Creatine Fact Check: Does It Really Build Muscle and Protect Your Brain After 50?

Build muscle in your 70s without setting foot in a gym. Protect your brain and slash your risk of dementia. The one

supplement that turns back the clock on aging. Now, if you spend any time online lately, then you will have seen claims

like these, and they are getting louder by the week. Creatine has gone from a niche powder for bodybuilders to one of

the most heavily marketed supplements on the planet. And a huge amount of that marketing is now actually aimed very

squarely at people over the age of 50. I see ads for this sort of thing literally every single day on Instagram,

and every longevity influencer seems to have one of these on their desk. Now, if any of you have followed me for any

length of time, then you will know that, on the whole, I am pretty against supplements in general for most people,

apart from a very small handful of certain ones that I will talk about at some point on this channel. And you will

never, ever see me trying to sell a supplement on here. I am pretty certain of that. As I've mentioned before, I've

literally turned down tens and tens of thousands of pounds, multiples of my doctor's salary, you know, from brands

that are trying to throw money at me to show you supplements and sell them to you. For the vast majority of people, a

supplement is not what you need. You need the basics and the foundations, the stuff that the research points to again

and again. And only once you've mastered the foundations could certain supplements become beneficial to you, a

very small number. And creatine could be one of them. So, what I want to do today in this video is cut through all of the

noise and look at two things that actually matter as you get older, and two things that creatine is genuinely

being studied for, which is your muscle and your brain. And so, by the end of this video, you should know whether

creatine is worth your money. And just as importantly, whether you are one of the people who should not touch it at

all. If you're new to the channel, then welcome. I'm Dr. Alex. I'm an emergency medicine doctor in the UK who has become

fascinated by the things that help us to live longer and stay healthier as we get older. All I ask in return is that if

you find this video useful, if you learn something from it today, then please help me out by subscribing to the

channel and giving the video a like and a hype as well. You know, it helps these videos reach many more people and it

supports what I'm doing here. All of those things are completely free. And I promise you, I will keep making these

videos for you as often as I can. Now, let me be perfectly straight with you before we go any further. I am not here

to oversell this to you. Creatine will never do for your heart or your brain what the basics do.

A real walk, whole food, keeping your blood sugar steady, and your insulin from spiking, you know, nothing in a tub

will ever come close to any of that. And from a pure longevity point of view, you could argue creatine barely shifts the

needle at all. But, here's what it might do. If you are already lifting weights, if

you are already eating very well and sleeping well, if you're doing basically all the basics,

it could hand you a very tiny sliver of extra strength. And in the right person, at the right moment, a sliver could be

everything. Just picture a trip on the top of the stairs. One version of you goes down and fractures your hip. And in

an older body, a fall like that is almost never just a fall. It is the ambulance, it is the hospital, it is

sometimes the nursing home as well. Then the muscle wasting away as you stop moving as you recover, and then the very

slow slide into frailty that for far too many people ends in death inside a year. The other version of you though, grabs

the handrail, the banister, it gives you a bit of a fright, and then you just carry on with the rest

of your day because you are strong enough to catch yourself and to stop you from falling. So, that is the same trip,

but two completely different endings. So, yes, for some people creatine absolutely could be worth it, but only

if you've done the hard thing first, which is resistance training, because as I'll go on to in a minute, it will not

do anything for you unless you're doing the hard stuff first. So, let's talk about what creatine actually is then.

Let me strip all of this back because the name sounds a bit like a drug, doesn't it? Creatine, but it is not a

drug. So, creatine is a natural compound. Your own body makes it every single day, mostly in your liver, and

you top it up by eating creatine. But, here's the catch though, and it's one that a lot of people tend to miss.

