is not the right way to interpret the null result (insufficient evidence to reject null hypothesis that it has no effect) because the prior for supplements that people are trying to sell you is so low. In the absence of clear, strong evidence, you should assume the the whole thing is just an example of motivated reasoning. People want nootropics to be real, and other people really want to sell you readily available powders by claiming they have nootropic properties. In that environment, they were always going to trying to concoct a similar narrative about some supplement, and it just happened to be creatine. Those efforts were always going to result in a handful of "positive" studies that turn out to be non-reproducible, maybe because of p-hacking, maybe because of publication bias, maybe because of outright fraud. This is what the literature always looks like for stuff that just doesn't work. If it did work - if the effect size was large enough that you could personally detect it in your own life - then the papers would be trying to put error bars around the effect size, not trying (and failing) to barely distinguish it from a placebo.
“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” - Ernest Rutherford
Heavily agreed. The supplement industry has such a low level of reliability that it has really soured me on so many practices people have. And I flat out do not understand how some of the supplement stores survive.
Hard sell. I remember the time I went to GNC and they gave me a free sample of the notorious Jack3D which had some kind of amphetamine-like stimulant in it and was associated with young soldiers in the US Army falling down dead.
Okay, but it kind of sounds like you want to nanny-state the writer's language.
Their conclusion seems like an absolutely fair interpretation of what they saw, and it also strikes me as dangerous -- perhaps more dangerous -- to suggest "writer genuinely believes, or doesn't believe, a thing, but they should say it differently from their own interpretation because..people are dumb?" Something like that.
Even as an informal conclusion I think it's important to know who you're up against and what their motivations are. Waving that away is how we get people like known, obvious charlatans like RFK Jr in any sort of position of power. I know this is nitpicking word choice but the informal conclusion is "Not likely, and not enough to matter for anything."
What value is there to an informal conclusion when the topic is as important as intelligence? The downsides to creatine if taken without good scientific backing should not be disregarded, yet that’s exactly what many ordinary people are now doing because of “informal conclusions” like this.
Are there really downsides to creatine though? (Genuine question). All the advice I've seen makes it seem like it's basically just good for you even if it doesn't accomplish some specific thing. The only downside I've heard is maybe water retention?
Most people taking creatine just need to drink water. They drink more water using creatine. In reality, the water/hydration is doing the heaviest lift, not the creatine.
I take my creatine with as little volume of water as possible, probably less than 50ml. I doubt that 50ml is having much impact on my overall hydration.
How much water are you drinking the rest of the day? Creatine in theory makes you more thirsty such that you should be drinking more water throughout the day
There are lots like Vitamin water, alkaline, and coconut water. And overpriced salt packets like Nuun and LMNT.
There's also no shortage of expensive water bottles being sold, and smart water bottles that track your drinking frequencies and flavor pods sold via subscription.
I don’t know. I personally wouldn’t take it if you aren’t also working out/lifting frequently (even if you drink a ton of water).
Anecdotal so safe to ignore this… but my hair did thin out but only after I was lazier on my work outs. Stopped taking and hair mostly returned to normal thank God.
I like creatine when I’m lifting because it reduces soreness. For some people that effect helps them push further and train harder, for me it’s just proactive pain relief
Sometimes I stay up until 1–3 a.m. because I'm working on a problem that's so interesting I can't stop until I make progress.
If I know I'm only going to get a few hours of sleep, I'll take 5–10 g of creatine, drink plenty of water, and go to bed. The next morning, I usually don't wake up with a headache.
If I skip the creatine under the same conditions, I'm much more likely to wake up with a headache after a short night's sleep.
Now it's become a habit, I automatically take creatine whenever I know my sleep duration is going to be much shorter than usual.
Yes, but hydration isn’t really a problem for me. I’m a bit of a water purification nerd, I collect water from a natural waterfall, run it through multiple stages of purification, and then start convincing myself it has some magical properties. I don’t drink soda or caffeine, I mostly just drink water.
