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Comment by ortusdux | Hacker News Reader

Are there risks to creatine?

As it was mentioned elsewhere it might make existing cancers worse, and decrease survivability. Cancer seems to love it.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25601461/ https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2021.03.009

More accessible video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcMgHncZVIw

Generally no, it's expensively studied and has had daily consumption to be safe for upto 5 years at least (studies haven't generally gone longer).

That being said some people do have adverse effects to supplementation, e.g. excessive water retention, bloating, stomach discomfort, &c.

So try it, if you have a bad reaction stop.

Maybe

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3...

Not risks but sideeffects that might affect you. I just decided to cut creatine out during summer months, as I sweat significantly more when on creatine (and pee of course, but that is manageable). Now I already sweat more than average joe based on my genetics (yes, I had that checked out by a doctor) but on creatine it became really annoying during hot season. Since creatine definitely allows me to lift heavier and progress, I will just plan around that and put cutting/maintenance phases into the hot season off-creatine, and go back to supplementing it the rest of the year.

Anecdotally, it makes me feel like crap and significantly increased hair shedding. I've seen attestations of both side effects online as well. No idea how or why it could cause either, and the crumminess at least significantly improved very quickly after stopping it. Neither side effect seems to be especially common though.

Essentially none. Creatine supplementation is a good idea for most people, especially vegans/vegetarians.

Why especially those?

Nobody gets fired for supplementing vegans.

Because they lack all kinds of substances that meateaters get plenty of.

I'm a vegan, and I'm surprised this is downvoted, because it's true. There are plenty of things that you need to be careful to not become deficient in on a vegan diet: protein (in appropriate amino acid balances), creatine, b12, the good Omega 3s (from algae preferably; flax is missing DHA entirely), calcium, iron, to name a few.

You're fine if you take daily algae oil, multivitamin, iron supplement, calcium, and creatine (without going overboard on any of it) and making sure to get lots of protein from balanced sources (eating a ton of soy is actually not a bad idea, because it's a balanced protein), but I wouldn't recommend somebody who doesn't want to have to worry about their nutrition to go vegan. Enough omnivores are already deficient in vitamins and minerals, and veganism only makes it harder.

Thank you, and don't forget zinc.

Also have to be careful that your protein sources (mainly legume-derived?) don't have too much copper, nickel, heavy metals.

I have no beef (sorry not sorry) with vegans or vegetarians, but indeed, be careful with your nutrition.

Forgot that vegans also tend to get tons of carotene, which even though the body downregulates conversion to retinol, isn't great (but omnivores and vegetarians also often overdo dairy so there's that).

If I just look around me, i see my omni friends and fam all struggling with overweight and some have expressed problems with constipation and high-BP.

Myself OTOH, lean, low-BP (without any bad symptoms), dont even know what constipation should feel like.

I dont believe you protein remark. Protein deficiency is virtually unheard of.

I consider creatine and O3s a bio-hack more than a supplementation.

B12: yes. But most meat people eat has been fed a B12 supplement as well (as live stock do not live on dark soil that is abundant in B12; they live on concrete floors and eat factory-produced animal feed... with B12 added to it).

Calcium: nope. Magnesium is more important IMHO; IFF you do not get 2 portions of low-oxelate (most are low-oxelate) leaves per day. I try to get the leaves.

Iron: mostly a thing for menstruating women.

Zink: mostly a thing for ejaculating men.

As a vegan (for moral reasons) I take D3, B12, some Magnesium and sometimes Zink as supplements. I do bio hack myself: creatine, high DHA O3s, but also recreational/experimental drugs.

I agree veganism makes it harder. But I dont think that's what veganism is about: it is an ethical stance. If you are "eating a vegan-compatible diet, but not vegan" we should use another word: plant based diet (which includes fungi, yes, weird).

This is false, it's only B12 you need to supplement (and meat-eaters also get B12 through supplements, just indirectly).

Most people are not deficient in vitamins and minerals - the benefits of supplementing are highly exaggerated. Evidence is not good.

I beg to differ. Magnesium and vitD (especially in colder climates, or for indoorsy people) deficiencies are very, very, common.

There's lots of research on this.

Not vouching for creatine, but in general, humans get some vital nutrients from animal consumption. Vegans have to take some B-vitamins for best health due to what they don't get from meat. I assume creatine is the same.

Where do those animals get their B12 from, do you think? (Hint: they don't synthesize it either, they get it from their diet)

Today, because our food / water are so sterilized (good thing!), we don't typically get much bacterial B12 from unclean root vegetables, drinking from streams, etc. So yes, we need to supplement today. Because of advances in cleanliness.

B12 is about hygiene (not drinking from muddy puddles), not about an inherent problem with veganism.

