Are You Missing THIS Supplement to Build Bone, Muscle, and Brain Health?

in the search for the best supplements to add to your diet and lifestyle there are so many options just on this channel alone we have numerous supplement videos I didn't even count how many however we get more questions on supplements than any other topic so here's another highly requested topic and this one's on Creatine or creatine monohydrate now creatine you might think of when you're thinking of people who lift weights a lot or muscle heads or guys that are just going to the gym and that's true and there is definitely benefit in that group but there is an abundance of evidences I'm going to show you on women who are param menopausal postmenopausal for not only potentially muscle and bone health but also for other things as well all right so before we dig into the benefits of creatine uh for this population let's look at a little bit of background because I bet a lot of you don't know what creatine is so creatine is a naturally occurring compound that's found in muscle cells it actually helps your muscle cells to produce energy during high-intensity exercise or heavy lifting chemically It's a combination of just three amino acids those same things that make protein so the amino acids are glycine Arginine and methionine and the body's primary source of creatine is its own production but it can also be obtained from supplementation and from diet so as with a lot of potential supplements creatine production naturally declines with aging making it a popular Target for people that are trying to work on the symptoms of Aging if you're trying to decrease the potential symptoms of the disease of Aging creatine along with a number of other things that decline as we age like collagen is another good example is something that could potentially be supplemented the question is is does it work okay so from a dietary perspective the best source of creatine is actually going to come from red meat and that just makes sense if creatine is in muscle then red meat is muscle right and so if we consume a muscle from another animal you're going to get the creatine but there is a difference in quantity between what we recommend through supplementation and what you would potentially get through diet so you can get about two grams of creatine per pound of red meat so when we talk about supplementation you'll see that we talk about 5 gram 10 gram some people even 20 gram so obviously we're not going to eat that many pounds of red meat in one day I don't care how much food you eat you're not going to eat 10 pounds of red meat in one day on a regular basis at least so we have to start then considering well should we get this from supplementation if so how much and I'm going to talk about exactly how we use this in our program but before we do that let's dig into a little bit of the research so you understand just how powerful this potentially could be all right now this first study is actually something that's perfect for this audience so this was a 2015 randomized control trial on 47 individuals they were on average age 57 they were postmenopausal and they were all women so this is definitely our target audience here so they used creatine for 12 months and they did two different types of interventions one was a resistance training for three days a week with creatine supplementation and then the other was resistance training plus Placebo now the dosing that they used was this is pretty consistent or at least around around this in the in the studies we'll talk about they use 0.1 G per kilogram per day so I did a little math for you so if you are a 100 PB woman that's going to be 4.5 grams or you could round that up to five grams per day and if you are a 200 lb woman or man then you're going to be if you wanted to follow this recommendation you would be consuming nine grams per day and just so you know creatine supplementation comes usually in 5 G serving Scoops so this 5 G dose is is pretty common so now the intervention lost around 1% of their bone maneral density of the femoral neck which doesn't sound very good right like that's obviously not the goal if you're taking a supplement for bone health but we always have to compare this to the placebo to the control and in the placebo group they lost almost 4% of their bone now I don't know what was going on with their dexa I don't know what was El what else was happening in their environment to cause that much bone loss in one year because that's a lot of bone loss but when you compare the two creatine was clearly protective it just wasn't protective enough to actually build bone they also looked at some other Imaging statistics and what they found is this thing called subar oal width and that actually went up with creatine and they also found that creatine increased strength in bench press and so between the periostal width going up and the strength going up what you're finding is that you're likely increasing bone strength you're just not necessarily seeing it on dexa so the takeaways from this study is that they didn't necessarily save bone completely but it was better than the placebo and you're probably adding to Bone strength maybe more so than bone density but definitely wouldn't just hang our recommendations off of that one study that's why we have more than one study all right so let's look at the second randomized control trial now this one's more recent 2023 randomized control trial on 237 women average age 59 they were also postmenopausal and they were looking specifically at creatine for bone health this is perfect right now their dose was a little bit higher so they were receiving 0.14 gram per kilogram per day so I did a little bit different math here so now for 30 lb woman you're looking at a little over 8 G per day again at 100 lb 6 G 200 lb 12 G so there's your your range for this study and so this was a little bit of a different intervention though so they did six days a week of walking with resistance training three days a week they were looking at primarily femoral neck and spine bone menal density so that's hip and spine bone menal density and the top of the femur they call it geometric properties so this is they get into all kinds of terms here but just essentially saying we're looking at both bone mineral density and some some metrics some Imaging metrics of strength there was a trend in the results a trend toward less loss than Placebo but it didn't reach significance so again we're seeing okay well both groups lost bone but the creatine group loost lost less now again in this study like the previous study even though the bone minerial density changes weren't that impressive creatin group did improve other markers of bone bone strength so I mentioned they were looking at the kind of the proximal femur the top part of the femur and they were looking at some other Imaging metrics there and indeed they did show some changes that would be uh significant likely with bone strength but again these things are really hard to measure creatine also in the intervention group it reduced the walking time and they walked faster for one of their events which was an 80 meter walk didn't have much of an effect on strength in this group but it did increase lean muscle mass as measured by dexa so again there's benefit it's not necessarily through bone density but it looks like it could be through bone strength it could be through some increase in lean muscle mass some performance benefit but not necessarily in bone mineral density that's why we always have to remember that osteoporosis is more than a t-core now before we show