What percentage of the body's creatine does the brain use (as stated)?

Wendie Trubow, MD, MBA, IFMCPPresident at Five Journeys, Functional Medicine & Wellness Provider, Best Selling Author, Passionate Champion for Health

The Difference Between Creatine and Creatinine

14 Oct 2025 · 1 min

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Creatine is a molecule your cells use for energy, with your brain consuming about 20% of your body's supply. Creatinine is what's left after creatine is used up, filtered by your kidneys and measured to check if they're working properly.

Questions this video answers

Approximately 20% (per the speaker).

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What's the difference between creatine and creatinine? Creatine is a molecule that is synthesized in the body that every cell needs for energy. So creatine helps fuel muscle energy, which athletes have known for a long time. It fuels brain energy, neuron energy. In fact, your brain uses probably 20% of the body's creatine just to think it fuels immune cells. So creatine is important for the optimal health, recovery functioning of every cell in the body. Creatinine is the metabolic byproduct of creatine. After the body has used creatine, it's been expended. Then creatinine is the cyclized form of the molecule that ends up being excreted, filtered out through the kidneys, and is measured oftentimes in the urine as a marker, an indirect marker of kidney function.