Creatine supplementation improves brain performance in vegetarians [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Creatine supplementation improves brain performance in vegetarians [pdf]

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

33 pointsulvund40 comments

Edit : it should be noted that this is from 2003. I'm sure newer research has been done. (Re-Edit. Not much by the looks of it)

One question this raises is why isn't there a know correlation between high red meat diets and higher brain performance? All things being equal the the study suggests a significant advantage for higher intake.

Here are my best guesses in order of likelyhood

- The benefit is temporary and relates more to the raising of levels rather the absolute level.

- The amounts of creatine involved (equivalent of 2 pounds red meat per day) are too much for anyone to ingest naturally for long, but this level is required to see significant benefits.

- The benefits of creatine are being counteracted by some other substances in red meat therefore masking it's effect on heavy meat eaters.

- The reported high average IQ of those who chose to become vegetarians masks the fact that the lack of creatine in their diet does actually make them dumber.

Anyway it looks interesting especially for those without much natural creatine intake.

Relevant link: http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training/browse_thread/...

tl;dr: Rawson 2008 is a broad null result for healthy young omnivores who aren't idiots. Vegetarians, idiots, the sleep-deprived, and old people may benefit.

So what the study is saying is that eating a diet we are evolutionary adapted to, then sleeping well makes us smart?

I think I'd put it in negative terms; not that sleeping makes you smarter (because that makes it sound like sleeping is a sufficient condition), but that not sleeping prevents you from being smarter (which says sleeping is necessary but not sufficient - as it is).

Ditto for vegetarian diet - not that eating meat makes you smart, but that not eating meat and not replacing the meat appropriately will prevent you from being (a little) smarter.

(There are other examples, like the B vitamins that vegetarians need to watch out for, I've heard.)

The graphs seem to show ~50% increase on Raven's Progressive Matrices tests, and ~30% on backwards digit span tests.

http://i.imgur.com/7jZT4.png

Those are pretty large gains, I'm tempted to try supplementing this.

A very interesting topic for a study would be similarly testing groups of omnivores, vegetarians and vegans, to see if there are any detectable mental capacity differences. It should be less controversial than comparing the same between races and genders.

The 'we developed bigger and better brains from eating meat' is an often used rationale for the omnivore diet.

Actually, I think that would be a terrible study. It's too hard to control for other factors that may differ between the groups. For instance, vegetarians and vegans in the U.S. are on average more educated. You can add that into a model, but this kind of study- where you test people before, during, and after creatine addition- is really much better science.

From the abstract:

" .. In this work, we tested the hypothesis that oral creatine supplementation (5 g/day for six weeks) would enhance intelligence test scores and working memory performance in 45 young adult, vegetarian subjects in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, cross-over design. Creatine supplementation had a significant positive effect (p , 0.0001) on both working memory (backward digit span) and intelligence (Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices), both tasks that require speed of processing. These findings underline a dynamic and significant role of brain energy capacity in influencing brain performance."

Statistically significant (subject to the usual caveats of being careful about the results from a single study). Little is said about how worthwhile the change is.

See figure 1. From what I gather in the paper, this RAPM is a speed measure. If I'm interpreting this stuff correctly at all (never read anything in this field before) performing 40% more tasks per unit time is quite worthwhile!

It's a score on some variant of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices

Actually, Raven's isn't supposed to be speeded if you care about measuring IQ rather than, say, processing speed or WM control. This is one reason why the Jaeggi 2008 study (showing that Dual N-back boosts IQ) is somewhat untrustworthy.

Yes, the significance test shows whether it is likely that the changes happened due to pure coincidence.

p < 0.0001 means the changes are very unlikely to be coincidental.

Which measure do you propose to test how worthwhile the results are :) ?

Define a threshold of "worthwhileness" and measure whether the results are statistically significantly larger than that.

Why do the graphs change the name of the line between point 2 and point 4?

Because they switch the placebo and creatine groups :)

    Week (-∞)-0: Noone has taken any supplements
    Test 1.
    Week 0-6   : Group 1 gets creatine, group 2 gets placebo
    Test 2.
    Week 6-12  : Noone takes any supplements
    Test 3.
    Week 12-18 : Group 1 gets placebo, group 2 gets creatine
    Test 4.

Thanks. I guess I have a problem reading closely.

It's time to link to Peter Norvig's article about reading research studies again:

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

This study is from 2003 and makes extravagant claims. Have there been any followup studies that corroborate it or qualify it? Were these vegetarians seriously deficient?

