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Magic powder or hype?

Walk into any supermarket, health-food store or pharmacy and you'll find shelves filled with "nutritional supplements".

Each and every one of those little containers, packed with pills or powders, promises to improve your life and your health in some way or another.

Just about every vitamin or mixture thereof, promises improved health, vitality and ability to fight off whatever ails you.

It becomes pretty hard to believe that any of us could live a healthy life without a cupboard filled with these supplements, doesn't it?

The reality is that most of this stuff is of little value to anyone who has an even half-decent diet.

The goal should be to get all the nutrients and essential minerals we need from our food rather than from a plastic bottle.

There are countless high quality studies that prove the benefits of sourcing your vitamins, proteins and other essentials from food rather than from supplements. In fact we seem to be constantly learning that fruits, vegetables and unprocessed foods contain factors (such as flavinoids) that are every bit as important (if not more so) as the traditional vitamins and minerals we've been told are crucial to good health.

As someone who spends at least an hour a day trawling through newly published medical studies, it has become very apparent that supplementation should be a "last resort" for those whose intake needs topping up.

Suffice to say, I do not take multivitamins or much in the way of supplements, opting instead for nutritionally dense foods such as eggs, lean meat, milk, yogurt, fruit and veges.

I'd have included fish but to be honest, it's just too damned expensive for me. Hell, at over $30 per Kg I almost can't afford a decent lean mince these days either.

However, there is one supplement that I started taking five years ago and continue taking to this day. It's the one I'd recommend to everyone.

I'm talking about creatine.

When I started taking this stuff it was pretty much something that only athletes used, it wasn't popular at all.

Today however, it's becoming a mainstream must-have and has become the darling-child of social media influencers (just search YouTube and you'll see what I mean).

I started taking creatine after my Parkinson's (PD) diagnosis. One of the first things I found that appeared to have a positive effect on the symptoms and progression of PD was creatine. The evidence was thin but positive and further investigation revealed that creatine is a very safe supplement for anyone who doesn't have a few underlying medical conditions.

One of the urban myths was that creatine will hasten male pattern baldness. Anyone who has met me or seem pictures of me will know that this was hardly a worry to me -- so I started supplementing 5g per day.

Around the same time I also started doing some elementary resistance training -- push-ups, dips, picking heavy things up and putting them down again, etc, etc. One of the reasons that athletes were using creatine was because it increases the ability of muscles to exert force during the first few seconds of heavy exertion. This means you can get in a few extra push-ups or dips and maybe an extra repetition if you're lifting something heavy.

The result of this extra "energy" is that you can exercise harder and thus it becomes easier to build strength and size.

For a long time the popular opinion was that creatine on its own would not increase the size of your muscles, apart from perhaps increasing the amount of water held in muscle fibres. The benefit came from the ability to exercise harder and it was the extra repetitions or heavier weight that helped muscles grow.

A recent study seems to have turned that wisdom on its head however. Now it seems that even without exercise, creatine can increase lean muscle mass by a measureable amount.

Woohoo... free muscle!

So should you invest $50 for 200 servings of creatine simply because it'll put a bit more bulge in your biceps?

Probably not.

However, the other benefits that creatine bring to the table are definitely worth it.

Recent studies have linked regular creatine supplementation to increase cognitive performance and slowed cognitive decline with age. Now that's an excellent reason for using it.

The thing about creatine is that you won't feel any change when you start taking it. The effects are subtle and progressive. It will likely take a month or so before any improvement in your strength or endurance starts happening because the muscles themselves need to become saturated and that happens only slowly.

Cognitive benfits can occur far more rapidly however -- albeit you need to take a much higher (but still safe) dose of up to 25g per day.

One area where it really shines is if you've had very little sleep but still need to perform the next day. Swallowing 30g of creatine the morning after a night where you got very little sleep won't make you perky and alert -- but it will provide noticeable improvements in your ability to concentrate and problem-solve. Coffee plus creatine can really mitigate the effects of a night where you only got three or four hours of shut-eye.

There continue to be more studies published on this wonder-powder and they all point to good things such as having very positive effects in slowing the progression of, mitigating the symptoms of and perhaps even protecting against dementia.

Are there any negatives?

Well for some people, high doses can apparently produce some digestive upset, although I've never experienced this. The solution in that case may be to spread your dose throughout the day -- say four doses of 5g instead of a single 20g hit.

Anyone with chronic or acute kidney issues would also be well advised to run things past their doctor before taking creatine. It's also worth letting your doctor know if you're supplementing because it can cause a rise in creatinine in blood tests. This is normal and nothing to be worried about but the levels will be higher than if you weren't supplementing so could raise concern if your doctor was unaware.

As for me, I take 5g each morning with a glass of cranberry juice and if I've had a really bad night's sleep I'll take 20-30g.

Just get the cheapest Creatine Monohydrate you can from a reliable source -- don't be swayed by all the hype associated with those trying to sell you a version that's priced double because it's some secret formula or special form of creatine. Every study proves that the generic monohydrate form is the safest and most effective.

No affiliate links, no sponsorships, no financial imperatives here -- just my own experiences backed by good quality science.

Carpe Diem folks!

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