Looking for a way to boost your energy, sharpen your focus, and protect your long-term brain health? You might think you know creatine—the supplement long associated with “bro culture” and bodybuilders—but you’re likely only scratching the surface.
In this deep dive, we sit down with leading human performance expert Dr. Dan Pardi to uncover the surprising science behind creatine. Far from just a gym-bag staple, this well-researched compound is a powerful tool for cognitive performance, stress resilience, and even recovery from sleep loss. Join us as we explore how this humble molecule is being redefined as an essential part of a complete health and wellness routine—and why it might just be the “energy hack” you’ve been missing.
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The Amazing Benefits Of Creatine With Expert Neuroscientist, Dr. Dan Pardi
The Role Of Creatine In Health And Longevity
Welcome back to the show, where we are unlocking the secrets to your healthier, happier, and longer life. This episode is one I am especially excited about because we’re diving into a topic that most people think they understand, but few actually do. When you hear the word creatine, you might picture bro culture, bodybuilders, or gym culture. What if I told you that this simple, well-researched compound may play a powerful role, not just in physical performance, but in brain health, energy, recovery, and even longevity?
To help us unpack this topic, I’m joined by Dan Pardi. Dan is a leading expert in human performance, sleep, and circadian biology. He has worked with elite athletes, executives, and organizations around the world, helping people better align their biology with how they live, work, and perform. His work sits at the intersection of science and real-world application, taking complex physiology and turning it into practical strategies that actually move the needle.
In this conversation, we will explore what creatine really does in the body at a cellular level, why it is gaining attention far beyond the fitness world, and how it might support not just strength, but cognitive performance, resilience to stress, and long-term health. We also talk about how creatine fits into the bigger picture of sleep, recovery, and optimizing your energy across the day and across your life. If you’re someone who wants to feel sharper, stronger, and more energized, not just now, but for decades to come, this is a conversation you will not want to miss. Let us dive into this conversation with Dan Pardi.
Dan, thank you so much for being with us. We’ve had a little bit of a chance to get to know each other over these past few months. I am just really excited to learn from you, to dive into all things creatine. You’re such a seasoned pro and expert in the field of neuroscience. You’ve been studying human biology for your whole career. I am just excited to dive into this with you. Thanks for being with us.
Zach, I’ve been really looking forward to having this conversation with you and your community. As I have expressed to you before, I am so impressed with what you are doing at Shell Point. It is a model that I hope gets adopted worldwide. In this age, in this period of life, people can have more time than before, and learning more about health is really learning about yourself. It is not an abstract subject that may or may not affect you.
It does every day. Every time we learn something new that is important for us or could be, we now have the chance to exploit that new bit of wisdom for our own benefit for the rest of our lives. That is one of the reasons why I love talking about health and sharing ideas, because I know it is helping. I am so motivated to do what I do, and I am really delighted to be here with you.
I love that perspective. That is fantastic. Thank you. I am always curious, what led you to get into this field? You’ve been studying human biology your whole career. Was there something that happened? Where did that passion come from? What led you down the road to want even to get your PhD in neuroscience and study this topic? Obviously, you’re helping a lot of people, and that is always valuable, obviously, and motivating. I am just curious, share a little bit about your passion, where that came from.
A lot of people who are in health are there because they had some issue with health at some point in the past, and it made them lean in and want to learn about their bodies. That is not entirely the case. Of course, you have people who just become fascinated by the subject for its own merits, and that is totally legitimate, too. My journey really has two big moments that I can call upon. You think back, like, “How did I get where I am?” The first one was in high school. I was an athlete, so I played soccer, I played basketball, and I ended up twisting my ankle really badly.
I was taken away from my passions, and I wanted to figure out how I could get back onto the field, onto the court. It was at that moment, even though it was a negative experience at the time, that it also made me start to take an interest in the body for the first time. Reading, and that led to some performance interests. Reading about how to optimize my performance. I became the default performance coach for my team. People would ask me questions like, “How do I recover better? What should I be drinking before and after the workout or the game?” I loved it.
It was a virtuous cycle. I would read, and I knew, and I would share. The more I shared, the more people had questions. I also liked being able to help people that way. That was like the origin, I think. I went on into college, and I had no idea exactly what I wanted to do, but I had a lot of interests, which is great. It was not like I was not interested in things. In college, I ended up basically taking every subject in the sports science field. I was thinking about sports medicine. I was thinking, I really liked exercise physiology, and eventually I went to pursue a master’s degree in exercise physiology from Florida State.
I moved from California all the way across the country, went to Florida State, and had an amazing time. I studied so hard and had so much fun. National championship, national champion football team at the time. That had great energy in Tallahassee. I just learned that at this point in my education, I was hitting my stride, I think academically, and was getting really good at learning better than ever before. That was fun. In my career, I was not sure what I wanted to do. I thought about going to medical school. I actually was invited to take gross anatomy with the medical students.
They invited a couple of the top performers and the exercise physiology department to do that. I really loved that whole community and group. I had thought about that, but it did not quite feel right. I have great respect for medicine, but my interest was more in the performance, health, and wellness side. What I realized at that time, but I could not articulate as well as I can now, is that there really was not a career track for me in exactly the way that I wanted it to. It has actually led to some recent talks that I’ve given about how scientific wellness needs to become more of an official track in our healthcare system.
