Most people don't get enough creatine from food, so supplementation helps. Creatine monohydrate is the most studied form, but newer versions like hydrochloride claim better absorption. JJ Virgin and an expert sort through the marketing claims and competing formulas.
Your body makes about half of what you would need if needs were— if you didn't have more than normal needs, because you've got to put that out. We'll talk about what might increase your need for creatine. You have a challenge getting it from your diet. You would have to eat high amounts of meat and fish. They'd have to be sashimi, carpaccio, or not cooked much. So the reality is we need to supplement.
Most people need the supplement in their diet in order to have optimal health.
All right. So it is a confusing landscape out there. Now, everything that if you are just listening to the podcasts and influencers and experts, you hear about creatine monohydrate. And I'm just going to tell you what I've heard. And then I want to go unpack the different forms and what is truth, because I know you've gone through a lot of the research on this. And let's— and I'd love people to be able to learn and then be able to discern the difference. But the information out there is that, um, you need to take creatine monohydrate, that there are different forms, they're just expensive and marketing, that creatine monohydrate's the most studied. And this is the, the only one that you should be taking because of that. So let's unpack the different forms and then I want to definitely address that.
Certainly you are right. Creatine monohydrate is the most popular form. It's the form that's been around the longest. In the past, many years ago, the only creatine that was available was what was extracted from meat. And then science learned how to synthesize it, and that was the start of creatine monohydrate. Since then, there have been a number of different forms of creatine that have been synthesized, mostly in attempt, if the researchers are straightforward about it, to improve upon creatine monohydrate. It is—
why do you need to improve upon creatine monohydrate?
Well, because I think people early on realized that there was a a non-optimal bioavailability. It, it was not a, a, a great molecule for uptake in the body for absorption. And so things like creatine citrate, creatine malate, creatine nitrate, creatine ethylester, creatine dicitrate, and, and things were all attempts to create better bioavailability and we got 8 patents because creatine hydrochloride was a conjugation that was discovered and introduced to the market, and it had far superior bioavailability compared to other forms.
Now, why did you start doing that in the first place? Like, why didn't you just take the creatine monohydrate?
Well, We listened to the athletes. The athletes that were using the steroids had also used the monohydrate, and they said that the quote, as I said earlier, nothing on the market currently works in the way that we need it to. Well, that included creatine monohydrate. Yes, it helped them some, but it did not help them nearly enough to make up for the strength, endurance, and recovery advantages that the hormonal compounds, the androgens, provided them. So we needed to find something that would catalyze those performance enhancement characteristics without being an illegal endocrine profile manipulator. So the— that's why we got into studying different forms that, that hopefully would provide these athletes the sort of, of non-doping control compounds that they needed to do their jobs.