Do you still drink water when you skip creatine? Being dehydrated causes headaches, so it may be the extra water intake that's helping and not the creatine.
yes, i always drink plenty of water throughout day and night too, infact when i get stuck on a problem i go for a walk and drink water.
So drinking water part is consistent with or without creatine. I do know the creatine takes a while to build up, so i don't know why it works but it does.
>Contrary to the common myth, thinking hard does not burn significantly more calories. (Demonstration: Start thinking hard, and watch as your heart rate does not increase.)
This matches what Gwern wrote years ago [0]. It does unequivocally make you stronger though. So if you're training anyway, may as well take it and hope it makes you smarter as well (just believing might be enough for that sweet placebo effect).
This made me wonder if sun exposure/vitamin D has any impact on storing or processing creatine, and maybe that's why the results in Australia were so much greater
Would also be interesting to study creatine’s effect on depression. There is some promising research and I personally (having used it and stopped using it at various points) have definitely noticed a difference.
Just having the desire to think makes a huge difference.
> Available short and long-term studies in healthy and diseased populations, from > infants to the elderly, at dosages ranging from 0.3 to 0.8 g/kg/day for up to 5 > years have consistently shown that creatine supplementation poses no adverse
> health risks and may provide a number of health and performance benefits.
Yep. From what I read mental fatigue (mental math problems is what the study used) or sleep deprivation are two scenarios in which creatine boosted cognition and memory.
It’s always been popular among athletes and weight lifters but now nootropic influencers have gotten ahold of it. It’s one of the few supplements with robust scientific evidence of a strong effect but that’s in athletic performance not nootropics.
I started taking 5g for cognition. Never any clear signal for that, but it does seem to help a bit with my (more than occasional) sleep deprivation. Mostly with fighting off headaches.
The conclusions aren't any different (it's one of the few thing that helps strength, poses no danger to your hair, and almost certainly does nothing for cognition), but the articles at https://www.strongerbyscience.com/?s=creatine are far more comprehensive, including the famous extremely long podcast episodes they used to do.
The one thing this misses is many supplements are tainted, which skews the popular perception of both upsides and risks. This was especially true in the US prior to 2005 or so when prohormones were still legal over the counter. Anything branded that wasn't just pure creatine was extremely likely to actually be a low-dose oral steroid, which really can make you lose hair and will increase strength quite a bit more than any dietary supplement.
This also misses caffeine as the other a-tier supplement that consistently shows strength increases in RCTs, though of course, caffeine is more frought than creatine because you build tolerance and it can disturb sleep.
"poses no danger to your hair" I keep hearing folks say this, and even in this thread there's someone who's experienced that and had it stop when they eliminated creatine. I too have experienced exactly that with exactly the stopping of issues once I stopped taking creatine.
Perhaps you can say "danger to your hair is rare", but there's very clearly (to me at least) an effect there, and the way it gets hand-waved away is strange to me.
Cycling is also a marketing ploy, since it makes it sound more like a PED and less like a compound found naturally in meat. It's the same reason people say they 'take' whey, when Miss Muffet simply ate it.
I've never heard of cycling it. We're you a teen during the steroid arrival? Maybe people were confusing things. I've always just done 5mg a day, but now people are talking about taking mega doses of like 20-30mg a day, shrug
Yes, they did, and many still do write it on the package, but it is, and always was a myth born God knows when out of precaution, because nobody really knows anything about how all this stuff really works now, and they did know even less than that 30 years ago. There never really was any evidence that you have to cycle it, and nobody (aside from the manufacturers) ever says it anymore. It makes about as much sense as cycling protein powder.
As for pills, yes, there is about every form of creatine supplement now, even chewing gum, but this is just dumb, how much of creatine do you think you can consume this way in a day?
I don’t think they’re strong evidence that it does anything beyond helping you build muscle. There are some people say they think clearer, but I don’t think that’s been measured in any significant way.
