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Creatine for Women in Menopause (Dosage, Bone, and Brain Research) · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: Should you take creatine?
• 0:01
  Philip Pape: Should you take it now that you're over 40?
• 0:03
  Philip Pape: Should women take more of it than men?
• 0:05
  Philip Pape: Today I'm reevaluating the claims and the primary creatine research.
• 0:11
  Philip Pape: You'll learn about the numbers, what it does, what it doesn't do for things like your bone, your brain, and how much creatine you actually need.
• 0:23
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 0:33
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and today is all about creatine.
• 0:38
  Philip Pape: And I actually like creatine, so it's always good to re-examine the numbers and the research behind it.
• 0:44
  Philip Pape: I personally take creatine.
• 0:46
  Philip Pape: I recommend it to almost every client we work with.
• 0:49
  Philip Pape: It's recommended in our supplement builder when people, you know, plug in their information and their situation, and it's almost always recommended unless you have some exotic issue like an allergy, which is very rare.
• 1:00
  Philip Pape: I don't have any affiliate deals with any creatine company or supplements, commission, none of that stuff either, which is helpful today because I'm not trying to push creatine, which is dirt cheap anyway, if you buy it from any reputable source.
• 1:14
  Philip Pape: And this is also not a takedown of creatine, not at all.
• 1:18
  Philip Pape: We're gonna evaluate the reasons that you've been given for taking it.
• 1:22
  Philip Pape: And I find that a lot of those reasons pass the scrutiny.
• 1:28
  Philip Pape: Some of them do not.
• 1:29
  Philip Pape: So it's good to understand why.
• 1:31
  Philip Pape: Then stick around to the end because I'm gonna give you a 30-second fix for the most common creatine problem there is.
• 1:37
  Philip Pape: All right, so for today, we are gonna talk about various claims around creatine, where the numbers come from, because it's good to connect: hey, this is the research.
• 1:45
  Philip Pape: Here's how people interpret the research, and maybe here's how we ultimately should interpret it.
• 1:49
  Philip Pape: Second, what is being measured when we talk about creatine usage.
• 1:54
  Philip Pape: And then third, the size of the effect in, especially women, older women over 40, versus what some of the marketing is.
• 2:01
  Philip Pape: Because I think there is some language in there about creatine and women needing to take a lot more of it and things like that.
• 2:07
  Philip Pape: And then, of course, we're gonna cover the dosage, the form, and then some claims that don't hold up.
• 2:12
  Philip Pape: So let's start with what a lot of people are hearing on the internet, what I get questions about.
• 2:16
  Philip Pape: Uh, you've probably heard some version of this recently, and it goes like this women have 70 to 80% lower creatine stores than men.
• 2:24
  Philip Pape: Estrogen affects creatine metabolism.
• 2:27
  Philip Pape: So when estrogen drops in perimenopause and menopause, the problem gets worse.
• 2:31
  Philip Pape: Therefore, women need creatine more than men do, and probably at a higher dose.
• 2:35
  Philip Pape: So you should be taking, say, five to 10 grams a day versus the typical recommendation of five, and it will help your muscle, your bones, your brain, your mood, all of that.
• 2:44
  Philip Pape: Okay, now I love the fact that people on social media are really good at marketing these tidy mechanistic claims, I guess, and kind of flatter you with the sense that, hey, you've been left out of this research and you need to take more because you're a woman, because you're older.
• 3:01
  Philip Pape: But a lot of this is tied to one statistic, and we're gonna see very quickly how this falls apart.
• 3:07
  Philip Pape: So, where does the 70 to 80 percent number come from?
• 3:10
  Philip Pape: 70, 80% lower creatine stores in women than men.
• 3:13
  Philip Pape: It comes from a 2021 review in a journal called Nutrients, and it was on creatine and women's health.
• 3:19
  Philip Pape: And it's a real paper by real researchers, Abby Smith Ryan, and Darren Kandau.
• 3:25
  Philip Pape: They've done a lot of legitimate work in the field.
• 3:27
  Philip Pape: And the review that they did says that females exhibit 70 to 80% lower endogenous creatine.
• 3:34
  Philip Pape: That means your body makes it yourself, stores storage, you know, creatine stores compared with males, and it cites a 2007 review of creatine metabolism by Brosnan and Brosnan to get the figure.