Ruminants (cattle, sheep, and goats) get B12 from bacteria which are the primary digesting organisms in multistage stomachs, and which are absorbed in the upper (small) intestine, given feedstock with sufficient cobalt nutrient from the soil in which it was grown. Any B12 produced in human digestive tract occurs in the lower (large) intestine which is too late for absorption into the circulatory system of vitamins and nutrients. This means that what trace production may be produced in human digestion, whether it is increased or reduced by natural exposure to trace cobalt in the soil or water we consume has no effect on metabolic B12. Natural soil and water do not contain sufficient B12 producing organisms to result in this being a primary nutrient source, even in a theoretical 'stone age' level of uncleanliness.

Livestock which are fed grain and leaf forage grown from soils which are deficient in cobalt may not produce sufficient B12 for their own metabolic health and thus most commercially reared livestock will have trace cobalt compounds in the salt lick or mineral amended grain supplements.

These generally do not actually contain B12, as these compounds do not directly pass through the complex digestion of ruminants and would not actually serve the muscle growth targets of the herd, whereas trace cobalt will get those results reliably.

In turn those animals are the nutritional source of B12 for humans, as the two primary bioactive forms, methylcobalamin from cellular cytosol (the internal gel in cells) and adenosylcobalamin from mitochondria.

Vegans can reliably get non-animal sources of B12 from nutritional yeast or from manufactured sources which make the two bioactive forms through bacterial fermentation (typically Pseudomonas denitrificans and Propionibacterium freudenreichii <~ which is the Swiss cheese bubble-causing species) and then stabilized as cyanocobalamin through the addition of potassium cyanide in the presence of nitric acid and heat, which converts back into those two bioactive forms through human digestion.

If we eat meat that was raised to be healthy, then we don't need supplements to get enough B12 to be healthy. If we choose not to eat meat, then sure, supplemental sources will be important to meet metabolic needs. But, dirty roots and cloudy water are not the natural 'wild' source of B12 for humans in any reasonable imagined version of the stone age.

Because meat is the best source of creatine from diet.

Well, if vegetarians and those of the Vegan religion don't get enough creatine it is most likely related to them not partaking of an important source of the substance: meat.

Your body can synthesize creatine, so it's not essential, but meat is a source of exogenous creatine and eating it results in higher stored creatine levels, which is slightly good for muscle power endurance in the ~5-15 second effort range. Supplementing produces slightly higher relative improvements in creatine levels in vegetarians and vegans than it does in people who eat meat.

Excessively large doses make your stomach and perhaps your kidneys unhappy and supplements being lightly regulated there may be purity issues where the risk is what else is in it.

But it's pretty safe at recommended doses.

I get severe cramping from it (reproducible). All I can find are papers about this being a myth and some reddit threads about other people having this.

Did you try different sources I do not trust some of the stuff out there and often wonder if these supplements aren’t just generic white powder…

That would be an argument against trying a different source

I get this unless I drink a lot of water. About 48 fl oz seems to be the right amount for 10g creatine. Sometimes this needs to be combined with a light snack, like a handful of nuts.

I get it too if I don't drink a lot more water. So did many people on my sports team.

Creatine binds to water (making less water available to your muscles) and allows your muscles to work harder (which makes them need more water). So if you're not drinking a lot more water when you're taking creatine, you will get cramps from either dehydration and/or muscle overuse.

But once you're past the loading phase for creatine and getting sufficient hydration, it's supposed to lessen cramps because the water bound to creatine also becomes available for use again as the creatine is used by the body.

How much water can 3g of creatine bind to? Is it like orbeez?

My understanding is it's a bit of a bind and release process that moves the water from outside of the muscle cell to inside of it until the cell is saturated or the creatine is consumed.

So the amount of creatine changes the rate as which water is loaded into the cell, but the total amount of water needed is calculated based on your muscle mass. The figures I've seen is 2L extra water (spread evenly, not all at once) for a normally recommended 5g daily creatine intake during loading (which typically takes a month at 5g/day dosage).

Yeah, of course I tried to drink more water. I also tried to ramp up the dose slower.

But the cramps are really debilitating, as in random back muscle locks up debilitating, so I thought it best to just give up on this.

I don't think dosing affects much, as long as you have excess creatine, the extra water requirements are determined by your muscle mass.

If you have kidney problems, it's very dangerous. My friend's son took creatine to build muscles, but got Berger disease. Be careful!

It can make you hold more water weight so you should drink more water in response.

i personally have problems with tinnitus and hearing loss, and creatine use tends to trigger it due to water retention so i stay off the stuff.

Interesting, I wonder how that is related? Do you believe you are getting hearing loss because you are retaining more water, or because you are dehydrated from retaining more water elsewhere in the body with the same intake rate? Does this go away if you were taking creatine and drinking more water? Or does it come up if you simply drink more water?

Potentially lots poopies.

Worse beach looks

Creatine causes intramuscular water increases, not subcutaneous. Doesn't actually have a negative impact here.

None

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