For instance, we imagine a position equivalent to your primary care doctor, which I call the HPE, the health performance expert. This person would be like a coach or their training would have them be educated in all the determinants of health, not just nutrition or not just exercise, but nutrition, sleep, and stress management. Everything that actually matters to the health of the body, it would be a generalist training, like your primary care doc is. Before you go to a specialist, you see that is your first point of contact. The reason why we need this position is that the time requirement is totally different. When you interface with that type of person, it is different, too.
Building A Complete Healthcare System With Health Performance Experts
You actually go see your health performance expert, not when you get sick, but all the times in between, so that you can take knowledge that exists in the world and embed skills into an individual so that they can live differently with the knowledge that they have. We do not get that type of training. It is almost like everybody knows how to do all this stuff. You just need reminders and tips. That is not true. Nutrition is not just a topic. It is a category. There are thousands of topics within the nutrition category itself.
Nutrition is not a single topic—it’s an entire category. Mastering it is a lifelong process of learning and developing the skills needed to navigate your health.
It is a lifetime process of learning and embedding skills that the individual then needs to navigate health. When you look at it as this really fun, enriching opportunity, not this overwhelming, “There is so much I need to know, and I’ll never know it all.” That is a good attitude to have. It’s like enjoy it, keep learning, keep striving, and there are always going to be topics to captivate your interest. That is where I am at now in terms of my perspective, but that career did not exist, and I am actually trying to do some work, some thought leadership work to try to change our healthcare system so that position becomes a reality.
I love that vision, and I love the way you just eloquently describe that role and the importance of that role. We’re at this junction here now at this time in history where there is a shift, it seems, that is happening from sick care to healthcare, or at least a lot of people are pushing in that direction now. I love that. I think that makes so much sense, the health performance experts. Are you getting some traction with that idea, or how do you bring vision to life?
I am going to be writing about this in my book. I presented it at the Institute for Human Machine Cognition, which is in Florida. There are two locations, Pensacola and Ocala. I’ve done two different versions of that, one on health measurement, which is a talk you’ve seen. The idea is that if we were to “fix” everything in our healthcare system right now, we would still be disappointed in the outcomes because the healthcare system does have a lot of issues in achieving its own objectives, but it is incomplete.
A full healthcare system would have a sick care arm, which is what we have now, and a much more robust self-care arm. The sick care, it is like going to your experts. They have disease-level expertise. They’re going to evaluate you for a referral, medication appropriateness, and a procedure. It is really all that group has in terms of time. If you go to your primary care doc, they do not have an hour to work with you. Even if they did, let us say you went to your doctor four times a year, and you had an hour with them, and they spent the entire time talking about, let us say, health and wellness.
Put that in the context of if you were trying to train a skill, like you’re trying to get good at guitar or you’re trying to get good at soccer. Meeting your coach four times a year for an hour is not adequate at all. It is a totally different framing. Once you see that mentally, you’re like, “This makes a lot of sense.” We’ve treated health as though it were not something that we needed to earn skill in, that we could outsource it entirely to other experts. While that arm is important, it is incomplete. My goal now is to try to illustrate a more complete vision. Hopefully, that’ll have an influence on how our healthcare system evolves.
That is an amazing vision. I love that, and it makes a ton of sense. Thanks for pushing that ball forward. It is a big task, but one that is super important, and I think it seems like there is a lot of energy behind right now to move in that direction. We’ll keep going. Tell me, I want to shift gears and dive into creatine. That is something that you’re an expert on. There are a lot of myths around creatine, it seems. You have a PhD in neuroscience, and I want to just hear your perspective. Can you break down what creatine is for those who are not super aware? Obviously, it is one of the most widely used and studied supplements out there. It is also cheap, which I like. It is getting a lot of good press lately.
The story of creatine is really interesting, and I love the story behind any topic in health. My PhD mentor, Dr. Jamie Zeitzer, fabulous human. He always instilled in me that a good scientist is a good historian. I’ve seen that with the best scientists that I’ve had a chance to work with, they understand the lineage, the history behind a topic. They understood how our knowledge around that subject evolved over time, and not just what is happening currently. I’ve always tried to embrace that. My own personal journey is the very first study that I ever took part in in the mid 1990s was on creatine during my master’s degree. Let me do a little level setting just so people understand what it is.
Creatine As An Essential Energy Store For ATP Regeneration
Creatine is a nitrogen-containing organic compound, and it is found throughout the body and most abundantly in muscle. That is where you’re going to find the majority of the creatine in the human body. Creatine is a compound that is made of three amino acids, arginine, glycine, and methionine, and it is stored in your cells as something called phosphocreatine. It is creatine plus a phosphate group. What this is primarily doing is giving up, thinking of creatine really as a store of extra phosphates. The reason why that matters is that the main energy currency in the body is ATP, which stands for adenosine plus three phosphates. You are using ten million molecules of ATP per cell per second. This is a huge amount.
Ten million per cell per second.
We have trillions of 37 trillion cells.
That is a lot of zeros of molecules.
We are using more ATP than there are known stars in our universe on a daily basis. In fact, you use so much ATP that if you were to calculate all of the weight of every reaction, you’re basically rebuilding your entire body weight in ATP every single day. The analogy that I give is, think about, let us say you live in a cash-only world. You can only pay for things in cash. That is ATP. Creatine is like your bank card, so you can get cash quickly. It is not your job. Your primary job is your source of income. That is, you are eating food and having that translate, being broken down, and eventually getting turned into ATP, but that process is slow. You only get paid every two weeks. This is an analogy.