Of course it is. LLMs aren't as smart as you think, or at least their "intelligence" isn't comparable to ours. They're just a useful tool, and they will always need someone to guide them.
Productivity isn’t the only reason to be smarter. For example, there’s also the benefit of asking fewer inane questions on the internet (hypothetically)
Good discussion, but this conclusion:
> I don’t know. Maybe a little.
is not the right way to interpret the null result (insufficient evidence to reject null hypothesis that it has no effect) because the prior for supplements that people are trying to sell you is so low. In the absence of clear, strong evidence, you should assume the the whole thing is just an example of motivated reasoning. People want nootropics to be real, and other people really want to sell you readily available powders by claiming they have nootropic properties. In that environment, they were always going to trying to concoct a similar narrative about some supplement, and it just happened to be creatine. Those efforts were always going to result in a handful of "positive" studies that turn out to be non-reproducible, maybe because of p-hacking, maybe because of publication bias, maybe because of outright fraud. This is what the literature always looks like for stuff that just doesn't work. If it did work - if the effect size was large enough that you could personally detect it in your own life - then the papers would be trying to put error bars around the effect size, not trying (and failing) to barely distinguish it from a placebo.
“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” - Ernest Rutherford
Heavily agreed. The supplement industry has such a low level of reliability that it has really soured me on so many practices people have. And I flat out do not understand how some of the supplement stores survive.
Hard sell. I remember the time I went to GNC and they gave me a free sample of the notorious Jack3D which had some kind of amphetamine-like stimulant in it and was associated with young soldiers in the US Army falling down dead.
Okay, but it kind of sounds like you want to nanny-state the writer's language.
Their conclusion seems like an absolutely fair interpretation of what they saw, and it also strikes me as dangerous -- perhaps more dangerous -- to suggest "writer genuinely believes, or doesn't believe, a thing, but they should say it differently from their own interpretation because..people are dumb?" Something like that.
One person is not a nation.
If you're being academically rigorous about it, sure, but I think it's fine as an informal conclusion.
Even as an informal conclusion I think it's important to know who you're up against and what their motivations are. Waving that away is how we get people like known, obvious charlatans like RFK Jr in any sort of position of power. I know this is nitpicking word choice but the informal conclusion is "Not likely, and not enough to matter for anything."
Personally I take creatine for entirely non-cognitive reasons, so it's reassuring to know it's probably not making me any dumber.
What value is there to an informal conclusion when the topic is as important as intelligence? The downsides to creatine if taken without good scientific backing should not be disregarded, yet that’s exactly what many ordinary people are now doing because of “informal conclusions” like this.
Are there really downsides to creatine though? (Genuine question). All the advice I've seen makes it seem like it's basically just good for you even if it doesn't accomplish some specific thing. The only downside I've heard is maybe water retention?
What are the "downsides"? It is one of the most studied substances and except in special cases like kidney issues it is totally safe.
mandatory XKCD https://xkcd.com/882/ "Jellybeans cause acne"
Most people taking creatine just need to drink water. They drink more water using creatine. In reality, the water/hydration is doing the heaviest lift, not the creatine.
I take my creatine with as little volume of water as possible, probably less than 50ml. I doubt that 50ml is having much impact on my overall hydration.
How much water are you drinking the rest of the day? Creatine in theory makes you more thirsty such that you should be drinking more water throughout the day
It's not something I track, but if it is making me thirstier then that sounds like another useful benefit.
yes but again, the idea is that it helps retains water in your muscles so I don't see it aiding in regular water intake
If you actually drank enough water daily, sans creatine, I'm sure you'd feel better.
Hydration is important so I'm with you on the first half, but what is the proposed link between reduced creatine intake and emotional wellbeing?
Placebo.
I wasn't expecting creatine to have any bearing on my emotional state in the first place, so I'm not sure how that would work.
A pity that water isn’t being sold as an expensive supplement. Or is it?
You're looking in the wrong place. There is a moderately large industry around water bottles.
