Most people taking creatine just need to drink water. They drink more water using creatine. In reality, the water/hydration is doing the heaviest lift, not the creatine.
Anecdotal so safe to ignore this… but my hair did thin out but only after I was lazier on my work outs. Stopped taking and hair mostly returned to normal thank God.
How old are you?
Also, working out helps reduce stress. Does it seem more plausible that getting lazier on your workouts, rather than the creatine, increased stress in your life, thus the hair thinning?
I have never heard of creatine causing thinning hair.
BTW, it tends to trash the eGFR test which relies on an unbiased creatinine reading.
There's also no shortage of expensive water bottles being sold, and smart water bottles that track your drinking frequencies and flavor pods sold via subscription.
$50 for flavoured salt is pure insanity.
Like many hippie health trends that then go mainstream, a lot of it seems to filter in from Rastafarian traditions, where in the Ital diet they believe that alkaline water coming from the Blue Mountains in Jamaica (and other natural springs there which are naturally alkaline) help detoxify the acids in the body.
Not really. In the US at least, there’s the “Lead And Copper Rule”, which effectively requires utilities to adjust water composition to make the water minimally corrosive to copper and to lead. This often involves delivering water at a pH higher than 7. (San Francisco, for example, has water pH near 9, although it seems to be on the high end compared to other systems.)
Since taking creatine I feel so much more energized. I can make it through the day with just 2 coffees (was previously drinking 5 coffees and an energy drink).
Maybe it's placebo. Maybe it's not. I don't really care. I feel the benefit and I love it.
"Other studies already proved those effects with creatine with a normal dose schedule, what they were testing is if a single high dose would have a beneficial effect too, which it did. A normal schedule is 3-5g per day with an optional loading phase of 10-20g per day during 7 days.
In the study they used a single dose of 0.35g/kg which means 20-40g per dose. How do they not get diarrhea? The loading phase is usually split into several doses to avoid diarrhea and I can personally attest to that being a good idea."
What the above doesn't tell you is that taking a loading dose can draw water into your intestines causing diarrhea. You probably can guess how I found this out.
At a certain point I was wondering if it was just placebo, stopped taking it for a month or so, and was quickly back to feeling tired after training. Started taking it again, back to feeling energized. It really does work.
If you can say "Oh yea that makes sense" with the same set of knowledge you had both before and after some event happens, all else being equal, you have an expectation. That is enough for placebo.
You have to have literally 0 knowledge about an event to rule out placebo.
I drink lots of water. Lots and lots, to the point that it’s already kind of annoying how frequently I have to piss. I’m fairly skeptical that drinking yet more would yield any benefits.
Creatine works because of buffering ATP and creatine kinase.
A problem though is that 1lb of chicken breast contains about 1.5 grams of creatine.
If a person is already eating a modern high protein diet, they are most likely already getting a decent amount of creatine.
I would imagine a vegetarian taking creatine would get a much better effect.
Yes. It’s very rare for a supplement to have such strong and consistent evidence.
A widely-cited review says that short-term supplementation increases maximal power/strength by 5-15%. This in turn may increase the long-term gainz from strength-training exercise. Creatine also increases sprint performance by 1-5%. Though, there seems to be little if any benefit for endurance exercise like long-distance running.
But they fail to account for ice baths with Epsom.
Similarly you fail to account for anyone who takes creatine with any other food or beverage.
So I don’t love such theories.