You can have your gig work, as I say. Your gig work is like, I am also going to drive an Uber, and I am going to make some cash more quickly, and that is going to be more like glycolysis, it is making energy faster, but of course, you’re not making as much in your gig work than your primary job. You still need to have that extra store of cash, and that is what creatine is in this analogy. If your spending is high, you need to have that storage of cash on your debit card so that you can keep your transactions flowing.
If you have no energy or no phosphates stored on your debit card, when you’re using energy at a high pace, and you run out, everything is going to slow down. Your transactions are going to just stop completely. That is my analogy for how to think about creatine. We used to think about it just as this exercise molecule, and that has everything to do with its history. That is where it was originally, I would not say discovered because we’ve known about it since the mid 1800s, but it really just sat in textbooks for 150 years until a research scientist and group named Roger Harris.
The History Of Creatine Supplementation In Sports Performance
Basically, he discovered that oral creatine supplementation could increase muscle creatine stores and that this actually led to performance improvements in ballistic-like activity, like sprinting. You could get like a three percent change in your sprint performance. It does not sound that much, but if you’re an Olympic athlete who is, let us say, competing in the a hundred meter dash, that three percent is literally the difference between even making the final race and winning gold.
Research showed that oral creatine supplementation can increase muscle creatine stores, leading to improved performance in explosive activities like sprinting.
It is a big deal. This is where creatine came from. Even though it was known, it now started to become broadly known. What happened is a really cool story where there was a sports scientist who was working with the British Olympic team, and so his name is Steve Jennings, and Roger Harris handed him a paper that said, “Look at this. This could help your athletes.” Steve Jennings is like, “This is amazing. Where can we get this stuff?” It turns out that the global supply of creatine was one kilogram.
That is it in the whole world.
To put that in context, that is enough to supply an athlete with maybe for 50 days, not an entire team. That is training to compete in the Barcelona Olympics. They had 47 days to come up with some techniques. They started to work with a local pharmaceutical company, and they were able to make creatine. They put it in these effervescent tablets, where the effervescence is not important, but it was the first form. You could drop the creatine into some water, and you could drink it.
It was a way to then get more creatine into the body. This led to Linford Christie winning the 100-meter dash in the Olympics that year. Afterwards, when he was being interviewed, he talked about creatine, and guess what happened? The world exploded with interest. Every athlete was like, “I have to get my hands on this stuff.” Just in the US alone, the 1993 Barcelona Olympics, within a couple of years, by 1995, it was already a $50 million market in the United States.
This is right around the time when I started to do my first research trial, looking at whether or not, because we did not really even know exactly how it worked. We thought that people would gain some weight when they take creatine because it is a hydrophilic water-loving molecule. It means when it gets pulled into cells, it pulls water with it. Your cells become more hydrated. The question that we were looking at is, “Is this really like an energetic benefit?
Is it contributing to improving energy, or is it just a lean weight effect?” Imagine if you’re lifting weights, for example, and you have fuller muscles, that is going to be able to create more of a lever for lifting weights. Maybe you’re only becoming stronger because of the hydration effect. That is what we tested. I do not have to go too much into detail there, because the point is we too found that there was a real ergogenic or sports-enhancing effect. For probably fifteen years, the world’s perception of creatine was just as a sports-enhancing product. That was it. That is where it started. That is where the story started. That is where all the research went.
If you remember what I said earlier, creatine is really a compound that keeps energy flowing when energy demand is high, and your body is having a hard time keeping up. Right around 2010, the perception of and the research around creatine went from something fairly narrow to something much wider. Now we’re really at the tip of the iceberg still, maybe no longer at the very tip, but we are still learning about just how many things creatine is good for. If you think of it fundamentally as an energy-supporting molecule and you realize how fundamental energy is for life and every single process in the body, creatine takes on a whole new level of importance.
Tell us about some of those things, and I’ve heard so many more people are adopting this, and so, as you said, you’ve been at this for 30 years, studying creatine, but most of the world really had, like you said, a narrow view until about 2010, when the research widened. It has been more recent that now it is more widely adopted. A lot of women are using creatine now and talk to us about the benefits of using creatine for other aspects of our health besides just sports performance.
I’ll do some additional level setting on how it is working and what it is doing. We are now looking at it for not only supporting better sleep at night, but also for sleep loss. If you’re not getting enough sleep and you have creatine on board, this might be the most interesting product, ingredient, supplement, whatever that we’ve ever discovered at changing you from, “I feel terrible because I did not get enough sleep,” to “I am performing normally, and I feel good.” That has so many benefits.
My PhD in neuroscience was actually in sleep neuroscience. My PhD work was looking at the intersection of what I call ecologically relevant amounts of sleep loss. I’ll explain what that means. A lot of research, a lot of sleep research will say, “We’re going to give you no sleep for one night, and then we’re going to test your cognitive performance the next day. That describes the field in general. That is good because you’re really stressing the system to see if there is really an effect there. However, ecologically relevant means, most of us, when we miss sleep, it is not like we miss an entire night. We just do not get as much.
My research was looking more at the sensitivity around sleep loss with cognitive performance. Let us say you just miss a couple of hours of sleep. How does that show up in altered brain performance? Specifically, how did that lead to different eating behavior? We’ve known that connection to be real. There was epidemiological work that shows if you do not get quite enough sleep, then you have alterations in insulin sensitivity, and you might have altered eating behavior. A lot of times, when you are experiencing sleep loss, you will not automatically see how your decision-making is altered.
