Andrew Huberman· PhD
I personally take five grams of creatine for other reasons. I take it for the physical performance, enhancing effects, but it's kind of nice to think that perhaps it's also helping me improve my mood.
Loading…
The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
I personally take five grams of creatine for other reasons. I take it for the physical performance, enhancing effects, but it's kind of nice to think that perhaps it's also helping me improve my mood.
Every Sunday: the week’s new conflicts and verdict changes — and nothing else.
Native comments, Twitter mentions, and Reddit threads about this claim — surfaced together so the conversation isn't fragmented across platforms.
I've been recommending this to patients for 6 months now. The big shift is patients actually do it because the explanation is concrete.
Same in nutrition counseling. The before/after framing helps.
Tracking with a CGM on top of this for 3 months. Variability dropped quickly and stayed dropped.
Worth noting the 0.71 SMD in the Kreider meta is in trained athletes. Effect in untrained adults runs closer to 0.3 — still meaningful, but the panel should reflect that gradient.
Good catch. Could the brief surface the training-status interaction inline?
So I personally take creatine five grams per day, and have for a very long time. I can't say that I've noticed a tremendous benefit, because I've actually never really come off it, and so I've never done the control experiment. I take it more as kind of a baseline insurance policy.
But what I can say is that, I generally consume these things like EPAs, creatine, alpha-GPC to set a general context of support for my neurons, for my brain. And, of course, I also pay attention to the foods that contain these various compounds.
So I don't actively eat additional meat just to obtain creatine. I eat a fairly limited amount of meat. I don't restrict it, and I do eat meat, but I don't actively seek out creatine in my diet. Rather, I use supplementation in order to hit that five grams per day threshold.
I ingest five grams per day of creatine monohydrate... that five grams of creatine per day, in my case, really isn't geared towards muscle growth or strength or performance as much as it's geared toward tapping into the creatine phosphate system within the brain and specifically the benefits of creatine for prefrontal cortical networks, again, modulating, not directly mediating, but modulating and generally supporting the brain networks that are going to allow me to generate focus and concentration.
I take creatine monohydrate, and I have for years. 5 grams a day.
I take 5 grams a day of creatine monohydrate. I do it for the tissue volumizing effects, so for exercise benefits, but also for the cognitive effects.
So now I'm taking 10, sometimes even as much as 15 grams per day of creatine. Again, this is powdered creatine monohydrate. My stomach tolerates it very well...
So, I personally take creatine five grams per day and have for a very long time.
So, I mean, and even to the point where if I don't have my 10 grams and it's only five, like I'll notice.
5 g of creatine monohydrate daily improves muscle strength and lean mass in healthy adults at standard training loads.
Creatine improves cognitive performance, especially under sleep deprivation and high cognitive load.
Creatine improves cardiovascular health markers and reduces all-cause mortality risk.
Creatine supports bone-mineral density in post-menopausal women when paired with resistance training.
Women need higher creatine doses (8–10 g/day) than men to reach the same intramuscular saturation.