- Loo et al. 2015 found color cancer cells can use it as fuel and blocking the creatine cut metastasis in mice [0]
- zhang et al 20921 found it promoting mouse colon and breast cancer models [1]
not an expert in any way, but i’m guessing it depends on cancer type and there doesn’t seem to be human data either way. as a cautious person w a lot of familial cancer, i cycled off after i looked into it.
I honestly don't know whether it made a difference. Sleep didn't get worse, no noticeable metabolic effects. Possibly the "perma tired muscles" I've been suffering from increasingly since about age 57 (I'm an active cyclist) have gotten a bit better, with <50% of days affected rather than >90% last year, but even that is subjective.
If "taking the stuff" means "more uptake" (does it?) and there are other beneficial effects, bring it on.
It's safe, cheap, and long-term-study proven to be extremely effective.
You will want to increase your daily hydration (at least for otherwise healthy men, a good sign is that you're "peeing clear") as Creatine does increase water retention.
It sounds you have the hardest part of it underway - consistency.
There's lots of studies - if you can get over 20g per day it is noticeable to the brain and energy. Adding a few grams a week until you're up there I found it noticeable. 20-30g seems to be a noticeable range.
Supplements aren't always like a coffee spike, they build up and sustain quite well.
What is blowing my mind though is that at $dayjob my team is going through a crazy crunch to deliver a very strategic project and some of us are pushing 10-12h days often. I'm in hour 12 today for the second day in a row, and my head is not tired at all. Turns out the brain also uses a lot of ATP too, specially during demanding cognitive tasks so I guess it is creatine that is keeping the engine running smoothly even after so many hours.
I will like once every week or two have a poor night sleep. These days I take twice the dose and I don't feel like I'm sleep deprived at all. Feels like cheating! And apparently no side effects at all so far. Well, maybe I'm working too much.
So, creatine = good?
Creatine uptake promotes dendritic cell activation and enhances antitumor immunity
> …and support the use of creatine supplementation as a strategy to augment DC-based cancer immunotherapy.
So it seems that from this research the outcome is indeed creatine = good
This is vague and doesn't explain anything. Can you share any references that communicate what you're thinking about?
It became something of a panacea nutrient, recently around COVID.
This doesn't mean you can just pound it, but for the most part it just becomes waste product.
It's definitely becoming mainstream.
I've taken it off and on for the past 15 years, the most noticeable effect is about 5lbs of weight gain. I do think it helps gym performance and the increased water retention mames for better muscle definition.
(I regret posting that blog post, but the study and discussion is interesting)
In a healthy individual with a balanced diet and no deficiencies, there are essentially zero supplements that do anything whatsoever to a measurable degree. Essentially the entire supplement aisle at Whole Foods or whatever is completely woo and useless, and any advertisements are someone trying to make money from you, or some mindless viral craze with no evidence. The exception to this general rule is omega 3s (fish oil is great for this, algae oil is even better given potential heavy metals in fish), protein supplementation if you're weightlifting, and creatine. GLP-1s are a wonder drug that are great if you are not a healthy individual and wish to be.
Please… just read it as the isolated and interesting insight into biology that it is. It’s a fascinating in vitro result that shows a potentially important role for creatinine in a certain immune response.
> Notably, creatine uptake similarly boosted the activation and immunostimulatory function of human monocyte-derived DCs.
One of the things I'm trying to do better lately is to have a good sleep hygiene. Sun in the eyes early in the morning, no caffeine for the first 60 waking minutes of the day (adenosine absorption period), no screens 2 hours before bed and whatnot. Still, some nights I will just wake up in the middle of the night and won't be able to get back to sleep, then it's when I feel creatine helps
Edit: Typo
I take creatine daily but when I'm working out more than a couple of weeks, i feel much better than on weeks when I skip working out.
The GI issues are caused by the creatine absorbing water. This causes your gut to have more water than usual as it follows the creatine through the works… which causes… urgency.
The effect diminishes after you’ve been taking a regular dose for a while, even with just monogydrate (not HCL).