It changes you in ways that are somewhat covert to you. They’re hidden. That does not mean that you cannot see them. You can move them from more of a non-conscious or subconscious state into your conscious. Like, “I am not feeling great today. I might be acting differently.” I’ll give you an example. When you are sleep-deprived, your risk calculation is entirely different. This is what casinos take advantage of. Casinos make most of their money in the middle of the night. They keep people up with the social environment and weak drinks, not too strong and light.
What ends up happening is that people will develop an optimism bias in their decision making, which means you’re more likely, the tired mind is more likely to focus on the potential win. I could win this amount of money and not face the consequences of how much I could lose. People will now bet extra money during this time when they’re in this altered state. They’ll wake up the next day and think, What have I done? I just lost $500.” That is something that casinos are very well aware of and take advantage of, and so that is just an illustration of how your brain changes when you do not get enough sleep.
Mitigating Cognitive Decline And Decision-Making Impairment Due To Sleep Loss
That is all the context for creatine. There has really not been anything that helps protect us against the ill effects of sleep loss. You can feel subjectively sleepy and groggy and moody and all that. Yet there are also other changes that are happening, like I just described in terms of how you’re thinking. The changes in the brain under the conditions of sleep loss are profound. We all can recognize that I did not quite get enough sleep, and I do not feel myself today. I do not have the energy. What creatine does is that during sleep loss, there is a particular metabolic state in the brain that occurs.
You have a buildup of ammonia, you have a buildup of acidity, and it is exactly those conditions that actually help the brain absorb more creatine. When your energy is struggling to keep up with the demands of just being awake, as if you do not have to think hard. Your brain is working really hard just being awake. When you do not get enough sleep, you’re building on top of some of that sleep pressure that you built up yesterday. Instead of starting from a fresh slate, when you do not get enough sleep, you’re building on top of this burden that was not fully resolved from yesterday.
You just feel that the whole day. What creatine does is because it is helping restore energy, ATP, at a faster rate. When ATP is used, it breaks down from ATP three phosphates to two phosphates, then it needs to regenerate back to ATP so that it can continue to use your cash. Creatine helps the body make energy ATP faster when it is being used at a fast rate. Some of the research on this is just mind-blowing, like there are a couple of different studies, one in an older population, one in professional rugby players, where they give them, I do not know why, but they always give them 21 hours of sleep loss.
Creatine helps your body regenerate ATP more quickly when energy demands are high, allowing you to produce power faster and sustain peak performance.
Almost a full day. They’ll measure in that period where you might have usually gone to sleep at night. What you notice in the placebo group is that performance degrades reliably as you could, as you would imagine. The sleepier you get, the worse your performance is on a variety of tasks. Your ability to hold information in your working memory, your reaction time gets slower, and information processing gets slower. You get dumb, you get slow, you make mistakes, you cannot remember anything, and everything slows down. With Creatine on board, all of those processes get preserved at a much higher rate than they would have been. You’re performing almost as though you had full sleep. It is unbelievable. That is one of the most interesting areas for creatine.
That is fascinating. You’re obviously a leading expert in that field. Thanks for helping us understand that. That is really fascinating and so interesting about the casinos and the optimism bias and how the world can be set up to take advantage of those things. One practical thing, if you are going to a casino, make sure you take some creatine.
There you go. I am going to insert. I have in some talks that I’ve given because we’ll talk about dosing, because I really want the audience to get a firm grasp on how much I take, and do I really need to do loading and all that? I should mention that in this study, which I was just referring to, in fact, all of them are giving a higher dose than what is common, a single high dose, 0.35 milligrams per kilogram. For a person, my body weight, that is going to be like 35 grams of creatine. It is a lot because usually what people take is 5 grams a day.
We’re talking, 5, 6, 7 times as much, depending on what your body weight is. By the way, a dose that size could definitely cause gastric upset. What you want to do is take it with food. I would not have that be your first dose. Get to know how your body does with creatine, and then you can push the dose under conditions like this. Let us talk about translating that to when a person might benefit from this. Let us say you’re taking a red eye and overnight, let us say you’re an executive of some sort, and you’re flying from New York to London, and you have to give a talk the next morning at 8:00 AM. I’ve been in this position before.
Now 8:00 AM is like the middle of the night for me, and so I have to be absolutely on at a time when I am usually asleep. That is tough. I did not sleep very well because I was flying like it is really tough constraints that you might get alerted by the moment. That is just being in front of people will cause you to be able to perk up quite a bit, but that would be a perfect example of when they use creatine. The other one that I’ve been doing recently is let us say you get invited to some event, like it is a friend’s birthday party and they happen to be starting having dinner, at like 8:00 on a Friday.
Optimizing Dosing Strategies For Daily Routine And Specific High-Demand Scenarios
You’ve been busy all week. Your brain is tired, and the dinner is starting an hour before your typical bedtime. I will take 10 grams of creatine around 5:00, 6:00, or 7:00 PM. I will notice feeling so much better. It is not like a stimulant. It is not like you feel riled up. If you had a huge dose of caffeine, rather than just preventing it, it would keep your body and your brain continuing to make energy. You just feel normal. You do not feel tired, you feel good. Your personality is there, your energy is there. You can recall words.
I now use creatine daily, but I also use it conditionally, where I take a little bit more for a particular purpose. This dinner example that I just gave, traveling, and people who do shift work. There are all sorts of reasons in life, some professional, some just personal, that would put you in a position where you could use a little bit more brain energy, because you’re not getting the sleep that you would. Creatine is by far the number one force that we even know of that can help you do well under challenging conditions.