Just thought I'd add this...

Creatine is naturally produced in the human body by amino acids. Just because you're a vegetarian, it doesn't mean you suffer a shortage of the particular amino acids required for producing creatine. Most vegetarians fall under the "ovo-lacto" umbrella, meaning they will eat egg and milk, and pretty much anything else made by animals, just not the animals themselves - being a vegetarian myself, I often say: "I'll eat food made by animals, just not food made OF animals" - and many vegetarians also use various "fullworthy" protein supplements containing all the essential amino acids, guaranteeing them all the components needed to produce creatine while being a vegetarian.

I myself use protein supplements to ensure, together with food, that I get a bit more than 1 gram of fullworthy protein per kilo body weight a day, and that is an amount that actually even meat-eaters, without supplements, can have a hard time reaching on a daily basis.

Addendum:

Digging a little bit on Wikipedia, I found the three amino acids (of which only one is essential) that Creatine is produced from in the body:

Arginine (non-essential) - vegetabilic sources: "wheat germ and flour, buckwheat, granola, oatmeal, peanuts, nuts (coconut, pecans, cashews, walnuts, almonds, Brazil nuts, hazelnuts, pinenuts), seeds (pumpkin, sesame, sunflower), chick peas, cooked soybeans."

Glycine (non-essential) - synthesized in the human body from Serine, also a non-essential amino acid.

Methionine (essential) - vegetabilic (and animalic) sources: "High levels of methionine can be found in sesame seeds, Brazil nuts, fish, meats and some other plant seeds; methionine is also found in cereal grains."

Judging from this, it seems that a vegetarian has to maintain a really lousy and unhealthy diet in order to suffer a Creatine shortage. Maybe the test subjects were university students on a Ramen diet.

Just because your body CAN produce creatine doesn't mean that all it needs to produce enough is its building blocks.

People here seem to be acting like our bodies have perfect feedback loops for every nutrient, but if in our recent evolutionary history we always got enough, that might not be the case. You have to remember that were one of only three mammals species that has completely lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C. If we lost synthesis of one necessary nutrient, don't you think it might be possible that we also lost some mechanisms for regulating the amount of another?

I just don't see where you are going with that text in the context of Creatine production. Vegetarians HAVE Creatine in their system, fully produced by the body. They just don't have the same amount as the meat-eaters, __because red meat contains Creatine itself, as a form of Creatine supplement__. Ergo, vegetarians are fully capable of producing the necessary amount of Creatine they need, by the ingestion of the required components. (otherwise there'd be no Creatine in their bodies.)

> Vegetarians HAVE Creatine in their system, fully produced by the body. They just don't have the same amount as the meat-eaters, __because red meat contains Creatine itself, as a form of Creatine supplement__. Ergo, vegetarians are fully capable of producing the necessary amount of Creatine they need, by the ingestion of the required components.

That's quite a logical leap there. I 'HAVE Money in my wallet', so ergo, I am 'fully capable of producing the necessary amount of Money I need'? (You should know I dream of living like a billionaire.)

Humans can produce vitamin D or omega-N oils on their own, yet, it's established fact that many humans are persistently deficient.

I consider it just a small leap in logic compared to your knee-jerk parallel regarding money in the wallet.

We know that increased oxygen in the blood speeds up healing of damaged tissue - this is why you get a tube up your nose blowing extra oxygen into your respiratory system when you come out of surgery. Does this by your logic mean that we're persistently oxygen deficient in our natural state, just because ADDING oxygen gives a higher effect?

What IS the nominal level of creatine in the body? Do you know? I don't. Pure creatine supplement from meat ingestion can so far only be proven to be an _added aid_, rather than going by the logic that vegetarians turn dumb when they stop eating red meat.

I don't understand how you can argue against the research that shows that vegetarians who supplement with creatine perform better than vegetarians who don't. Vegetarians do not produce "enough" creatine on their own. If you want to disprove that, find research that shows otherwise.

The wallet analogy wasn't that great. Allow me to try. I have all the exercise equipment needed to stay in great shape in my house, but that doesn't mean I'm in great shape.