There are lots like Vitamin water, alkaline, and coconut water. And overpriced salt packets like Nuun and LMNT.
There's also no shortage of expensive water bottles being sold, and smart water bottles that track your drinking frequencies and flavor pods sold via subscription.
I don’t know. I personally wouldn’t take it if you aren’t also working out/lifting frequently (even if you drink a ton of water).
Anecdotal so safe to ignore this… but my hair did thin out but only after I was lazier on my work outs. Stopped taking and hair mostly returned to normal thank God.
I get severe muscle cramping, even after pounding water and electrolytes. Like I can’t handle my kid something in the car without risking a spasm.
spasms are commonly a potassium deficiency, you could take a multivitamin.
I like creatine when I’m lifting because it reduces soreness. For some people that effect helps them push further and train harder, for me it’s just proactive pain relief
This is not true
just reminded me to buy a decent waterbottle - thank you
Sometimes I stay up until 1–3 a.m. because I'm working on a problem that's so interesting I can't stop until I make progress.
If I know I'm only going to get a few hours of sleep, I'll take 5–10 g of creatine, drink plenty of water, and go to bed. The next morning, I usually don't wake up with a headache.
If I skip the creatine under the same conditions, I'm much more likely to wake up with a headache after a short night's sleep.
Now it's become a habit, I automatically take creatine whenever I know my sleep duration is going to be much shorter than usual.
Do you take monohydrate or HCL?
most common one, monohydrate.
> If I know I'm only going to get a few hours of sleep, I'll ... drink plenty of water
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21517-dehydra...
from your link
>Headache pain often appears along with other signs and symptoms of dehydration, including darker-than-usual pee, dry mouth and fatigue
none of these symptoms are true for me.
"often" and "always" are two different words that mean two different things
Yes, but hydration isn’t really a problem for me. I’m a bit of a water purification nerd, I collect water from a natural waterfall, run it through multiple stages of purification, and then start convincing myself it has some magical properties. I don’t drink soda or caffeine, I mostly just drink water.
Do you still drink water when you skip creatine? Being dehydrated causes headaches, so it may be the extra water intake that's helping and not the creatine.
yes, i always drink plenty of water throughout day and night too, infact when i get stuck on a problem i go for a walk and drink water.
So drinking water part is consistent with or without creatine. I do know the creatine takes a while to build up, so i don't know why it works but it does.
>Contrary to the common myth, thinking hard does not burn significantly more calories. (Demonstration: Start thinking hard, and watch as your heart rate does not increase.)
this is wrong [0] , it's just hard to measure.
[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32314956/
This matches what Gwern wrote years ago [0]. It does unequivocally make you stronger though. So if you're training anyway, may as well take it and hope it makes you smarter as well (just believing might be enough for that sweet placebo effect).
[0] https://gwern.net/creatine
This made me wonder if sun exposure/vitamin D has any impact on storing or processing creatine, and maybe that's why the results in Australia were so much greater
Would also be interesting to study creatine’s effect on depression. There is some promising research and I personally (having used it and stopped using it at various points) have definitely noticed a difference.
Just having the desire to think makes a huge difference.
In my experience, it wont make you smarter but my brain just feels more energized to think.
> Available short and long-term studies in healthy and diseased populations, from > infants to the elderly, at dosages ranging from 0.3 to 0.8 g/kg/day for up to 5 > years have consistently shown that creatine supplementation poses no adverse > health risks and may provide a number of health and performance benefits.
They missed a zero behind the comma, didn't they?
Studies I read seems to show a marginal boost in cognitionl and memory, but only if you were otherwise overtaxed for some reason.
Like being tired, stressed, etc...
Yep. From what I read mental fatigue (mental math problems is what the study used) or sleep deprivation are two scenarios in which creatine boosted cognition and memory.
Here are the sleep deprivation studies
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54249-9
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16416332/
Nope, but makes a producer's pocket heavier :D
When you realize that, you got a little smarter
Why is creatine so popular lately? what changed?