That is fascinating. I have never thought about taking it conditionally like that. I use creatine. I take it in the morning, just a part of my supplement stack in my normal routine. I actually mix it into my coffee because I’ve learned that, and maybe you can tell me if this is true. Maybe it is not, but I’ve learned that if you dissolve it in something that is warm or hot, it is more bioavailable. Is that true?
There are a few things that we’ve looked at for bioavailability. Having it with a meal, having it in a warm beverage, or having it with something that is going to stimulate an insulin response. I am always interested in understanding optimization around, how do we get more out of the things that we’re doing? That is always good to know. You have to counterbalance that with complication. Does it complicate the situation enough that now your fundamental behavior is limited by the complexity?
I’ve made it so hard on myself that I am actually not being very consistent with this. This is just like a general comment. Taking it with your coffee is great. It seems like a great idea because comparing one behavior with a regular habit is a great way to ensure compliance. I have a cup of coffee every morning right here. If I take my creatine with that, I am now associating it with a regular routine behavior. That is good. Putting creatine into a hot, acidic beverage can cause creatine to break down. More of it is going to convert from creatine into creatinine, which is not an active substance.
It is how you excrete creatine, but it is only a couple of percent. It is not a big deal. If you drink your coffee right away, I think you’re fine. If you are somebody who is going to drink your coffee over the course of like two hours, you sip at it, you’re going to experience a more substantial degradation of creatine. I would just have it separately. Now it is not a problem. It is just that you’re getting less of the creatine. If you drink it within twenty minutes or so, you should be fine. If you sip it slowly over a period of time, you’re actually probably getting half of the creatine that you would have put into the cup.
That makes sense. I am taking, I’ve actually increased my dose of creatine over the last, I do not know, maybe six months ago, because of a lot of the research that has come out that I’ve heard and listened to. I was taking five. You have 5 grams of it, and now I opted for 10 mg. Can you tell us about dosing? Also, who should be taking creatine? My sixteen-year-old son takes it. I think that my wife should be taking it. Who should be taking creatine?
I will start with those. The canonical standard dose for decades now has been 5 grams of creatine monohydrate per day. I also mentioned a form of creatine that most of the research is built off of creatine monohydrate. It is stable. It’ll remain in a jar on your shelf for years as long as it does not get water in it. Typically, supplements will come with those packs that are inside the supplements to try to absorb moisture so it does not cause clumping. I’ve had creatine, which has been sitting on my shelf for a while. When you open the jar again, it is all hard, and you have to mix it up.
That is just because hydration or some water gets in there, and it causes the molecules to bind. It does not look the way that it did when you first opened that jar. That is just a little bit of administrative context here. 3 to 5 grams a day has really been the standard for a long time. You will also hear people discuss a loading phase. This is all going back to sports performance. The athletes would take 20 grams a day. Usually, 5 grams four times. One in the morning, one at lunch, one late afternoon, one a little bit later, something like that.
That is going to fill up your, it is going to saturate your muscle creatine stores faster. If you do not take the loading dose over 5 to 7 days and you just take 5 grams per day, you’ll end up in the exact same place, but it’ll take, say, three weeks. We can discuss the merits of that. Sometimes, feeling it more reliably is a good thing because it helps your mind associate that the benefit is real. If it takes three weeks, you’re getting the same benefit, but since you’ve acclimated to that more slowly, you’re like, I am not sure if it is working or not when it absolutely is. That is more like a behavior question.
How much do your muscle stores go up? About 20% on average, but if you’re a vegan or a vegetarian, you will see that those people who maintain that, those dietary style have a 40% increase in muscle creatine. The reason why is that we get creatine in our diet if we’re eating animal products. There is virtually no creatine in vegetable sources. That is why vegetarians or vegans will benefit even more because we basically get creatine into our bodies without supplements by eating it, and our bodies make it.
Creatine is naturally found in animal-based foods, while plant-based foods contain little to no creatine.
The way that it makes it, you make about 1 or 2 grams a day. It starts in the kidneys, where the first part of the molecule is made. That partially built molecule moves to the liver, and the liver will finish completing the creatine molecule. It gets into circulation, and a bunch of different cells in the body have the creatine transporter on those cells. The manufacturing is outsourced. It is not happening in the cells, and it pulls in the creatine, and we have creatine transporters in our gut, on our immune cells, in our brain, and in our muscles.
We’ve thought about it as just a muscle compound for the longest time because over 90% of creatine is stored there, but that does not mean that other cells are not using it. They are. When you take more than 5 grams per day, think of here is the analogy that I give. Imagine this like a concrete slope, and you’re at the top, and you pour water down, and there are holes in the slope. Those first couple of holes absorb all that water, and none gets to the ones below them. When you pour one glass, it fills up those top holes.
You pour a second glass, and now it can roll past the filled-up holes at the top, and it can actually make it to some of the ones at the bottom. Think of that as an analogy for yourselves. It has now become popular for people to take 10 grams per day, and you’re exploiting that exact idea. You’re filling up your muscle stores, you’re keeping them topped off, and the addition can get into other cells in the body, like the brain, and that is a great interest happening in the brain. Not just for sleep loss, but for other purposes as well.
I’d love to hear about that, too, about the benefits, because I see there’s a lot of research around the benefits for long-term brain health as well. You tell us a little bit about what is being discovered there.