• 3:46
  Philip Pape: Now, there's a couple things about the paper that people conveniently leave out.
• 3:50
  Philip Pape: The first one is the funding.
• 3:52
  Philip Pape: The publication costs for the review were paid by Alcim, which is a creatine manufacturer.
• 3:58
  Philip Pape: And two of the authors disclosed that they serve as scientific advisors to the company, but they disclose it in the paper.
• 4:04
  Philip Pape: So I don't always think that that in and of itself is a problem.
• 4:08
  Philip Pape: And Stacy Sims is a paid scientific advisor to Momentous and helped develop a supplement stack that contains creatine.
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: And the 70 to 80% figure appears on the company's own website under her name.
• 4:20
  Philip Pape: Mary Claire Haver sells a branded creatine through her business and promotes creatine for menopause in national media.
• 4:28
  Philip Pape: And Darren Kandau advises multiple creatine manufacturers, and he's been an expert witness in creatine litigation.
• 4:36
  Philip Pape: Okay, now I'm not saying any of these people are lying.
• 4:38
  Philip Pape: Financial interest itself, in and of itself, doesn't mean that a claim is false.
• 4:44
  Philip Pape: I uh I have my own offers and products and things, right?
• 4:47
  Philip Pape: And what sometimes I don't always disclose it, you know, not nefariously or on purpose, but you you have to be aware of what people's interests are and who's saying things louder than other people, especially when there's one thing that's often repeated, but it's only repeated by specific few people.
• 5:05
  Philip Pape: You want to kind of compare to the original data and see if it holds up.
• 5:10
  Philip Pape: And if it holds up, okay, so what if they have a conflict of interest?
• 5:13
  Philip Pape: It still holds up, regardless of that.
• 5:16
  Philip Pape: So let's look at that.
• 5:18
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 5:19
  Philip Pape: In that same 2021 review, in the sentence, right after the one everybody talks about, the authors write that females have roughly 10% higher resting intramuscular creatine concentration than males.
• 5:32
  Philip Pape: So higher, not lower.
• 5:34
  Philip Pape: And they cite a 1991 study by Forsberg for that number.
• 5:38
  Philip Pape: That study took muscle biopsies from 23 women and 18 men and measured total creatine per unit of muscle tissue, which is which is a direct measurement.
• 5:47
  Philip Pape: So it's almost like they have both claims back to back in the review, but that's because they're measuring different things.
• 5:53
  Philip Pape: Let me explain.
• 5:54
  Philip Pape: The 70 to 80 percent figure is about total whole body creatine plus dietary intake plus synthesis.
• 6:03
  Philip Pape: Whereas the 10% figure is the concentration, how much creatine is sitting in each kilogram of muscle.
• 6:10
  Philip Pape: So why is the total pool of creatine smaller?
• 6:14
  Philip Pape: Well, mostly because women have less total muscle to hold that creatine and women eat a little bit less meat and fish on average, which is where dietary creatine often comes from, but the tissue itself isn't depleted at all.
• 6:25
  Philip Pape: If anything, it's it's slightly more saturated.
• 6:28
  Philip Pape: So if you think about this like a fuel system, okay, a smaller tank, it's not an empty tank.
• 6:35
  Philip Pape: A smaller tank does not mean you need higher octane or higher quality fuel in the tank.
• 6:41
  Philip Pape: But that's the leap of logic being made here that, hey, you have a smaller pool of creatine.
• 6:47
  Philip Pape: So therefore, your daily dose should be larger.
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: But there's no dose response trial in women that show that.
• 6:55
  Philip Pape: There aren't any.
• 6:56
  Philip Pape: The dosing recommendation is just an inference from this whole storage capacity model or relationship.
• 7:03
  Philip Pape: And then I think it gets a little bit worse for their argument because we can actually check that inference.
• 7:10
  Philip Pape: If women were genuinely creatine deficient in the tissue, women should load more creatine into muscle than men do when they supplement.
• 7:19
  Philip Pape: Well, guess what?
• 7:20
  Philip Pape: There was uh some researchers, Tarna Polski and others, that looked at that.
• 7:26
  Philip Pape: And the magnitude of the increase in muscle creatine and phosphocreatine after supplementation does not, I repeat, does not differ meaningfully by sex.
• 7:38
  Philip Pape: Same dose gives the same response.
