Why I joined the cult of creatine
By Allison Morrow, CNN
(CNN) — Until a friend casually mentioned trying creatine this past spring, I hadn’t thought much about it — it was stuff I’d long associated with meatheads and a minor scandal involving my high school football team. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere, being talked up by every fitness influencer, mental health guru and powder peddler on the internet.
This is how it usually goes with the wellness industry, that ever-growing multibillion-dollar complex of businesses pushing supplements, remedies and no small amount of snake oil to a health-obsessed swath of society. A vaguely medicinal-sounding powder, pill, or gummy shows up in your TikTok feed one day and rapidly starts multiplying:
Eat more protein. Do not forget fiber. And collagen! Just stir it into your coffee, mama! Just spoon it in your face, eat it. It’s called ~health~ babe. By the way, if you’re not adding organic bovine colostrum to your steel-cut oats, what are you even doing?
Obviously, intellectually, much of the barrage consists of scams. Yet: what if— ? What if this one weird trick really does tackle stubborn belly fat? What if this leaf extract actually is “nature’s Ozempic” at a fraction of the cost?
“‘Wellness’ is a lot like ‘beauty’ or ‘success’ or ‘happiness,’” Annie Wilson, senior lecturer of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told me. “It makes for a really good marketing term because you can’t define it very well, and you can never have enough or too much of it.”
The pitch for creatine felt especially tailored to me, an elder millennial distance-runner-slash-CrossFit junkie with expendable income: Build muscle! Aid recovery! Improve your mood! The TikToks came in three genres: a woman in her 40s stands in her absurdly well-lit suburban kitchen, scooping powder into a smoothie while citing scientific studies; Peter Attia or Andrew Huberman or some other Internet Guy talking to a podcaster; a jacked weight-lifter, any gender, holding a tub of creatine in a sponsored post. That’s how I found myself, earlier this summer, putting a safe-enough-looking black plastic tub of micronized creatine monohydrate powder in my Amazon cart.
Fitness FOMO
For fellow latecomers: Creatine is a chemical compound humans produce naturally through our liver and kidneys, and it’s also found in meat and dairy. Or you can take in more of it directly, in the form of a popular supplement for building muscle. Maximizing gains, in fitfluencer parlance.
In the past few years, though, studies have suggested supplementing with creatine may also offer a host of other potential benefits, such as combatting depression and improving memory, particularly among women and older people.
Those compelling cognitive health claims have pushed creatine to the top of the pantheon of supplements promising to fix whatever’s broken in you or turbocharge whatever’s good in you. On Amazon, creatine sales were expected to grow 18% in 2024 to more than $424 million, according to data from Jungle Scout.
Just to clear the air: Creatine is not a steroid, though you’d be forgiven for thinking so.
When I told my husband I was buying creatine, he responded with a tinge of alarm: “The stuff Mark McGwire was doing?”
(Doing, like a drug. Not taking, like a vitamin.)
Yes, McGwire, the former home run king with many asterisks to his name, did tell the media in 1998, in the midst of his race with Sammy Sosa to break Roger Maris’s single-season record of 61 home runs, that he’d been consuming creatine to help with muscle recovery. Sportswriters could see it right there in his locker, he wasn’t hiding it. He also copped to taking an over-the-counter testosterone-producing pill called androstenedione, or “andro,” which was marketed as a natural alternative to steroids.
“Everything I’ve done is natural,” McGwire told the Associated Press that year, attempting to quiet the scuttlebutt around who was juicing and who wasn’t in Major League Baseball. “Everything” and “natural,” the public would later learn, wasn’t exactly the truth. As the two suspiciously swollen sluggers closed in on, then demolished, the once-unreachable record — with McGwire hitting 70 homers to Sosa’s 66 — the words “andro,” “creatine” and “steroids” circulated almost interchangeably.
Andro, which increases testosterone levels, is now banned by virtually every professional sports body, though MLB was one of the last to do so, in 2004. Anabolic steroids, similarly, increase testosterone to build muscle, and are banned by virtually every athletic organization.
Creatine, the least controversial and most “natural” component of McGwire’s smorgasbord of performance enhancers, became a victim by association. But in the decades since, as athletes have kept using it and more research has been published on it, creatine has made a comeback.
Bottoms up
It might have been a good idea to call a doctor before I started ingesting a supplement I only sort of understood. But I — and I can’t stress this enough — did not feel like it. Summer had begun, and there was no time to waste as I achieved Linda-Hamilton-in-Terminator-2 biceps.
By the time my creatine arrived, I’d done enough internet research to feel confident in my plan: 5 grams daily, even on rest days, stirred into water or a smoothie. (I declined to try the method peddled by at least one YouTuber who advocated spooning the dry powder directly into your mouth, a suggestion that recalled the viral, profoundly ill-advised cinnamon challenge of the 2010s.)
To my relief, a teaspoon of creatine stirred into a glass of water is mostly tasteless. A little gritty, slightly metallic — nothing compared with the sickly sweet, chalky experience of protein powders I’ve suffered through in the past. It wouldn’t be hard to work into my morning routine (which I’m going to tell you about, but I want you to know in advance: I know that it’s annoying as hell.)