Potential Neurological Benefits Including Synaptic Plasticity And Neuroprotection
The brain is becoming a topic of great focus now in popular culture and in research because of increased risks of incidence of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, and things like that. Because we’re seeing these brain-related issues rising, there has also been greater interest in how to preserve brain health. In this conversation, while there is interest in looking at creatine for particular disease states, there is definitely an argument for taking creatine at the right dose for the preservation of brain capabilities as we get older.
We know that when we get older, our ability to generate and maintain energy diminishes for a variety of reasons. Our mitochondria become less good at making energy, the whole communication system for energy, and you develop insensitivities to your insulin and glucose. You just have all the different ways our body is making energy become somewhat constrained. They’re not as good as they used to be. With creatine on board, it is doing a lot. You can increase, if you have the right dose of creatine, if you’re taking somewhere like a loading phase, somewhere between 10 grams and even 20 grams a day.
You’re going to increase brain creatine source somewhere between 5% and 15%. Let us just say, like, 10%, 11% on average. Not as much as muscle. Muscle you’re increasing at about twenty percent. There are a variety of different mechanistic pathways that are of interest. Improving bioenergetics, your brain’s ability to sustain energy. Neuromodulation, it might be a neurotransmitter. I just created a reel for Instagram talking about a new paper that came out of China, in which this group was looking to identify new neurotransmitters.
After twelve years of looking and searching, they identified creatine as possibly a new neurotransmitter. It fulfills a lot of criteria. You find it in synapses, which are like the final communication structure. It is released into the synapse. We have not found a creatine receptor yet. That is important. That is a missing piece of the puzzle. All these different criteria for something qualifying as a neurotransmitter seem to be present for creatine. The authors had speculated that up to 1% or 2% of neurons in the entire nervous system might be creatinergic, meaning that they’re using creatine as the signaling molecule.
Think of neurotransmitters as the communication language. They’re like words that you would speak to someone else. Those are the words of neurons to communicate. Neuroprotection, neurotrophic support. Neurotrophic support means think of that as fertilizer to grow new neurons and replace them. Synaptic plasticity for learning. As you experience life, as you’re working on learning paddle or paddle pickleball, how do you get better? That is a form of learning, too, with repetition.
Not just Sudoku, not just learning facts and figures, but actually procedural learning. Doing a behavior like dance or pickleball and getting better at it. That is the brain adjusting to environmental input. A requirement is that you will undergo what is called synaptic plasticity, which means those neurons are changing in response to environmental stimuli, and you’re developing a skill. Creatine helps with that. We’re talking about better cognition.
We’re talking about better mood regulation, which I’ve not yet mentioned, but that is a really big one. We’re talking potentially about delaying, avoiding, or even preventing disease. Of course, we cannot say that, but these are just things that have not been shown. I want to be very cautious around that point, but it is being looked at as something that could, mechanistically, there is a biological possibility that it could lead to us needing a lot more work there. That is exciting. The effects on sleep. We’ve thought about it as a muscle compound. You could just position it entirely as a brain compound, and have that be like the anchor point for how you think of creatine.
Just to summarize some of this. Taking it daily, what ages, who should be taking this, in your opinion? How safe is it for younger kids and much older, elderly people as well?
I want to answer this question by talking about dietary intakes. We talked about how the body makes 1 or 2 grams a day. If you’re an omnivore and you’re eating sources of creatine like beef and fish, you’re probably consuming another 1 or 2 grams a day. What I am fascinated by, I always look at hunter-gatherer intake levels because so much of human evolution, modernity is just a tiny sliver of the environmental conditions that humans are now living in, but they’re different than the environmental conditions under which humans evolved.
Ninety-nine percent of human existence actually was living as hunter-gatherers. At least during certain times of the year, we had a very high meat intake. We have biological presidents for taking in at least 5 or 10 grams of creatine a day just from diet. In fact, a quick side note. I am very excited to publish. I do a Saturday newsletter on Human OS, which is an educational site that I’ve done for years. I am going to be talking about a new paper that argues that meat intake is probably one of the best things we can do for our brains as we get older.
The paper is fascinating because it flips the narrative. It does so in this, I would say, I do not want to say creative, but in a way that you had not really thought about previously. I’ll leave that as a cliffhanger, but you can go check it out because the newsletter is free. Anyway, there is total biological precedence of taking in 5 or 10 grams a day and maybe even higher. Who should take this and how much? You have a question about your sixteen-year-old son. I’ve got a 3-year-old son, a 7-year-old son, and a 12-year-old son. The 7 and 12-year-olds take some creatine every day, just a couple of grams. If you think about it, their bodies are working so hard.
They’re playing sports, they’re growing. The almost thirteen-year-old is about to start going through puberty. What an energetically demanding time. He does jujitsu and wrestles. He has this incredible energy demand. Supporting energy, I think, can help his body with the energetic needs that it has. I am totally a fan of that. For older people, the need for creatine might increase even as we get older. I do not know if that is even the right way to put it, but I think maybe the importance of creatine supplementation goes up. I think our body is going to use our whole lives because we’re making it, we’re eating it, but supplementation with a higher dose might have even more noticeable benefits as we get older.