• 7:40
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 7:41
  Philip Pape: So the premise of the same, the premise of a sex-specific dosing argument falls apart at the tissue level.
• 7:49
  Philip Pape: And then the conclusion also has no research behind it anyway.
• 7:52
  Philip Pape: So that if we have a hidden flaw in our episode today, that is it.
• 7:57
  Philip Pape: And it's not a small one because it's the whole premise by which people are being yelled at, or women being yelled at and told, oh, you really have to take more creatine.
• 8:05
  Philip Pape: This is an urgent problem.
• 8:07
  Philip Pape: And by the way, I sell some.
• 8:09
  Philip Pape: Now, before you go throwing out your creatine, hold off because the next part goes the other direction in that you still want to take creatine, but it's not that women have to take a lot more than men, et cetera.
• 8:21
  Philip Pape: The reason to take creatine is a very boring, boring but true reason that still holds up.
• 8:26
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 8:27
  Philip Pape: And speaking of boring reasons that happen to be true, everything I'm about to tell you about creatine depends on something creatine cannot actually do for you, which is you need to have a training stimulus in the first place.
• 8:41
  Philip Pape: So I want that to get that out of the way earlier.
• 8:44
  Philip Pape: Creatine multiplies that signal.
• 8:46
  Philip Pape: It's kind of like protein, right?
• 8:47
  Philip Pape: We you can eat protein till the cows come home, but if you're not lifting weights, it's not gonna be that beneficial.
• 8:52
  Philip Pape: Maybe it's slightly more beneficial than not having enough protein, but nowhere near as beneficial as if you're also resistance training, which we have to be doing.
• 9:01
  Philip Pape: So I'm gonna give you a nice segue into my app Fitness Lab with this discussion because it was built around this exact problem.
• 9:09
  Philip Pape: Just hear me out for a second.
• 9:11
  Philip Pape: Fitness Lab doesn't just hand you a calorie number from a calculator, it doesn't just hand you a random workout.
• 9:16
  Philip Pape: It builds your training around what you can recover from.
• 9:21
  Philip Pape: It adjusts your nutrition from your data as you go, tells you when to push, when to back off, which is what a lot of people struggle with.
• 9:29
  Philip Pape: If you're supplementing with creatine on top of that, but the training is not progressing, then you're kind of wasting your money and it's not doing much for you.
• 9:39
  Philip Pape: So we have to have that progressive resistance training as part of our lifestyle.
• 9:43
  Philip Pape: So if you want to check out Fitness Lab, go to wits and weights.com slash app.
• 9:47
  Philip Pape: That is witsandweights.com slash app.
• 9:49
  Philip Pape: Okay, go take a look at that app, come back because I want to give you numbers now on what creatine does for you in terms of the results.
• 9:57
  Philip Pape: Okay, because people want to understand, okay, if let's say I'm a woman in menopause who is lifting, I've heard all this other stuff about creatine that Phillips saying you don't really have to worry about like getting a ton more than men, but creatine is still hugely beneficial.
• 10:10
  Philip Pape: So let's do the good news first.
• 10:12
  Philip Pape: And then I'm gonna take two things away that are that are less good news.
• 10:17
  Philip Pape: Okay, so let usually I like bad news first, but let's start with the good news.
• 10:20
  Philip Pape: The good news is that the strongest evidence for creatine in this population, so we're talking women in peri postmenopause, is the muscle and strength alongside resistance training.
• 10:31
  Philip Pape: There's a meta-analysis of 22 trials in older adults, about 721 people, where their average age was from the late 50s into their 70s.
• 10:40
  Philip Pape: All of them were lifting two or three times a week, anywhere from seven weeks up to a full year.
• 10:44
  Philip Pape: Creatine plus lifting produced about 1.4 kilograms more lean tissue than lifting alone.
• 10:52
  Philip Pape: So about three pounds of muscle or lean tissue with small improvements in chest press and legs, leg press strength.
• 10:58
  Philip Pape: Now, when we talk about meta-analysis of trials, you know, some trials might have showed a benefit, some might have showed nothing at all.
• 11:04
  Philip Pape: They don't show, they didn't show a negative from creatine.
• 11:08
  Philip Pape: So that's that's at least good.
• 11:10
  Philip Pape: When you narrow it down to older women specifically, it gets a little bit more of a modest improvement.