Some people say HCL causes less distress because it doesn’t draw water as much. Others argue that defeats the purpose of taking it.
Monohydrate is studied to death and proven effective, HCL not so much.
I've been taking it for almost a month and I plan to stop to see if I notice any change back that would make me want to start taking creatine again.
It has replaced in some ways caffeine for me.
The part of where creatine wipes out sleep deficit sounded like a stretch, but it definitely helps.
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
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.
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.
But it's pretty safe at recommended doses.
In the bouldering community there has also been a bit of an uproar where Emil Abrahammsson (find it on Youtube) did very light static holds 2+ times per day for ~30 seconds if I recall correctly for great tendon strength, this also had some influence on how people train for armwrestling. This style was nicknamed "Abrahangs".
Big heavy holds will help encourage blood flow without stretching them / stressing them as hard as big lifts.
It seems weird because it goes again ROM ideas, but it has definitely helped protect my arms for rock climbing as well as less fatigue in my legs for big lifts.
I suspect creatine is responsible for me not being able to get back to sleep easily, because once I'm awake, I'm awake.
I'm back on it now for endurance sports (trail running + cycling) and the advice is to just take 5g a day and don't worry about cycling off. At 5g/day it takes 4-6 weeks to saturate your muscles.
It does have a noticeable impact on water retention, so this year I cycled off six weeks away from my "A" race and lost 5lbs of water weight. It was a 100 mile mountain ultra so I thought the extra pop on the climbs probably wasn't worth the extra weight over the entire course (but probably was worth it while doing hill reps in training). Next year I'm sticking to shorter stuff where I'll run up more climbs. For those I don't plan to cycle off.
This is giving me flashbacks to using bodybuilding.com forums.. man, long time ago.
It is my 100% always buy supplement. I only have 2 of those now, protein the other. It absolutely helps me think better and feel better throughout the day. Noticeable when I stop taking it. And its dirt cheap. If I had more disposable income I'd have a few others but I went from tons of supplements to basically nothing. I never use PWOs or anything now, even when I do have money.
A little appetite suppression would be nice. I spend too much of my day thinking about food and that's annoying... For the past couple of years (I'm 56) my cravings for food have skyrocketed and if I ate as often or as much as I want to, I'd pack on weight fast.
A few years ago I did start taking 300 mg of nicotinamide riboside daily and that has helped quite a bit with inflammation.
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.
Overdose has been observed at 1,925 μg/d (77,000 IU per day). Acute overdose requires between 15,000 μg/d (600,000 IU per day) and 42,000 μg/d (1,680,000 IU per day) over several days to months.
~40% of people don't get enough vitamin D [1]. It's not useful to categorize it as some trend, based on people just not following general recommended dosing (with more precise dosing depending entirely on personal sun exposure and skin color).
edit: As an office worker, I take 10k IU per day when I'm entirely indoors (most of the time), but vary it based on sun exposure. I based this on recent studies, and have my doctors approval with an exactly center-of-the-nominal-range vitamin D serum level.
These numbers seem high to me. The 75 nmol/L (30ng/L) is not really a reliable value. It was published in a research that raises many questions due to conflict of interests.
Hence the
> ~40% of people don't get enough vitamin D
becomes:
> ~40% of people in the USA don't get enough vitamin D according to Dr. Holick
Where I live the norm is 20 ng/L and if we apply that, then the shocking 40% becomes more reasonable 10-15%
0: https://drink4good.com/can-drinking-too-much-carrot-juice-tu...
If you don't have a primarily fish based diet or spend hours under direct overhead sunlight every day without a shirt on, you're probably deficient as well.
> Recommendations to Obtain Adequate Amount of Vitamin D.
> Sun exposure to the face, arms, hands, and legs without sunscreen for 5 to 30 minutes at least twice a week or more between the hours of 10 am and 4 pm
Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8299926/
Now that's for most people: if you live in Alaska then during the winter maybe you need a litle more or something ... but the point is most people just need a little sun, < 30 minutes twice a week.
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.
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).