I love how you mentioned daily intake plus conditional intake. For me, as I mentioned, I am taking 10 grams a day. I have increased that from 5 to 10. If I did not get a good night of sleep or I had something demanding coming up, I could maybe throw in an extra 10 grams a couple of hours ahead of time, and that would be totally fine. I know some people are going to ask the question, too. You mentioned that it is hydrophilic people who do. I do feel like there is still a myth out there about weight gain. Is that a thing? Is that not a thing?
Weight gain is a thing, but bloating is a difference. Some people have thought, “I am going to get bloated when I take creatine.” Many things that start in the world of athletics are changed by the athletes that are taking it from the origin. You had a lot of bodybuilders who were taking it. They’re not only taking creatine. Turns out bodybuilders take steroids, and a lot of people who take steroids, particularly in the 1990s, like right now, there has been a change in the perception, I think, of hormones, testosterone replacement therapy.
It is a lot more out in the open now for a recreational athlete or somebody who is just in midlife. It is a hormonal replacement like women have been doing for a long time. It has less of a stigma to it, but then there are also still synthetic anabolic steroids, and bodybuilders are notorious for taking a lot of different types and trying to maximize muscle usage and get it, and getting bloated, and then also saying, “I am taking creatine.” That was it. All sorts of things were attributed to creatine, and it might have been other things. I am a hyper-responder with creatine. I’ll reliably gain 10 pounds when I take it, but it is the feeling and not, and that is definitely the high end from my conversations with other people, but not unprecedented.
Other people will experience that too. That is proportional to my body size of 215 pounds. Ten pounds for me, percentage-wise, is less of a gain if somebody is 130, 140 pounds. Again, what you’re doing is you’re pulling water into your muscles. I’ll be curious to know your experience, Zach, but the feeling is more like how you feel when you’ve worked out, and your muscles are a little bit fuller, and they feel tighter?
That is more like the feeling of creatine, not that I had a huge bowl of ramen soup and sodium, and I am feeling squishy and puffy the next day. That is a different feeling. Those people have falsely attributed some of that inner cellular weight gain to your muscles, which feels good. Most people like it because you’re not going to get huge. Just imagine how you feel after 30 minutes of a workout. You just feel a little tighter.
That is the feeling of creatine and not like, “I am dealing with a lot of extracellular fluid, and I feel really puffy.” In fact, creating would probably prevent that because again, it is pulling water into the cells, not having it on the outside of cells. That is an important discussion around the weight gain that you do experience and the weight gain that you do not experience.
It is more of a muscle mass gain. You’re hydrating muscles. I know you’re the chief health officer of Qualia, and I do not want to wrap this conversation up without at least mentioning your work with Qualia and what you’re doing there. Can you tell us just briefly a little bit about that? We’re to have you back to talk more about all the things you’re doing with Qualia and other topics that we can cover. I’d love that. Tell us a little bit about that. Give us a little teaser there so we can connect with you that way, too.
I am really a scientific communicator. Scientists do studies, and I’ve done studies in the past, but I am not doing studies now. I’ve chosen a path of communicating health science so that people can understand these consequential ideas better, so they can benefit from them in their lives. I’ve been doing that for more than a decade with my work at Human OS. If you want to check it out, HumanOS.me. I’ve been a fan of Qualia for a while, really, since their origin. I’ve known their founders, and we’ve stayed in touch. I use their Qualia Mind formula, which I love.
It is a nootropic stack, which means there are a variety of compounds that are in that formula designed to help the brain perform well while thinking. The testament to that is the fact that I have just taken it for ten years. You just do not, it is hard to continue taking something when you do not really feel it, but I have very noticeable benefits with that. That was my relationship with the company. Almost a year ago, I ended up joining the company as their chief health officer. The goal really was to help communicate the science, not just the science of our products, but also the areas that we are developing solutions for.
We see ourselves not only as a company that formulates products, but also formulates perspective. How do you think about these ideas? Our ambition or aspiration is not just to walk people down a purchasing pipeline. It is just to educate, just do a good job. Helping people see the value of a product, but even just a therapeutic area. The smarter people are about an area, the more likely they are to not just try something, but to continue to benefit from it. Not only do I like that the company’s mission is broad, but it is beyond just the product.
The more knowledgeable people are about a subject, the more likely they are not only to try it, but to stick with it long enough to experience its benefits.
Again, it is the education, too, but also their strategy on how they formulate products. You’ll often see a single-ingredient compound, like this ingredient, which has been shown to have benefits. The way I describe Qualia is we’re a system-based company. We’re trying to support an entire system in doing a task. That is much less reductionist than just this single ingredient, because in science, you have to usually narrow your inquiry to something very specific, so you know, does creatine have an impact on X? The more factors you add in, the harder it is to know exactly what is working.
That is the constraint of science. The naturalistic reality of life is that we are not running, repeating a clinical trial. We’re trying to harness all these different ideas into a lifestyle pattern that benefits us. Qualia makes formulations that are around trying to optimize in a particular area. Qualia Mind has lots of different ingredients. Qualia Creatine Plus, it did not require as much. We do not have to have many ingredients in there to really optimize it. We have something called OptiCreatine. That is a form of micronized creatine monohydrate.
Creatine monohydrate is, again, that is the gold standard form of getting creatine into the body. Pretty much every study, for the most part, is looking at creatine monohydrate. Everything we talk about, that is the version of creatine that has been used. Creatine monohydrate is gritty. If you put it into a glass, it sinks to the bottom. You have to keep stirring it, and it tastes like you’re chewing sand. The micronized creatine monohydrate is the same form of creatine, but it is pulverized into tiny particles. It dilutes much better in a drink.