you two more compelling arguments and discuss how we use creatine in our practice let me just mention that if you're having a hard time putting together all of the different things I totally get it there's a lot of information about osteoporosis there's a lot of conflicting information even on our own channel there's so many things it's so hard to just figure out what's right for you coming to our free Master Class might really help if you look in the link on the description below on YouTube or go to Optimal human health if you're listening to this on a podcast optimal human health.com you can register for our free master class and that Master Class is where I put together personally all the things that we are using for our our our patients right now and then leave about 10 to 15 minutes for questions I think most people find this to be really helpful and it helps to just push them in the right direction as far as creating their own programed optimize their bone health all right now this next study is really cool so this helps to determine okay maybe how much but also when you should take creatine and I'll be honest this actually changed the way that I take the supplement because I've been taking creatine for a long time so this was a study on again what they they call older adults I didn't coin this term but they called older adults age 50 to 71 and they were divided into three groups and this was a double blind study so they had a creatine group that took the intervention before training a group that took the intervention of creatine after training and then a placebo group so those are your three groups and then this lasted for 32 weeks the dosing was similar to that first study we showed and that's 0.1 gram per kilogram per day so again that's you know that 4 to eight grams range either before or after training and then the placebo group I thought was funny they gave them a placebo powder both before and after so really trying to cover all their bases there which is good so what's interesting here in the results is that all groups saw increases in lean tissue Mass so increases likely in in muscle mass but they also saw increases in muscle strength and decreases in fat Mass so actually the training they were doing which was consistent across all three groups was really effective however the creatine after group showed greater increases in lean tissue Mass compared to Placebo the before group did not show any difference compared to Placebo another thing that was interesting here is that when you compared the before and the after groups the after group did show substantial gains compared to the before group both in the lower extremity and in the upper extremity strength uh test so that's leg press and chest press so that's really interesting so the takeaway from me here is that if you're going to consume Creatine and you want to get the best bang for your buck and effort probably consuming creatine after a strength training session is going to give you more benefit than if you were to take it before and that was a shift for me I had always taken it first thing in the morning and then I recognized man I should actually take this probably with my EAA or BCAA powder and I take it after training in fact that's what's in my water bottle right now now I threw in this last study just because I wanted to encourage people to look at creatine as more than just a muscle and potentially bone thing because creatine can help all over the body so this was a 2023 study now this was a systematic review and metaanalysis of 10 randomized control trials on memory performance in creatine so what was really cool is that creatine did have an impact on memory compared to Placebo especially as people got older so what they noticed as they divided by age is that the group 66 to 76 had the best Improvement using creatine so again creatine is not just for young dudes in the gym now the doses here are a little bit different so they had some studies that used a very low dose 2.2 gram per day and they had studies that used doses all the way up to 20 grams per day and the timing of the studies of duration ranged from anywhere from 5 days which seems really short to 24 weeks and there was no difference between men and women which I think was also helpful to understand that this is not related to more muscle mass because I've seen some comments around that and that might be true from a performance perspective but I think from a brain perspective obviously men women have the same siiz brain so what they noted in the study was that it didn't really matter the dose in this study is that the benefits were present either way for both men and women and it was more impactful for older men and women than it was for younger men and women when it comes to memory now I will tell you that there's some newer studies that actually might argue that we need bigger dosing for cognitive function and I think the recommendations right now coming out of people that are looking in the you know anti-aging space are probably around 10 grams per day so that would be divided up into two different doses but either way creatine has the impact to improve memory and that's something that a lot of people are definitely worried about all right so then how do we use it well we definitely end up talking about it we definitely recommend it because one of the things we talk about so often with our patients is the importance of muscle mass the importance of training and so if you can add something like creatine like Branch chain amino acids and essential amino acids which I've talked about before if you can add some of these simple little hacks to make the effort that you're putting out better and make it more impactful to improve strength and to potentially improve bone then these things are probably worth talking about so creatine makes the list does it make the final list sometimes it just depends on how many things and what the low hanging fruit are and this is again why it's so hard to create a program on your own because if you just look at all the potential things you're going to have so many things and you're going to end up spending a ton of money and taking a ton of supplements and not all of them are likely going to be helpful for you there's an another reason to take creatine 2 which also this is another reason why it frequently makes the final list is there's a biomarker called homosysteine that we measure and homosysteine is kind of an inflammatory marker it's really a biomarker looking at B vitamin metabolism it looks at this process called methylation and so if your homosysteine elevated then that is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease dementia and osteoporosis in creatine can help to reduce homosysteine so it's another way that creatine might be helping to improve bone health through the Improvement of B vitamin metabolism so ultimately this is an easy to use powder it goes in water it tastes like nothing we generally start the dose at five grams but I'm totally open to 10 grams on our patients and we have safety data obviously going up to 20 grams and probably higher so I think that this is a safe it is a really well-studied supplement so it's something that certainly does make the list for us on occasion so this video was a review of creatine and if you like this consider this video which is our new updated best calcium frosto process video and then we also have our new updated best diet for osteoporosis which this leads right into as well and remember that osteoporosis isn't the end but deciding to reverse it is a beginning I'll see you in the next video