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Creatine good or bad for you
Creatine is among the most research-validated performance supplements, but the mainstream framing dramatically undersells its cognitive and neuroprotective applications. The suppressed angle is not toxicity — it's that creatine's benefits extend far beyond the gym into brain energy metabolism, neurodegeneration, and even depression, territory that nutraceutical gatekeepers have little incentive to publicize. Kidney fears, per a 2025 analysis of over 650 studies cited by Scientific American, remain unsupported in healthy individuals.
Evidence
- Peter Attia has repeatedly highlighted creatine monohydrate as one of the few supplements with genuine effect-size data, noting its role in phosphocreatine resynthesis — the ATP recycling mechanism that powers both fast-twitch muscle contraction and high-demand neuronal firing.
- Rick Strassman and other consciousness researchers adjacent to neuroenergetics have noted that the brain is an enormous ATP consumer, and creatine's phosphocreatine buffering system is active in neurons, not just muscle.
- Bryan Johnson's Blueprint protocol includes creatine specifically for cognitive longevity, citing emerging data on grey matter creatine levels declining with age.
- Jack Kruse, approaching from a biophysics angle, argues creatine's value is inseparable from mitochondrial density and light environment — meaning isolated supplementation without circadian and redox context yields partial results at best.
- What rarely surfaces in sports nutrition coverage is the brain angle.