• 11:15
  Philip Pape: A female-only meta-analysis of 10 trials in 211 older women found improved upper body strength, no significant effect on lower body strength, and no significant effect on muscle mass overall.
• 11:27
  Philip Pape: The trials that did show benefits in upper and lower body were at least 24 weeks or longer.
• 11:32
  Philip Pape: So it's like six months minimum before you judge whether it's doing anything for you, which I think is an important thing.
• 11:38
  Philip Pape: I don't want to gloss over the fact that, you know, a lot of people have this like quick fix mentality.
• 11:43
  Philip Pape: Even though we talk about things taking time, for whatever reason, they'll start taking creatine and within like two weeks, oh my God, it's not doing anything for me.
• 11:49
  Philip Pape: And you got to remember there's a whole process.
• 11:51
  Philip Pape: There's a saturation effect, there's you in your training.
• 11:54
  Philip Pape: I mean, there's a whole bunch of factors involved.
• 11:56
  Philip Pape: Having said all that, the bulk of the creatine research is still in young men.
• 12:00
  Philip Pape: And we have very thin data on females, which is often the case in this industry.
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: Sorry to say.
• 12:05
  Philip Pape: When someone is super, super confident and they're like, this is exactly what creatine does for a 55-year-old woman.
• 12:11
  Philip Pape: You know, ask them how many, you know, what studies they're using, how many women were in the studies.
• 12:15
  Philip Pape: Are we studying women as a population?
• 12:18
  Philip Pape: And the honest answer is eh, that's the funding hasn't really gone that direction very often.
• 12:23
  Philip Pape: There's another piece about muscle that's interesting, a 2025 trial that what we call washed out the water weight before measuring.
• 12:32
  Philip Pape: Okay, because remember, you gain some water weight from creatine when you start taking it.
• 12:36
  Philip Pape: That's a separate thing we can touch on.
• 12:38
  Philip Pape: But the five grams a day, the typical loading protocol without a training stimulus, produce no measurable muscle beyond what training alone produced.
• 12:48
  Philip Pape: Without lifting, therefore, this supplement doesn't do anything for you.
• 12:52
  Philip Pape: Okay, not a big surprise.
• 12:53
  Philip Pape: I just mentioned that several times.
• 12:55
  Philip Pape: It is not a hormone, it's not a drug, it's not going to change your body while you're just sitting on the couch.
• 13:00
  Philip Pape: It just gives you a little bit of an edge to your performance.
• 13:03
  Philip Pape: It amplifies what you're already doing in terms of your training.
• 13:06
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 13:06
  Philip Pape: Now there are two other claims related to creatine that I need to put the brakes on right now.
• 13:12
  Philip Pape: And I might have even talked about these in the past.
• 13:15
  Philip Pape: It's speculative at best.
• 13:17
  Philip Pape: The first one is bone, and the second one is on cognition or brain and mood.
• 13:20
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 13:21
  Philip Pape: So on bone mass, bone density, which of course is very much packaged hard to or sold very hard to women, especially women in menopause, you know, osteopenia, osteoporosis.
• 13:32
  Philip Pape: I mean, I'm talking about this all the time in the context of lifting weights.
• 13:35
  Philip Pape: I would say this actually has a lot of research, but the most tepid result or the worst result.
• 13:41
  Philip Pape: Philip Chelebeck, kind of cool name.
• 13:43
  Philip Pape: I don't mean the Philip part, but that's cool too.
• 13:45
  Philip Pape: Has probably done more work on creatine and bone than anyone.
• 13:49
  Philip Pape: And I like how he handled the research because he ran the trials that could have confirmed his own hypothesis, and then they did not, and he published them anyway, which I love.
• 13:58
  Philip Pape: That's great.
• 13:59
  Philip Pape: Like that's good science right there.
• 14:00
  Philip Pape: He ran a two-year trial in 237 postmenopausal women with creatine plus exercise.
• 14:07
  Philip Pape: And it found no benefit to bone mineral density at any site where they measured it.
• 14:12
  Philip Pape: And then there was a separate two-year trial on postmenopausal women with osteopenia.
• 14:16
  Philip Pape: They used three grams a day of creatine and they found no effect on bone density, no effect on bone markers, no effect on what they call the micro architecture.
• 14:25
  Philip Pape: They also didn't find effect on lean mass or muscle function.
