Does creatine make you smarter?

petra

Given LLM's is being smarter still a worthwhile to optimize with supplements?

brcmthrowaway

I remember learning about Creatine as a weightlifting teen I never ended up doing it because you had to cycle it, and it was just one more thing to track Is it the same case in 2026? Is there a simple pill I can take?

dvduval

I don’t think they’re strong evidence that it does anything beyond helping you build muscle. There are some people say they think clearer, but I don’t think that’s been measured in any significant way.

garciasn

Saved you a click: > Does creatine make you smarter? > I don’t know. Maybe a little.

olooney

Good discussion, but this conclusion: > I don’t know. Maybe a little. is not the right way to interpret the null result (insufficient evidence to reject null hypothesis that it has no effect) because the prior for supplements that people are trying to sell you is so low. In the absence of clear, strong evidence, you should assume the the whole thing is just an example of motivated reasoning. People want nootropics to be real, and other people really want to sell you readily available powders by claiming they have nootropic properties. In that environment, they were always going to trying to concoct a similar narrative about some supplement, and it just happened to be creatine. Those efforts were always going to result in a handful of "positive" studies that turn out to be non-reproducible, maybe because of p-hacking, maybe because of publication bias, maybe because of outright fraud. This is what the literature always looks like for stuff that just doesn't work. If it did work - if the effect size was large enough that you could personally detect it in your own life - then the papers would be trying to put error bars around the effect size, not trying (and failing) to barely distinguish it from a placebo. “If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” - Ernest Rutherford

aeonik

Studies I read seems to show a marginal boost in cognitionl and memory, but only if you were otherwise overtaxed for some reason. Like being tired, stressed, etc...

softbuilder

I started taking 5g for cognition. Never any clear signal for that, but it does seem to help a bit with my (more than occasional) sleep deprivation. Mostly with fighting off headaches.

thisisauserid

Article's answer to its own question: It safely builds muscle and boosts cognition.

faangguyindia

Sometimes I stay up until 1–3 a.m. because I'm working on a problem that's so interesting I can't stop until I make progress. If I know I'm only going to get a few hours of sleep, I'll take 5–10 g of creatine, drink plenty of water, and go to bed. The next morning, I usually don't wake up with a headache. If I skip the creatine under the same conditions, I'm much more likely to wake up with a headache after a short night's sleep. Now it's become a habit, I automatically take creatine whenever I know my sleep duration is going to be much shorter than usual.

imzadi

This made me wonder if sun exposure/vitamin D has any impact on storing or processing creatine, and maybe that's why the results in Australia were so much greater

bassiee

In my experience, it wont make you smarter but my brain just feels more energized to think.

John23832

Most people taking creatine just need to drink water. They drink more water using creatine. In reality, the water/hydration is doing the heaviest lift, not the creatine.

6thbit

Why is creatine so popular lately? what changed?

igor_nast

Nope, but makes a producer's pocket heavier :D

sspehr

> Available short and long-term studies in healthy and diseased populations, from > infants to the elderly, at dosages ranging from 0.3 to 0.8 g/kg/day for up to 5 > years have consistently shown that creatine supplementation poses no adverse > health risks and may provide a number of health and performance benefits. They missed a zero behind the comma, didn't they?

nonameiguess

The conclusions aren't any different (it's one of the few thing that helps strength, poses no danger to your hair, and almost certainly does nothing for cognition), but the articles at https://www.strongerbyscience.com/?s=creatine are far more comprehensive, including the famous extremely long podcast episodes they used to do. The one thing this misses is many supplements are tainted, which skews the popular perception of both upsides and risks. This was especially true in the US prior to 2005 or so when prohormones were still legal over the counter. Anything branded that wasn't just pure creatine was extremely likely to actually be a low-dose oral steroid, which really can make you lose hair and will increase strength quite a bit more than any dietary supplement. This also misses caffeine as the other a-tier supplement that consistently shows strength increases in RCTs, though of course, caffeine is more frought than creatine because you build tolerance and it can disturb sleep.

doix

This matches what Gwern wrote years ago [0]. It does unequivocally make you stronger though. So if you're training anyway, may as well take it and hope it makes you smarter as well (just believing might be enough for that sweet placebo effect). [0] https://gwern.net/creatine

serf

>Contrary to the common myth, thinking hard does not burn significantly more calories. (Demonstration: Start thinking hard, and watch as your heart rate does not increase.) this is wrong [0] , it's just hard to measure. [0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32314956/

zuzululu

if you are using to slim down it will hold on to water unless you are bulking i dont see creatine to be consumed regularly if you truly want fuel for the brain nothing beats keto

blobbers

Okay, I skimmed the article. Is creatine safe to supplement for children?