Creatine is found almost entirely in meat and fish. Plants contain virtually no creatine. So, if you are a vegetarian

or a vegan, then you are taking in far less creatine from your diet, and your body stores tend to run lower as a

result. The good news for that group of people, if they are wanting to take creatine, is that this supplement is

made in a lab. It's not made from animals, so it is suitable for vegans, and they often respond to it more

noticeably than meat eaters do. Now, once creatine is inside you, most of it is stored in your muscles, and a smaller

but important amount of it also sits in your brain. And what it does is fairly simple. Think of it like a rechargeable

battery for very short, very fast bursts of energy. When a cell needs power faster than it can make it, it draws on

this creatine battery for an instant top-up. Your muscles use it for that first explosive effort. Your brain uses

it when it's working hard or running a bit tired. And hold on to that idea because it explains everything else that

follows in this video. So, as you get older, two things happen at once. Your body makes less creatine of its own, and

most people also eat less meat and fish than they did in their 30s. So, your stores of creatine quietly drop at the

very stage of life when you need it most. And you do need it. So, picture catching yourself when you fall off a

curb or the top of the stairs. That is a very fast, explosive demand on your leg muscles. Exactly the kind of burst that

creatine will actually fuel. And exactly the kind of save that keeps an older person out of hospital with a broken hip

or broken wrist. Or picture walking into a room and becoming blank about why you went in there in the first place. That

mental stumble is your brain's energy system running a little short under load. So, muscle and brain, the two

systems that creatine feeds, are the two systems that quietly start to struggle. So, topping up the tank may matter more

at 60 than it ever did at the age of 20 or 30. That's the theory anyway. Here is what the evidence actually shows. So,

let's start with your muscle then. This is the strongest part of the whole story. So, we've got to be really clear

about how solid the research is. When researchers gather all these good trials together, the picture is fairly

consistent. One of the largest analyses here brought together 22 randomized controlled trials, over 700 older

adults, and found that creatine alongside resistance training led to roughly an extra kilo and a half of lean

tissue, lean muscle, compared to people doing the identical training without creatine. Plus, real gains in strength

as well. More recent work, though, has actually sharpened that, and it shows that the best benefit is in the legs,

and the weakest benefit is in the upper body. And these are randomized controlled trials. These are the gold

standard in medicine, all pointing the same way. So, for muscle, the evidence is genuinely good. But, here is the

single most important sentence in this video. That benefit only appears in people who are already lifting weights.

No training means no stimulus, so there is nothing for the creatine to amplify, which is why it does close to nothing in

somebody who does not lift. It is not a muscle pill. It is a multiplier on the work you are already doing. Now, this

reminds me of something from when I first started doing triathlon. So, I was starting from fairly unfit, and I was

looking for shortcuts, as so many people do. A way to get a faster time, and to get the gains without the effort. Now, I

had read about aero helmets, so aerodynamic helmets that go sort of over your neck, and go really pointed at the

back to try and reduce the drag. So, I walked into one of these bike shops, and the guy behind the counter was pretty

honest with me. He explained that the helmet only really does anything if you are already fit enough to ride fast

enough for the wind resistance to be a real problem in the first place. Below that speed, a fancy helmet and a normal

helmet are pretty much the same. The gains come from the fitness, from the hard work. So, the helmet is a top-up

once you have earned it in the first place. Creatine is pretty similar to that. You have to put the effort in

first because without the training underneath it, the powder has nothing to multiply. So, the muscle story I am

pretty confident about. The brain though, the second benefit about your brain function is a bit different. It's

really exciting, but we've got to be honest about what the evidence shows. So, remember that the brain runs on that

same battery. So, researchers asked whether topping it up sharpens your thinking and your memory. And the honest

answer is that creatine reliably helps two specific, very narrow things. Your short-term memory and your mental

processing speed, which is just how quickly your brain handles a task. That is it. It doesn't reliably lift your

overall all round thinking score and it doesn't reliably improve the high-level planning and problem-solving

that your brain does. And it certainly doesn't lower your risk of dementia. So, the narrow skills of memory and speed do

move a bit, but the broad measure of general brain power doesn't move. Now, within those two very narrow benefits,

there is one detail that is really important. That memory benefit shows up most strongly in the oldest adults,

those in the late 60s and 70s and 80s, and barely at all in young people whose brains already have a fuel to spare,

the effect seems to matter most when the brain is under stress, such as poor sleep or illness as well. And here's

