The Most Tested, Safe, & Effective Sports Supplement | Dr. Layne Norton & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | Touching on creatine, it is the most tested, safe, and effective support supplement we have.

00:00:09.640 | I mean, it's just, there are thousands of studies on creatine monohydrate now.

00:00:13.520 | And I would say very clearly too, if you're using any other form of creatine, I think you're

00:00:19.680 | wasting your money. Creatine hydrochloride has some hype around it. Apparently, it's a little

00:00:26.160 | more soluble. The claim is that you need less, but there's only a couple studies on it, and it's

00:00:32.180 | more expensive. And creatine monohydrate is not particularly expensive. I realize people have

00:00:37.000 | different budgets, but it's not, it doesn't land in the, it's not a budget breaker. Yeah, it's gotten

00:00:41.520 | more expensive because of COVID and supply chain issues. Even the, there's forms of creatine that

00:00:46.460 | appear to be as good, like hydrochloride, but it's more expensive. And then things like creatine ethyl

00:00:52.700 | ester has been shown to be worse than creatine monohydrate. Buffered creatine is as good or

00:00:58.920 | worse, and it's much more expensive. So I tell people just take creatine monohydrate. It is tried

00:01:05.560 | and true. It's been shown to saturate the muscle cells 100% with phosphocreatine, and that's what

00:01:10.700 | you want. So creatine works through a few different methodologies. One, through increasing phosphocreatine

00:01:16.680 | content, which helps improve exercise performance. It also appears to improve recovery, and it

00:01:25.420 | increases lean mass, a lot of which is through bringing water into the muscle cells. But that

00:01:33.220 | is, I mean, muscle cells are mostly water. So when people say, well, it's just water, that's

00:01:38.440 | what muscle cells mostly are. And it also increases strength and some other metrics. Now, it also has

00:01:47.020 | been shown in studies that people tend to get a decrease in body fat percentage. Now that's probably

00:01:52.160 | because they're getting an increase in lean mass. And so the relative is a decrease in body fat

00:01:56.280 | percentage. But there are a few studies that show a decrease in fat mass as well. I don't think that

00:02:00.700 | creatine is a fat burner. I think that people are able to train harder, build more lean tissue. And so

00:02:05.100 | that's probably having an effect on fat mass. Then they've actually shown more recently some

00:02:09.680 | cognitive benefits to creatine, which I find really interesting as well. But the only knock on creatine

00:02:15.320 | that anybody's been able to come up with, because they've debunked the kidney stuff, they've debunked

00:02:19.140 | the liver stuff, there's no evidence that it harms healthy kidney or liver, is hair loss. So what about

00:02:26.060 | hair loss? Because there was one study in 2009 that showed that creatine increased DHT.

00:02:33.000 | But they didn't really show an effect on any other sex hormone. So it's kind of strange. Like you would

00:02:39.240 | think if there was an increase in DHT, there would be like something else that changes as well.

00:02:43.420 | And it's only one study. And again, didn't directly measure hair loss, measured DHT, which we know is

00:02:51.540 | involved in the loss of the follicle. So what I would say is that I am not convinced. It's only one study,

00:02:58.980 | never been replicated to my knowledge, and it was looking at a mechanism rather than an outcome. So if you're

00:03:05.220 | somebody who's prone to hair loss, and you want to avoid creatine because of that, I understand. But for most

00:03:10.340 | people, I don't think it's a, I don't think it's something to worry about.

00:03:12.820 | Do you emphasize the classic loading of creatine, taking it a bunch of times per day, and then backing off or just

00:03:19.300 | taking it consistently at the, I think five grams per day is kind of a typical dose that people take?

00:03:25.540 | So again, no solutions, only trade-offs. You can load it and you will saturate your

00:03:31.060 | phosphocreatine stores faster, like usually within a week. If you just take five grams per day,

00:03:37.700 | it'll take two, three, four weeks, but you will get to the same place. And you're probably going to have

00:03:44.660 | a much lower risk of GI issues. Some people, creatine can be a gut irritant. If it is for some folks,

00:03:52.740 | I would recommend splitting it into multiple doses. So maybe like multiple to one or two gram doses per

00:03:57.780 | day. And definitely don't load it if you're somebody who has GI issues from it.