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Comment by pitched | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been taking 5mg daily of Creatine for about 6 months now. It gives me a surprising amount of energy that is still very noticeable if I miss a day, even with a full 8 hours of sleep.

A big surprise I got early on was that my previous coffee habit of 5+ cups per day just kind of disappeared. No longer needed to keep going, I think.

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5 mg? We get about 1 gram of creatine through a varied diet and the body synthesize the rest. I would guess it to be purely placebo for you? All lifter recommend 3-5 g of supplementation daily.

5mg? That seems like a very small dose... the linked study says they administered 0.35g per kg - for me that'd be about 24g, which seems like a lot, though I guess people who are lifting weights might do that much daily for a week or two and then switch down to 5g/day.

They have to mean 5g, as does the guy who responded to you who seems to have made the same mistake. The recommended dose on most creatine containers is around 5 grams. 5mg is so little that it would be impossible to measure without a mg scale.

The last sentence there is an impressively neat tautology. I love it

I always wondered why I couldn’t measure mg with my gram scale! I just kept asking myself where are the sig figs?

To your snark, I was meaning to convey that a standard kitchen scale wouldn't be accurate enough to measure 5mg, necessitating what is typically referred to as a precision or mg scale.

https://awscales.com/gemini-20-precision-milligram-scale/

Is it really a tautology though?

The recommended dose is 5g per day. You can front-load creatine if you are deficient, but taking over 5g daily won’t do much.

Edit: it’s 5g, not mg.

Everything I've ever come across suggests 3-5g per day, with some folks doing a 20-25g loading protocol to saturate your muscles in the first week.

Mitchell Hooper, world strongman champion, takes 10g a day..but he's built different :-)

Too many people in this thread are conflating taking creatine for cognitive effects with taking it for weight lifting and strength performance.

If you are taking weight lifting doses for cognitive effects, you are effectively 'doing it wrong' and will notice a significant weight gain from the extra water retention.

And possibly saturate your toilet too!

Recommended dose by whom?

It's most popular in sports training and adjacent aesthetics, and the norm among that community is in grams. While most products are available as powders that you could perhaps measure out in milligrams, their reference dosage for advertising is usually 5g.

This study appears to use a single dose of 0.35g/kg which would be 28g for an 80kg person. So quite a lot but not excessively more than a “loading” dose for weight training.

Correct. I mistyped.

I did mean 5g, not 5mg. Thanks to everyone who pointed out the error.

Is it just creatine? I've had some good results - improved mental clarity, just to discover it has taurine added.

It is pure Creatine. This is definitely an above average result from the supplement, from what I understand. Probably from some sort of deficiency in the long chain of reactions that make it. My bet is that the sleep deficiency measured in this study is also impacting when of the reactions too. I wish it was easier to measure these things to actually know for sure.

Be careful with it, as too much Creatine can put extra stress on your kidneys.

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