argument that this could be good for kidneys because, uh, a big part of where— when creatine is made in the body, it starts in the kidneys. The step one happens there, and then it goes— that complex now goes to the liver, and then it is finished in the liver and then gets into circulation. And then your cells have creatine transporters on them, which we talked about earlier, And so your cells aren't making it. It's happening. It's getting outsourced and manufactured, gets into circulation, and then you take it up. And so the reason why I think, well, maybe this could be good for kidneys, and this of course would need to be tested directly, is because you're easing the burden of how much your kidneys need to make. And there's a component of creatine that is really interesting and underdiscussed, and it has to do with methylation. And so we— methylation is a really important process in the body. And it does a variety of things. We have these methyl groups, there's a limited amount of them. And what, what meth— what methylation does is it helps with DNA repair. You'll tag a methyl group to a compound that has been a metabolite, and that's how the body knows to get rid of it and excrete it. So it's part of our detoxification excretion process. And it's even important for the synthesis and even breakdown of neurotransmitters. And so about 70% of all of your methylation need in your body goes towards making creatine. And when you— so when you take creatine, you're easing the burden so the available methyl groups can go towards detoxification, neurotransmitter synthesis, and DNA repair. That is probably an underappreciated part of creatine and a really cool bit of science. So that's my theory around whether— why this might actually be better for kidneys than— not only not harmful, but possibly better. But that, like I said, that should be tested directly.

Yeah. And when I think— still, um, would you agree with this? I mean, do you still think there's considerable amount of education that needs to be done for physicians to understand this?

Yeah, because for all the things that we're talking about, um, I think whenever we have a lever that can support a higher level of health for longer into the lifespan, so supporting healthspan, that we should know, doctors should know about this. And part of the reason may not necessarily be that they're going to prescribe it because that sort of falls outside of— unless you're a functional medicine clinician, it might just fall out of your purview, right? The risk is a doctor not knowing much and then saying, well, I wouldn't take that, and it not be based on anything legitimate. And so now the doctor, which is there to support your health, through being uninformed, now steers you away from something that could be helpful.

Yeah, agree. I think a lot of people come away with kind of fear or a kind of an old school thinking and, and aren't willing then to look at it because, you know, somebody has shut that idea down and planted that little seed of doubt.

Yep, totally, totally agree. Doctors are not trained on that, and so it's, uh, they can be very close-minded to supplements in general, unfortunately. So I'm gonna try to do some writing on this to hopefully improve the thinking on supplements in general.

Talk a little bit about quality of supplements. So, because I think, you know, any, any good marketer or product producer knows people are now looking for creatine, they think they need it or have realized I do indeed based on information you've sold. Is all creatine on the market created equal? Now I know the answer, but I want you to answer that.

Yeah. You know, creatine is not a, we're lucky it's very stable. So if it does get moisture in it, then that will cause it to degrade, degrade more quickly, but it can survive intact on shelves for a long time. So that's good. The, the creatine that we use in our product is called Opticreatine, which is is— that's a main form, but it's micronized. And so one of the problems of creatine monohydrate is that the, the granules of creatine are large. And so if you put it into a glass and you drink it, you'll see a lot of it remains on your glass. And so whenever we make any sort of a product, we're always like, all right, how do we deliver what we say we're going to deliver? So we oftentimes will work with companies that create ingredients that are standardized. So they do all the testing and they are essentially confirming that you're getting what you— what is on the bottle. And we always, we always appreciate that. So we typically work with standardized ingredients. But there's real benefits to this as well. And some of them might be through improved absorption, dilution. It can dissolve better in a glass. And that actually is a very practical benefit of being more palatable. So instead of drinking what feels like grittiness and sand-like. It just blends really nicely into water. So, you drink it, it has almost no taste. You don't have to put a lot of flavor in it to mask it. A lot of us at the company just put it in our coffee. It's a little salty. And so, people that like that little bit of salt, which apparently brings out the flavor in your coffee.

