The Gym Powder Your Brain Runs On
Eight trials, 225 people, and a memory effect that only turned up after 66. Plus a scanner watching brain creatine climb 11%.
A scoop goes in juice. Nineteen people with Alzheimer’s stirred creatine powder into a drink. Twenty grams a day, for eight weeks. Then a scanner found 11% more creatine in the tissue… Working memory came up too.
Creatine is not exotic. You turn over 1 to 3 grams a day, and about half of that comes from food. Muscles hold most of it. The brain keeps a smaller store, and it draws on that store under load. Kostas Prokopidis and his team pooled eight trials of healthy people. Memory scores came out ahead of placebo. But the split by age is the part worth reading twice.
Most supplement copy leans on one small trial. I spend more than $20,000 a year on private research… the sort hedge funds pay a fortune for. Walled off from the public. Then I read the paper behind the claim. Five grams a day has been in my own cupboard for two years. No memory gain I can feel, which is what the trials predict at my age…
A German team gave 15 young adults 0.35 grams per kilo of body weight. Then they kept them awake. Word memory, processing speed and reaction time all held up better than placebo. The lift started around 3.5 hours in and ran to nine. That dose is enormous, though. For an 80 kilo man it lands near 28 grams. The authors call the right dose an open question.
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