where creatine and the brain works a bit differently from creatine and muscle. So, let me be clear here. With muscle,

the creatine does nothing unless you train because all it can do is amplify the work that you put in. The brain is

not like that. You do not have to sit down doing crosswords or puzzles for it to work. The small effect it has on your

brain comes from simply keeping the brain's energy tank a little fuller, ready for the moments when you are tired

or a bit more stretched. But, the thing is that doesn't let your brain off the hook, either, because the real

foundations for your brain are the same ones that I go on about all the time in all of these videos. So, that is sleep

and moving your body and whole food and keeping your blood sugar steady. All of those things do far more for your brain

than any powder ever will. And creatine is only ever the very small top-up that sits on top of all of those. And this

brings me to the really big question that so many of you have, which I guess I've already just mentioned, which is

does creatine actually reduce your risk of dementia or Alzheimer's? To cut a very long story short, the most

recent research isn't convincing. Creatine is not going to reduce your risk or reverse dementia or Alzheimer's

or others. Anybody telling you otherwise is, again, selling you something. So, creatine monohydrate is one of the most

studied supplements in existence with hundreds of trials behind it, some of them running for years. In healthy

people, it hasn't been shown to damage the kidneys or the liver. And the old internet fear about kidney harm traces

back to a tiny handful of case reports, rather than controlled evidence. The most common real effects are minor,

like a bit of stomach upset, usually from taking a bit too much at once, and a small amount of weight gain in the

first 2 weeks or so. And people often panic that this is fat, that they're piling on weight because they're storing

fat, but it's not fat. It is water being drawn into the muscle, which is entirely harmless and part of how creatine

actually works. Now, this next part is really important. So, creatine raises a substance in your blood called

creatinine by roughly 10% on a standard dose. Your doctor uses creatinine to estimate your kidney function through a

number called eGFR, which is basically how well your kidneys are working. So, basically, creatine can make your

creatinine go up, which then makes your eGFR reading go down, and it makes a perfectly healthy [laughter] kidney

start to look like it's going downhill, when nothing is actually wrong. When researchers in these studies check those

same people, but with a different marker, which creatine doesn't affect, kidney function comes back completely

normal. So, an elevated creatinine in a creatine user does not mean that your kidneys are failing. It is just a

measurement artifact. The practical fix is pretty easy. Either tell whoever takes your blood that you use creatine,

or stop it for about a week before your blood test. Now, the next really important point is about who shouldn't

take it. So, the catch is that nearly all of these research studies studying the safety excluded anybody with disease

and only really focused on healthy people. So, very simply, we don't have good evidence that it is safe for a

kidney that is already struggling. Kidney disease is generally defined as an eGFR that sits persistently below 60.

If that is you, or if your kidney function is known to be reduced, or you have any other problems, creatine

probably isn't sensible for you. And pregnancy is another reason to not take it, obviously. So, if you're over the

age of 40 or 50, or you've got medical problems, then just check with your doctor first. Now, if you're healthy and

you've decided to try creatine, and again, I'm not recommending it to anybody personally, all of this is just

education, it's not advice. I would say try and keep everything simple. 3 to 5 g a day of plain creatine monohydrate,

which is either a white powder or a white tablet, you know, that's the form that you see most commonly. You do not

need to take it at any particular time of the day. And despite what the label suggests, you do not need to be timing

this around exercise or any other part of the day, just take it whenever you like. You also, despite what a lot of

these bottles suggest, you don't need to be loading yourself for the first week. A lot of them say take 20 g a day for

the first 5 days, and then go down after that. This won't really make a difference to

you at all. And the final thing really is just buy from a brand that is really reputable. Don't buy off Amazon, buy

from a decent company that you've seen the name dotted around quite a few times. Now, obviously, I'm a doctor, and

so I've got to say this. Everything here is educational, not personal medical advice. I'm not your doctor, so, you

know, just please check yourself before you start taking this. I'm trying to be really careful whenever I talk about

supplements. I completely get how hard it is to speak with a doctor these days, but please, just if you've got any

concerns or any medical problems, then please just check with somebody first.