• 14:29
  Philip Pape: And so when you pull the older adult trials, creatine during resistance training does not increase bone mineral density.
• 14:36
  Philip Pape: Now, these are some of these things that they measure are signals in bone geometry.
• 14:41
  Philip Pape: Some of them are shape and bending strength measures, like at the hip.
• 14:46
  Philip Pape: And they're secondary outcomes that have never been shown to reduce fractures anyway.
• 14:52
  Philip Pape: So, really, what I take away from all of this is load up your skeleton with resistance training if you want your bones to respond, because that's going to work the most, right?
• 15:02
  Philip Pape: Creatine's not going to do that for you.
• 15:04
  Philip Pape: The second piece here is the brain and mood stuff that's been talked about.
• 15:08
  Philip Pape: And it's a little bit more promising, but it's still thin and mixed on the research, which is why I bring it up.
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: I always like to hedge a little bit on what we really, really know.
• 15:16
  Philip Pape: And the core problem here is really related to the dose.
• 15:20
  Philip Pape: The standard dose of five grams a day raises muscle creatine by about 20%.
• 15:26
  Philip Pape: When we look at brain imaging studies, brain creatine rises somewhere around 3 to 10%.
• 15:33
  Philip Pape: But the doses that actually move it or increase it are around 20 grams a day and higher.
• 15:39
  Philip Pape: So the five grams a day that we're all taking has a lot going for it in terms of muscle and performance, but maybe not your brain.
• 15:48
  Philip Pape: There is a menopause cognition study that a lot of people have been citing that had 36 women split across four groups.
• 15:56
  Philip Pape: So about nine women per group, kind of a small sample size, I admit, running over eight weeks.
• 16:01
  Philip Pape: They use creatine hydrochlorite, or I forget how you pronounce it, but HCl, right?
• 16:06
  Philip Pape: Which is like hydrochloric acid.
• 16:07
  Philip Pape: So creatine, HCl, and ethyl ester instead of creatine monohydrate.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: So creatine monohydrate's the form that I recommend people get.
• 16:14
  Philip Pape: It's cheap, it's proven.
• 16:16
  Philip Pape: You don't have to get it mixed with anything or sold by any special brand, you know.
• 16:20
  Philip Pape: But that's the difference in this study.
• 16:22
  Philip Pape: They use creatine HCl and ethyl ester instead of monohydrate.
• 16:25
  Philip Pape: The reaction time improved in just one of the groups.
• 16:28
  Philip Pape: And the mood finding was not statistically significant.
• 16:31
  Philip Pape: It's also pilot with small sample size, as I already mentioned.
• 16:34
  Philip Pape: And maybe if they can scale it up, run and replicate it at scale could be helpful to see if taking more creatine is helpful.
• 16:41
  Philip Pape: On depression specifically, there were people in some of these trials diagnosed with major depression, as opposed to say healthy women in menopause, right?
• 16:51
  Philip Pape: So we had to be careful what population we look at.
• 16:53
  Philip Pape: When they look at those trials, the average effect came out to like 2.2 points on a depression scale, and three points is like the smallest change considered clinically meaningful.
• 17:03
  Philip Pape: So again, I don't think you can really conclude anything.
• 17:05
  Philip Pape: If anything, authors of the trials conclude that it's trivial or not, not an effect.
• 17:12
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 17:13
  Philip Pape: So those are two big claims that get a lot of attention, I guess, in social media about bone health and about brain health, but they really don't have strong support yet.
• 17:25
  Philip Pape: The brain piece, like I noted, maybe there's something happening at higher dosages.
• 17:30
  Philip Pape: I personally take like anywhere around 15 or 20 grams a day, just in case there's some little benefit there, but we really don't know.
• 17:36
  Philip Pape: Maybe they'll come out eventually and say, no, look, actually, when you exceed 20 grams a day, there is some statistically significant benefit, but we're not there yet.
• 17:44
  Philip Pape: So what do I want you to do?
• 17:45
  Philip Pape: Let's talk about practicality.
• 17:47
  Philip Pape: It's simple, it's cheap.
• 17:48
  Philip Pape: Here we go.
• 17:49
  Philip Pape: Just take three to five grams of creatine monohydrate a day, every day, at whatever time you'll remember to take it.
• 17:55
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 17:56
  Philip Pape: If you're on the larger side, body weight, maybe hit the top of that range, five grams.