My alarm goes off at 5:12 a.m., Monday to Friday. I get dressed. I’m at CrossFit by 5:55 for an hourlong class that starts at 6. After that, I head into the office. That’s been my schedule more or less for the past three years, when I got tired of running ultramarathons and took up weight-lifting.
A week into the creatine experiment, my arms looked about the same as before, which is to say, not quite Hamiltonian. But I did feel something. A little bit of ease while cranking out one or two extra push-ups during a workout. A little less fatigue, perhaps, by the time Friday rolled around and my body would normally be crying uncle. Was the creatine working, or was it just my brain telling me the creatine’s working?
Probably a bit of both, according to Michael Fredericson, a doctor of sports medicine and professor of orthopedic surgery at Stanford University. While I couldn’t be bothered to consult my own doctor before this journey, once I’d started, I did want to learn more by talking to a physician who wasn’t some TikTok creator trying to build their brand.
When I called Fredericson, about a week into my new habit, I half expected him to tell me that creatine was, like so many other supplements out there, a scam. Or, at best, a vector for a benign placebo effect that convinces me I’m getting stronger.
I was wrong.
“I’m a big, big proponent of creatine,” Fredericson said. “I mean, it’s safe, it is effective for all age groups … There’s just not really any downside to it.”
While the supplement no silver bullet, the hype is, to some extent, accurate.
The hype
I’d initially dismissed the GymTok talk of creatine’s alleged cognitive benefits: a better memory, a sunnier mood, less brain fog.
Creatine boosts athletic performance because muscles convert it into a compound that generates energy, especially during intense bursts of activity like sprinting or weightlifting. I assumed the creatine cult’s reported mental health improvements were just a function of working out more.
But it turns out there’s some real science backing the cognitive claims.
One study published in 2023 found that creatine supplementation “may confer beneficial effects on cognitive function in adults, particularly in the domains of memory, attention time, and information processing speed.”
Another study Fredericson mentioned focused on creatine’s effect on women. It found evidence that “indicates positive effects from creatine supplementation on mood and cognition, possibly by restoring brain energy levels and homeostasis.” Two of the study authors disclosed they’re scientific advisers to a company that makes creatine, which paid the publication fee for the research.
There are even some early studies, Fredericson told me, that suggest creatine could be helpful in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, though he cautioned there aren’t enough studies to say so conclusively.
I was starting to think that maybe the supplement industry hadn’t hyped creatine enough.
On the road
My heart raced as I watched a TSA officer pluck my carry-on from the X-ray belt and direct me to a metal side table.
It was Creatine Week Three, and according to Fredercison and all of my TikTok gurus, I needed to keep taking it daily, to start feeling the results, which could take up to six weeks. That meant the tub of fine white powder was coming along with me and my husband on our honeymoon.
The officer unzipped my luggage and took out the contraband.
“I need to test this,” he told me as he unscrewed the cap.
“Yes, sir,” I replied, suddenly feeling stupid for not checking my bag.
I was prepared to plead my case, to show him my notes from my interview with Dr. Fredericson, to quote the medical literature. “Everything I’ve done is all natural!” I imagined myself shouting while being taken away in handcuffs.
A minute later he placed the tub back in my suitcase and waved me through. All clear.
Several hours later, at our Airbnb in Lisbon, I set my creatine tub by the kitchen sink, lying to myself about the running and pushups I was going to do that week to avoid falling behind on my gym routine. (Total miles run in Portugal: zero. Total pushups pushed: also zero.)
When we checked out a few days later, jet lagged and slightly hungover, I almost forgot to pack it. (Creatine does not negate the effects of vinho verde, apparently.) I was reminded of the main downside of taking creatine: You kind of have to take it forever. And in most cases, Wilson told me, what you’re getting out of it is not a presence of something good but the potential absence of something bad. That seemed to be the case with creatine, too, at least when it comes to the cognitive claims.
After a few weeks on creatine, my muscles felt a little more puffed out, which was fun, but my physique didn’t change dramatically. (It turns out Linda Hamilton, who at 5 feet 5 inches is roughly my height, told Entertainment Weekly in 1991 that she got into “Terminator 2” shape by working out three hours every day and eating a zero-fat diet centered on cereal with skim milk, chicken, dry salads and cigarettes. That extremely ’90s regimen got her down to a distressing 112 pounds. To achieve the arms that launched a thousand home-workout magazine articles, you need a lot more than creatine and CrossFit.)
Hard workouts are still hard. Creatine might be helping me recover, but it can’t prevent my quads from being sore after a heavy squat day. Pull-ups remain hard. Burpees are still murder. The assault bike is as aptly named as ever.
As for the cognitive claims, well, I don’t think my brain has gotten any worse, but that’s not saying much. I’ve always been able to recall lines of dialogue and plot points from shows I’ve seen one time, but if there were a gun to my head right now I couldn’t tell you where my car is parked or where I decided to stash my family’s winter coats. In the past six months, I’ve lost and had to replace both my work ID and my driver’s license. If creatine is helping, then Lord help me.
Naturally, as I started to wonder about the cognitive benefits I wasn’t feeling, the TikTok creatine mafia offered up a reason: I’m just not taking enough. Five grams is for basic gym rats looking for a little muscle jolt — the real sweet spot is 10 or even 20 grams.
Double up your creatine, ladies! Don’t just fix your body, fix your brain, fix your whole life …
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