My FAVORITE supplement
Honestly, I’m not a big fan of supplements. There’s a good chance taking a lot of them for a long time is just making your urine more expensive. Unless your bloodwork shows you’ve got a deficiency or if you’re problem solving with your Acupuncturist/Nutritionist/PCP, you may not be getting what’s promised from taking a pill or powder that you bought from that very convincing health influencer. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of marketing in the fitness/health industry disguised as “education”.
However, there are a few I like. I’ll start of with my favorite: CREATINE!
No, it’s not a steroid. No, you won’t suddenly look super jacked. No, your hair probably won’t fall out.
YES it can actually make you stronger and help you recompose fat with muscle faster than without IF you use it with strength training.
YES it helps reduce muscle damage and speeds up recovery between intense exercise AND can help lessen the severity of an injury.
YES it can help older people avoid functional decline (like improving sit-to-stand performance, one of the first reasons people need assisted care).
YES it can help your brain! There’s potential that it can help your short-term memory and some really exciting new clinical trials that when combined with antidepressants or cognitive-behavioral therapy, leads to greater reductions in depressive symptoms compared to either of those treatments alone!
It’s one of the most well-researched supplements. Your body DOES make enough for survival and you CAN get creatine through diet (red meat, poultry, fish), but it’s hard to reach the higher levels (5g/day) that have these extra performance/health benefits. It would take several pounds of salmon or beef to get 5 grams of creatine monohydrate.
The people who should talk to their Primary Care Doctor before starting are people with pre-existing kidney disease or hypertension. While there hasn’t been major issues in the lit so far, there could be risk. The side effect reported is some weight gain (but probably due to water retention).
I personally use Legion, but there are a LOTS of great options. This isn’t a supplement that you need to spend a ton of money for the best one. It IS good if you can find a brand that uses 3rd party testing to verify purity/potency.
<3 Dr. Laura
Sources
Kreider RB, et al. (2017). "International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: safety and efficacy of creatine supplementation." Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition.
Persky AM, Brazeau GA. (2001). "Clinical pharmacology of the dietary supplement creatine monohydrate." Pharmacological Reviews.
Yoon, S., Kim, J., Hwang, J., Kim, T., Kang, H., Namgung, E., Ban, S., Oh, S., Yang, J., Renshaw, P., & Lyoo, I. (2016). Effects of Creatine Monohydrate Augmentation on Brain Metabolic and Network Outcome Measures in Women With Major Depressive Disorder. Biological Psychiatry, 80, 439-447. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2015.11.027.
Lyoo, I., Yoon, S., Kim, T., Hwang, J., Kim, J., Won, W., Bae, S., & Renshaw, P. (2012). A randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trial of oral creatine monohydrate augmentation for enhanced response to a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor in women with major depressive disorder.. The American journal of psychiatry, 169 9, 937-945 . https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2012.12010009.