• 18:00
  Philip Pape: Like I said, I take, I don't know, 12, 15, you know, I put it on a scale and just dump it in roughly around there.
• 18:07
  Philip Pape: Some days it's 12, some days it's 18.
• 18:08
  Philip Pape: It's kind of in that range.
• 18:10
  Philip Pape: But you're good enough taking probably around five.
• 18:12
  Philip Pape: And it's hard, you can't really, don't really worry about taking too much, again, if you're not far beyond that.
• 18:17
  Philip Pape: That's the protocol.
• 18:18
  Philip Pape: So that's it.
• 18:18
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 18:19
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 18:19
  Philip Pape: You don't have to load it either.
• 18:21
  Philip Pape: That in the old days, you would have to load with like, I don't know, what was it, 20 grams a day for two weeks or something like that.
• 18:28
  Philip Pape: It only changes how fast your body gets saturated, not how saturated you get.
• 18:34
  Philip Pape: We've seen studies like by Holtman that three grams a day for 28 days produce the same 20% increase in muscle creatine as 20 grams a day for six days.
• 18:43
  Philip Pape: And then if you skip this loading phase and just do it straight from the beginning as like three to five grams, then you don't get like the bloating and stuff that happens very quickly that people often complain about.
• 18:55
  Philip Pape: You're gonna buy plain creatine monohydrate powder.
• 18:59
  Philip Pape: That is it.
• 18:59
  Philip Pape: Just find a brand that does third-party testing.
• 19:02
  Philip Pape: No form has beaten creatine monohydrate in trials.
• 19:06
  Philip Pape: Not HCl, not buffered, not ethyl ester.
• 19:09
  Philip Pape: In fact, ethyl ester degrades faster into creatinine.
• 19:13
  Philip Pape: Definitely not the gummies, which I'll come back to at the end of the episode.
• 19:17
  Philip Pape: And then there's the sequencing here.
• 19:20
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 19:21
  Philip Pape: Creatine is less important than two other things.
• 19:25
  Philip Pape: One, are you training hard enough to actually make use of the creatine?
• 19:29
  Philip Pape: And number two, are you eating enough protein to build with it?
• 19:32
  Philip Pape: Because if you're not there on those, creatine to me is in that 1% of optimization that you really shouldn't worry about until you've got the lifestyle basics dialed in, strength training and protein.
• 19:40
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 19:41
  Philip Pape: Fix those first and then add the creatine in.
• 19:44
  Philip Pape: Also, I like to not add it in while you're also changing your phase.
• 19:47
  Philip Pape: Like if you're changing to a fat loss phase, it can screw things up a little bit because you're gonna gain some weight from the water absorption and it's gonna mess up your calculations and you're gonna think you're not losing fat or whatever.
• 19:58
  Philip Pape: You're gonna have to wait for that to kind of wash out, as they say, or to stabilize.
• 20:01
  Philip Pape: So I like doing it when I'm at maintenance, noting the increase in weight.
• 20:05
  Philip Pape: It might be a pound for some per people, it might be three, four, five pounds for others.
• 20:09
  Philip Pape: I also want to address three creatine myths right now, okay?
• 20:13
  Philip Pape: Myth number one is on the bloating.
• 20:15
  Philip Pape: Now, the water that gets absorbed or retained goes inside the muscle cell.
• 20:19
  Philip Pape: It's not under the skin, and it's usually about one to two kilograms of total body water in the first week or two.
• 20:25
  Philip Pape: So it's gonna show up on the scale.
• 20:27
  Philip Pape: It does not show up in your face, okay?
• 20:30
  Philip Pape: If you skip the loating, like I said earlier, just go straight to the small dose that you need forever, the three to five grams, it's usually gradual enough that most people don't notice it.
• 20:41
  Philip Pape: Most people, some people do.
• 20:42
  Philip Pape: I mean, I we do have plenty of clients and members that will know notice a little bit of bloating, but in many cases, not the bloating so much as the slight weight gain that they kind of mentally convert into I'm bloated.
• 20:54
  Philip Pape: But it's not body fat.
• 20:55
  Philip Pape: Remember, it's it's good weight gain.
• 20:57
  Philip Pape: Okay, the second one is hair loss.
• 20:59
  Philip Pape: This is an old one that still persists for some reason.