That is a very practical benefit because people are sensitive to taste and texture and all that. Oftentimes with other creatines, you have to add in a lot of artificial sweetener. I’ve tried so many that have been so sweet that they’re repulsive. That’s one potential issue. There might be some better absorption benefits from having it be tiny like that. More action, more of what you drink actually gets into the body. We add another form of creatine, creatine magna power, which is creatine plus conjugated with magnesium. We should talk about magnesium sometime because this is an equally interesting subject, and I am absolutely fascinated by magnesium.
We’re not getting enough. Half of the United States does not get enough. Our plants are diluted in terms of the magnesium they have. The broccoli head that you’re eating on your plate tonight has 25% less magnesium than your grandparents’ same block of broccoli did. We used to get a ton of it in our water. We’re not anymore, as we’re filtering out the bad stuff. Also, some of the magnesium in it. We’re at a real constraint. It turns out that all of that ATP, if you remember from the beginning of the conversation, in order for ATP to be usable, it must be bound to magnesium.
What magnesium does is it neutralizes the very heavy negative charge that phosphates carry. That then makes the ATP molecule much more likely to be used by enzymes. Ninety-five percent of your ATP in your body is bound to magnesium, and more than half of the United States is not meeting the recommended daily intake. As we get older, absorption is limited and hampered, and the recommended daily intake might only be half of what’s optimal.
That’s a whole conversation then.
The Science Of System-Based Supplement Formulation And Bioavailability
Magnesium. If we’re supporting energy through creatine, we also want to support energy by adding some magnesium at the time you’re taking this. The third ingredient, so there’s really just three, OptiCreatine, creatine magna powder, which is the creatine plus magnesium, and then 250 milligrams of sea salt, which then translates to 100 milligrams of sodium and 150 milligrams of chloride. The reason why we add those is that they aid, both of those aid in the transporter, the creatine transporter. They help tell it to help move creatine into your cells, your immune cells, your gut lining, and your brain cells. We want to get creatine from the glass into the body.
You’re going to drink it. We want to get it from inside the body into your GI tract, into the body, and then in from the body into your cells. Our formulation team did a great job with this because I think it’s probably my favorite green team that I’ve tried on the market. It is almost like powdered sugar. It’s super light and fluffy. It tastes really good. I do not know if you’ve tried it and put it in your coffee, but the little bit of sea salt, some people like that a lot because apparently some salt brings out the flavor of coffee better. I did not know this, but Greg told me.
I am going to try that. That’s great. The Qualia Creatine Plus is then your favorite brand recommended. I love Qualia’s other products and, as I said, we’ll have you on again here soon to talk and dive into some of those formulations. I want to cover a lot of those things because there are so many benefits there.
In the future, we will think about the hallmarks of aging. There are lots of different ways. The hallmarks of aging provide a model for different aspects that occur reliably across species as we age. We have mitochondrial dysfunction, we have telomere shortening, there is this big list, and that list is growing. There is really not going to be a single product that says, “We’re going to address everything in the body with this one thing.”
The future of health optimization with better aging is going to be in a multi-product approach. We benefit from things when we take them consistently and over time. None of these are, take it once and great, I have all the benefits for my life. It is like nutrition. It has just got to come into the body regularly. With that perspective, you could easily argue for having multiple supplements as a regular part of your daily health routine. That is what I do.
Dan, this has been fascinating. Obviously, such a wealth of knowledge, experience, and expertise. Thank you for being willing to share that with our community. As I said, we’ll have you back here soon to dive into a few more topics, but this is amazing. I am so grateful for this deep dive on creatine and all the benefits it can have for all of us. Thanks for being with us. Thanks so much for your time.
Thank you, Zach. I really appreciate that.
Just to mention one more time, it’s HumanOS.me is where people can connect with you and find you, and that’s the newsletter as well.
I would look for that newsletter on meat consumption, and then you can also connect with me at QualiaLife.com. I encourage people to check out our blog. We put a lot of energy into that. As I said, the company’s mission is in part education. We imagine some of our products have many ingredients, and we’ll just take one of those ingredients and do a full blog article just on that. I would say, as a parting word, that while it is easy to feel overwhelmed by everything.
Make educating yourself on health a part of your regular approach in life and enjoy it. When you’re learning about health, you’re learning about you. Every time you learn something, you get to exploit that knowledge for your own benefit for the rest of your life. Congratulations, audiences, you’re doing it right. Thank you, Zach, for all the work you’re doing and for having me on.
That is a perfect parting word. Thank you so much. QualiaLife.com. Dan Pardi, you’re an amazing human, and I just thank you so much for being with us.
Thanks so much. Bye-bye.
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What a great conversation with Dan Pardi. He obviously has a wealth of knowledge and experience in this field. Hope you picked up some new insights about creatine, this amazing supplement that can be used throughout our lifetimes and provides energy to our brains and muscles to help us when we lack sleep and in a lot of other things. You can find them at HumanOS.me or QualiaLife.com. The blog is there, the research is there. I encourage you to check that out.
They also have a great creatine product themselves, Qualia Creatine Plus, which provides magnesium as well as some sea salt for the transporter as well. There are a lot of benefits there. Check it out, do a little research on your own if you want, but you can also try it. As I said, I take creatine. It is a very safe supplement to take with very few adverse side effects and is well-researched. There is a lot out there to dive into, but I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. Thanks so much for tuning in. We’ll see you back here next time on the show.
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