Health fads come and go
It’s always been popular among athletes and weight lifters but now nootropic influencers have gotten ahold of it. It’s one of the few supplements with robust scientific evidence of a strong effect but that’s in athletic performance not nootropics.
another upside is its also hella cheap so its a very easy addin
I started taking 5g for cognition. Never any clear signal for that, but it does seem to help a bit with my (more than occasional) sleep deprivation. Mostly with fighting off headaches.
The conclusions aren't any different (it's one of the few thing that helps strength, poses no danger to your hair, and almost certainly does nothing for cognition), but the articles at https://www.strongerbyscience.com/?s=creatine are far more comprehensive, including the famous extremely long podcast episodes they used to do.
The one thing this misses is many supplements are tainted, which skews the popular perception of both upsides and risks. This was especially true in the US prior to 2005 or so when prohormones were still legal over the counter. Anything branded that wasn't just pure creatine was extremely likely to actually be a low-dose oral steroid, which really can make you lose hair and will increase strength quite a bit more than any dietary supplement.
This also misses caffeine as the other a-tier supplement that consistently shows strength increases in RCTs, though of course, caffeine is more frought than creatine because you build tolerance and it can disturb sleep.
"poses no danger to your hair" I keep hearing folks say this, and even in this thread there's someone who's experienced that and had it stop when they eliminated creatine. I too have experienced exactly that with exactly the stopping of issues once I stopped taking creatine.
Perhaps you can say "danger to your hair is rare", but there's very clearly (to me at least) an effect there, and the way it gets hand-waved away is strange to me.
if you are using to slim down it will hold on to water unless you are bulking i dont see creatine to be consumed regularly
if you truly want fuel for the brain nothing beats keto
I remember learning about Creatine as a weightlifting teen
I never ended up doing it because you had to cycle it, and it was just one more thing to track
Is it the same case in 2026? Is there a simple pill I can take?
You don't have to cycle it. You also don't need to load it (a marketing ploy to get you to buy more).
You can just take 3-5g daily.
Cycling is also a marketing ploy, since it makes it sound more like a PED and less like a compound found naturally in meat. It's the same reason people say they 'take' whey, when Miss Muffet simply ate it.
I've never heard of cycling it. We're you a teen during the steroid arrival? Maybe people were confusing things. I've always just done 5mg a day, but now people are talking about taking mega doses of like 20-30mg a day, shrug
Creatine is dosed in grams not milligrams, otherwise your number are correct.
That’s never been the case, you were getting bad information.
Yes, they did, and many still do write it on the package, but it is, and always was a myth born God knows when out of precaution, because nobody really knows anything about how all this stuff really works now, and they did know even less than that 30 years ago. There never really was any evidence that you have to cycle it, and nobody (aside from the manufacturers) ever says it anymore. It makes about as much sense as cycling protein powder.
As for pills, yes, there is about every form of creatine supplement now, even chewing gum, but this is just dumb, how much of creatine do you think you can consume this way in a day?
Cycling creatine was the guidance from the 90s. 5g/day and drink plenty of water is all you need to do.
Saved you a click:
> Does creatine make you smarter?
> I don’t know. Maybe a little.
Article's answer to its own question:
It safely builds muscle and boosts cognition.
No, it does not.
More like "probably", "yes", and "probably not."
I don’t think they’re strong evidence that it does anything beyond helping you build muscle. There are some people say they think clearer, but I don’t think that’s been measured in any significant way.
Given LLM's is being smarter still a worthwhile to optimize with supplements?
that was hard to parse, but yes, because then you can ask smarter questions to the LLM which saves you money, so you can afford supplements
Of course it is. LLMs aren't as smart as you think, or at least their "intelligence" isn't comparable to ours. They're just a useful tool, and they will always need someone to guide them.
Productivity isn’t the only reason to be smarter. For example, there’s also the benefit of asking fewer inane questions on the internet (hypothetically)