• 21:01
  Philip Pape: Goes back to one study from 2009 and some rugby players, and they measured DHT, which went up, but it was in the normal range.
• 21:09
  Philip Pape: It was actually never measured in hair directly.
• 21:12
  Philip Pape: Nobody counted hair follicles, assessed hair density, followed anyone individually to see the longitudinal results.
• 21:18
  Philip Pape: And then back and then recently in 2025, there was a trial that found no difference in DHT or in hair outcomes.
• 21:25
  Philip Pape: So we don't worry about creatine and hair loss anymore.
• 21:28
  Philip Pape: And the third one is kidneys.
• 21:30
  Philip Pape: So this is an important one, and it's always worth consulting with your medical professional, your doctor.
• 21:35
  Philip Pape: Creatine raises serum creatinine because creatine or creatinine is literally what creatine becomes and turns into.
• 21:44
  Philip Pape: So that can make your estimated GFR look a little worse on a standard blood panel, but your kidneys are perfectly fine.
• 21:52
  Philip Pape: And the trials in healthy people consistently show no harm to kidney function, just like with higher protein.
• 21:58
  Philip Pape: You know, we people get scared over proteins.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: For whatever reason, even though there's no data to support it.
• 22:03
  Philip Pape: So tell your doctor or whoever's taking your labs that you do take creatine.
• 22:09
  Philip Pape: And if the number looks off, ask about things like cystin C, which measures kidney function.
• 22:14
  Philip Pape: You can do a urine test.
• 22:15
  Philip Pape: I've done that myself a few times, like with my rheumatologist, who says, Hey, maybe we should just do the urine test to make sure your kidneys are good.
• 22:21
  Philip Pape: I do.
• 22:21
  Philip Pape: She was like, Yeah, perfectly fine.
• 22:23
  Philip Pape: It must be because you take creatine.
• 22:25
  Philip Pape: Also, think about when you lift weights, there's byproducts of lifting weights that show up in your blood.
• 22:30
  Philip Pape: And that's why they they tell you to not lift for like at least 24 hours before a blood draw.
• 22:35
  Philip Pape: But I found even like having to wait two days for it not to affect it is important.
• 22:40
  Philip Pape: So being a lifter, you're gonna have a little bit of a different profile with some of these things.
• 22:44
  Philip Pape: But again, consult the professionals at the end of the day just to make sure and correlate everything.
• 22:49
  Philip Pape: Now, if you have existing kidney disease, I'm not even gonna go there.
• 22:52
  Philip Pape: It's out of my scope.
• 22:53
  Philip Pape: Have a conversation with your physician.
• 22:56
  Philip Pape: Okay, so I'm not saying don't take creatine.
• 22:58
  Philip Pape: I hope you can tell.
• 22:59
  Philip Pape: I take it.
• 23:00
  Philip Pape: I think most people, most women, everybody over 40, whatever, who's lift who lifts weights should take it.
• 23:05
  Philip Pape: I'm also not saying it's useless for the brain and the cognitive stuff.
• 23:08
  Philip Pape: I'm saying the evidence is very early, very preliminary right now.
• 23:11
  Philip Pape: The dose is probably much higher than what you're taking.
• 23:13
  Philip Pape: It could be 15, 20, 25 grams.
• 23:15
  Philip Pape: We just don't know.
• 23:16
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna recommend it directly.
• 23:18
  Philip Pape: If you want to experiment on yourself, go for it.
• 23:21
  Philip Pape: I don't even know when when the results would show up, how you would know, et cetera.
• 23:24
  Philip Pape: It's almost like one of those, well, should you just do it just in case?
• 23:27
  Philip Pape: That's totally your call, right?
• 23:28
  Philip Pape: I take a higher amount, I don't take a super high amount, but that's kind of what goes through my head.
• 23:33
  Philip Pape: So the reason to take creatine is pretty simple.
• 23:35
  Philip Pape: It adds a little bit amount, a little bit of muscle and strength on top of your training.
• 23:39
  Philip Pape: It can move the needle a little bit, maybe get you an extra rep or two in the gym.
• 23:43
  Philip Pape: It is very, very inexpensive, and it's one of the most well-studied supplements that we have on safety.
• 23:48
  Philip Pape: You could totally not take it and probably be totally fine.
• 23:52
  Philip Pape: That's kind of my take on this.