But, I never argued that they benefit better with Creatine. You haven't read my posts. And just as vegetarians get a boost from it, so do meat-eaters, who also perform better when supplementing Creatine - ask 10 athletes (body builders in particular) and you will find at least 5 who uses it and can vouch for increased stamina from it. Does this, too, mean that they don't get enough? Surely it should, by the logic you've been using, and at this point you are contradicting yourself. From this we can simply draw the conclusion that everyone benefits from more of this in their systems, but it doesn't point to a deficiency of any kind, just as with my example of how artificially increased oxygen levels in the blood doesn't mean we don't get "enough" naturally.

The point I trying to make just flies by you; You don't KNOW what is enough, you don't KNOW what is too little. You can't say any of this based solely on the proof that _anyone_ performs BETTER when you ADD MORE. This is _not_ synonymous with a deficiency. And the research pointed to doesn't even bring up the specific vegetabilic diets held by the vegetarian subjects of the research, which is a very important detail missing for solidifying the "facts" the research is trying to bring forth. It's a very clear case of "correlation is not causation".

The definitions you're using for "deficiency", "enough" and "too little" are useless. If your body performs better with more of a substance that can be obtained through food or produced by your body, I'd call that a deficiency. If your body isn't performing as well as you'd like, and that can be improved by consuming more of a substance without harming your health, then you don't have enough of it.

This really shouldn't be controversial. I think vegetarianism is a good thing and it's something I'm attempting, but ignoring science because you don't like the negative connotation of "deficiency" doesn't make any sense.

If we define a "deficiency" as "expected level" of something, then we don't know if they had a deficiency. Regarding your definition, I don't have a testosterone deficiency, but I'd certainly perform better as an athlete if I took anabolic steroids.

Regarding creatine levels, all we know from the study is that after the supplementation, they had significantly more in their body. Maybe the results would be the same for omnivores - we don't know until someone runs the experiment. Even within this data, I'd like to see the vegans and vegetarians graphed separately.

My definition of "deficiency" was intended to consider only levels that can be obtained through food or created by your body from food. The definition still isn't completely right since given the same inputs, different people will produce a range of values. You get the idea, though.

Touchy: "rather than going by the logic that vegetarians turn dumb when they stop eating red meat". Do you deny that a vegetarian diet, without supplementation, often lacks in key nutrients?

Don't ever comment at reddit whatever you do you'll be apoplectic with rage in no time.

I say that vegetarians are deficient in creatine because this study showed that supplements increased their mental abilities. When they did the same study with meat-eaters, there was no such improvement, indicating that omnivores are not deficient in creatine.

Rawson ES, Lieberman HR, Walsh TM, Zuber SM, Harhart JM, Matthews TC (September 2008). "Creatine supplementation does not improve cognitive function in young adults". Physiology & Behavior 95 (1-2): 130–4. doi:10.1016/j.physbeh.2008.05.009. PMID 18579168.

I don't know why you're so defensive about this. It's well known that vegetarians are deficient in many nutrients. It's also well known that humans have an omnivorous past, so it should be obvious logically well.

Creatine supplements for meat-eaters increase physical stamina. It's one of the most sold products in "power sports" along with protein supplements. Ask the jocks to get the word from the horse's mouth, then tell me they too suffer a Creatine deficiency. :)

After I switched to vegetarian diet I have not noticed _any_ difference in brain/personality/iq, I ve just lost extra weight. And have less allergies. Aside from that - nothing.

Case solved. Who needs research when you can just proclaim truth to the world based on personal experience! :)

It is hard to add anything to corruption's comment, but a practical tip:

I've seen claims that it is hard to notice how/when your intelligence changes over time. A friend who had some health issues for a while (sorry, I'm not giving more details) played (simple) computer games quite a lot, because the results showed functionality trends.

ymmv, of course, but if I were you I'd play a few games like that over time while trying creatine supplements. If they help, I'd continue.

Games like what? Tetris? Bejeweled? Text Twist?

I think there were simple games like that; not reaction stuff, though. I'll ask and hopefully get back to you in less than 24 hours.

Awesome! Thanks!

Not so awesome.

There were mostly FB-games. Things like "Who Has the Biggest Brain", word games (speed reactions), like Word Drop and Word Challenge in FB.

(I don't know anything about these games; I just have their names and a datapoint that they were good to verify daily shape and trace mind effects for medicines, etc. For some specific problems I'm not going to discuss.)

I should add this. I believe it is correct (no personal experience).

It seems there were two ideas here. One, do the stupid game enough so you didn't learn much by doing half an hour again == that is, it was a good test of present ability. Two, find something that is relevant for the problem you have.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com