Who knew?

Okay. Yeah. I was like, "Okay, I heard that. Let me try it." And so, it's pretty good. Yeah. So, that's, you know, I would say that some of these benefits are, they seem quotidian in a sense, but they make a difference in terms of someone sticking with it long-term. Yeah. Better dissolving, better tasting, and then probably better absorption. But those are some of the main attributes I think of Opti-Creatine. It just takes the creatine monohydrate and then it just grinds it down. So, the actual granules are much, much smaller. And that's why it dissolves.

Fantastic, Dan. It's been a wealth of information. So as a, you know, a user and a believer for a variety of reasons, you know, and of course the first thing is, you know, is it going to help me with lean muscle mass? Is it going to improve my body composition? I, I would be remiss if I said that's probably not every woman's number one concern, but the brain benefit, the cognitive function, and then the support with sleep deprivation or jet lag, which is kind of— I got, I got both.

Yeah.

Is there a question though that I did not ask you that I should have?

Well, there's a question you did ask that I have not— you had asked about bloating, and I had took a circuitous answer and talked about some other things like methylation, but A good thing to know about bloating, the idea of it is that hasn't really shown to be a thing. So it can, the reason why is we talked about creatine is hydrophilic or water loving. And so it pulls water, like for every gram of creatine that gets into your cells, it is pulling water into the cells. And so people will gain weight. I am a resp— I'll gain like, you know, I'm, I'm bigger too. I'm 210, 250 pounds. So I'll gain 10 pounds when I do, when I take creatine. But there's a difference between the feeling of having a large bowl of ramen where you have this extracellular water, which we think of bloating, and the feeling with creatine is more like, you know, when you do a good workout and your muscles feel a little taut after, they feel full, but it's not— that's not going to make you bulky. So some people have been concerned about that. It's just that feeling that you might have after you've worked out where your muscles feel a little tighter. And a lot of people like that. If you're worrying about getting bulky, that is years of training. It doesn't sneak up on you. It's an intentional goal that is very hard to achieve, and you have to have that as a goal.

Totally agree. Yeah. And couldn't have been better said, I think. Yes, absolutely. So, so much great research, and you are a wealth of information. Where could listeners learn more, find out more about you, where's that place?

Uh, thank you, Debra. I appreciate that. Well, so Qualia doesn't just make supplements. We're also very dedicated to education, and that is a part of our mission, is how do we help people with health and healthspan. And for that, we create products and we create educational resources. So we have a very active blog. So for example, in February, we put out 6 articles.. And we have several writers, myself, Jenny Robard, who's worked with me for about 12 years, Darryl Grable. He's been at the company since the beginning. And we'll talk about both topics that relate to therapeutic areas that we work in, but also other topics. So we recently published an article on brain rot, which was the Webster 2024 word of the year, and essentially how social media usage changes your brain in a very specific way. And I encourage everybody to go read that article. You just scroll down, you'll find it fascinating. And we give strategies like, for one, when you read it, you will ident— there's a very specific pattern that you will say, oh my gosh, that's me. And then two, ways to counteract it so that you are less, you know, you succumb less to some of those perils of, uh, how that type of social media will drive of, you know, certain behaviors in your life. Really cool stuff. So we— point is, we do a lot there too. So go to qualialife.com. You can find the blog there. You can find products there, more product information, but all of our work goes there. So I encourage people to check it out.

Fantastic. Thank you. Yes. And I'm going to go try not to fall down that scrolling rabbit hole myself.

All right.

It's been great to talk to you. I appreciate I appreciate your time and being here.

Thank you so much, Debra.

The information shared on Flipping 50 the Stronger Way is for educational and informational purposes only and not intended as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult your physician or qualified healthcare provider before beginning any exercise program, making changes to your diet, or adjusting any medications or supplements. Individual results may vary. Debra Atkinson and Flipping 50 are not responsible for any injury or adverse outcomes resulting from information presented on this podcast.