A randomized controlled trial found that combining creatine supplementation with a Bifidobacterium probiotic significantly reduced depressive symptoms in 45 participants. The mechanism: the probiotic increases gut creatine transporters, boosting creatine absorption and brain energy metabolism, which is typically depleted in depression.
If you care about mental health, you need to know about this new human randomized controlled trial published in Cell Metabolism. It was mind-blowing and effectively showed that creatine combined with a particular probiotic could treat depression in humans in a placebo-controlled trial. But let me break down some of the science for you, because they started in a human cohort and they looked broadly at their metabolism— what's in their blood, what's in their brain, their cerebral spinal fluid, and what's in their poop. What they found was that creatine was elevated in their poop but decreased in their blood and in their cerebral spinal fluid. So this leads to some hypothesis. Maybe something's going on in the gut to decrease creatine absorption and lead to more being pooped out, meaning less for your brain and energy metabolism. So then they did a series of experiments in mice, and what they found was that a particular class of bacteria, Bifidobacterium, in certain subspecies, actually changed gene expression to increase creatine transporters. In the gut. This increases creatine uptake, it gets to the brain, and it helps the brain energy metabolism. Now, it's already known there's deficits in brain energy metabolism in patients with depression, so this starts to put the picture together. But the big question is, does it work in humans? They ran not one but two clinical controlled trials, and in one with patients with depression, 45 patients were randomized to a placebo treatment or a combination of this particular probiotic, the Bifidobacterium, with creatine. And the patients who got randomized to the creatine plus probiotic had significant improvements in this blinded controlled trial in depression symptoms. This is mind-blowing, but obviously this is just a short—