• 23:54
  Philip Pape: It's like take it or leave it.
• 23:56
  Philip Pape: But I would say give it a shot, see if it helps you.
• 23:57
  Philip Pape: It's not this dramatic thing.
• 24:00
  Philip Pape: And the other stuff about how women need a lot more than men, it's just not supported by the evidence.
• 24:05
  Philip Pape: All right, before we wrap up, I do have a fix that I promised you for the most common creatine problem there is.
• 24:11
  Philip Pape: But if the, you know, creatine information in this episode or the stuff about menopause or women were helpful or useful to you, I do have a free guide called Menopause Fat Loss Over 40 that I think you're really gonna like.
• 24:24
  Philip Pape: You go to witsandweeights.com slash free or click the link in the show notes.
• 24:27
  Philip Pape: It's called menopause fat loss over 40.
• 24:30
  Philip Pape: It walks you through how to set up your calories and protein through perimenopause and after, how to train for muscle and bone in a way that loads skeleton, what to do in the scale stalls for a few weeks, all of those sort of things.
• 24:42
  Philip Pape: No supplement noise or affiliate stuff in there.
• 24:45
  Philip Pape: Just go to witsandwaist.com slash free or click the link in the show notes.
• 24:49
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 24:49
  Philip Pape: So here's the creatine thing.
• 24:51
  Philip Pape: Now I mentioned earlier I was going to talk about gummies, and I actually pivoted as I was developing this episode.
• 24:56
  Philip Pape: Real quick, though, I wouldn't take creatine gummies at all because there have been studies that show the amount of creatine in those gummies is way off from what they advertise.
• 25:05
  Philip Pape: Sometimes almost no creatine in there.
• 25:07
  Philip Pape: Total waste of money.
• 25:08
  Philip Pape: So that's one thing.
• 25:09
  Philip Pape: But the if you take creatine, one interesting thing about creatine monohydrate is it's not water soluble.
• 25:15
  Philip Pape: So it doesn't, what do you call it?
• 25:18
  Philip Pape: It doesn't blend in, dilute into the water.
• 25:21
  Philip Pape: So the type I get is called it's called micronized creatine monohydrate.
• 25:25
  Philip Pape: So it's even smaller particles where you can stir it up really quick and just gulp it down.
• 25:29
  Philip Pape: If you're not careful, if you don't do that properly, you can get all this grit in the bottom of your glass that is like leftover creatine that you didn't take because creatine monohydrate really only dissolves at about 14 grams per liter in room temperature water.
• 25:44
  Philip Pape: So if you have a five gram scoop, you need at least 12 ounces of water to fully go into what we call a solution.
• 25:50
  Philip Pape: And even then, you have to like really stir it up.
• 25:53
  Philip Pape: A lot of people use too little liquid, and then some of it falls and gets stuck to the glass, and then you're not taking the dose.
• 26:00
  Philip Pape: Now, is that a big deal?
• 26:01
  Philip Pape: Probably not.
• 26:02
  Philip Pape: But some people I've seen it do more than others, or they buy the type of creatine that has larger particles, and then there's a ton of it that they don't actually drink.
• 26:09
  Philip Pape: Kind of the same problem you have with psyllium husk if you're not careful.
• 26:11
  Philip Pape: So, really, that's it.
• 26:12
  Philip Pape: If you're someone who gets stomach cramps or upset from taking creatine, oftentimes you're just not dissolving the powder enough, or you're not having enough liquid.
• 26:23
  Philip Pape: So this can fix it too.
• 26:24
  Philip Pape: And by the way, warm liquid is fine, by the way.
• 26:27
  Philip Pape: And you might have heard things about not taking it with coffee or this or that.
• 26:31
  Philip Pape: Don't worry about any of that stuff.
• 26:32
  Philip Pape: As long as you drink it down, you're gonna be fine because creatine only breaks down into creatinine in acid over many hours.
• 26:40
  Philip Pape: So again, your coffee doesn't destroy it.
• 26:41
  Philip Pape: Whatever you read, it's all nonsense.
• 26:43
  Philip Pape: Just drink it however you want, get it down, make sure the glass is clear and you're good to go.
• 26:47
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 26:50
  Philip Pape: And remember, creatine adds to what your training is already doing.
• 26:54
  Philip Pape: So build the foundation first.
• 26:56
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.