I think this is quite different because (1) creatine has been proven to be completely harmless for people of all ages absent some rare thing like a kidney disorder and (2) it has a bunch of clearly measurable positive effects.

So this is more like trying to determine whether ginseng is good at keeping away colds or whatever. Maybe it does (actually quickly searching this, it definitely does but let's pretend it's as folksy as it sounds for a minute) but even if it doesn't then it's harmless and has a bunch of other effects, so when one takes it - the whole possible cold prophylaxis can just be seen as an added perk.

People have no idea how successful big pharma’s info campaign has been since what I’m increasingly calling the real Web 3.0 (post-influencer social media and arrival of big corporate narratives).

According to Reddit, Epsom salt has no effect (doesn’t absorb) - you’re wasting your time by using it. They’ll cite all sorts of real, funded studies that agree and yet always the comment section is filled with anecdotal evidence of the contrary - to which a typical response is “hot water in general is soothing” (ignoring efficacy of magnesium sulfate in ice baths).

I digress - creatine is a similar situation. All this confusion at best. It’s also not unlike the health effects of cannabis just prior to going effectively legal - it either causes or cures cancer, or something? We need more research! That’s the real problem!

Any time you see this sort of narrative it’s corporate politics and influence at play.

By virtue of how hard it is to get any information on creatine, it probably threatens some market or vertical at least (whether or not it “works”). Like A. muscaria mushroom or sassafras, you’ll have to do your own research to really know.

What I'm getting from all this is that we have an armchair expert explaining details about something they're not an expert in, and we have you reviewing the way they present this information, saying their very weak hedge wasn't strongly negative enough. Based on priors about the industry.

Basically, HN doing HN things - having a good deep think about topics outside their realm of expertise, then debating the minutiae. I'd just rather trust someone who has spent their career researching this stuff, thanks (unless that's what you do - in which case please tell us more).

If you're being academically rigorous about it, sure, but I think it's fine as an informal conclusion.

The null is surely different in this case because we know that supplemented creatine goes to the brain and the brain uses it, which is definitely not a claim all supplements can make.

The fact that there's a biologically plausible mechanism plus mixed statistical evidence makes "maybe" a perfectly reasonable conclusion.

I think the way you interpret the null result is downstream of considering creatine as "a supplement". You can make the null result say anything by changing your prior about creatine or supplements. That's the issue with priors.

You also seem to reject the possibility that some things help just a bit. The author has another article in the same vein about "things that can help maybe a bit but the evidence we have doesn't really help detecting small effects" https://dynomight.net/vitamin-d/

You are essentially trying to say that most studies regarding supplements are not valid

Heavily agreed. The supplement industry has such a low level of reliability that it has really soured me on so many practices people have. And I flat out do not understand how some of the supplement stores survive.

mandatory XKCD https://xkcd.com/882/ "Jellybeans cause acne"

Okay, but it kind of sounds like you want to nanny-state the writer's language.

Their conclusion seems like an absolutely fair interpretation of what they saw, and it also strikes me as dangerous -- perhaps more dangerous -- to suggest "writer genuinely believes, or doesn't believe, a thing, but they should say it differently from their own interpretation because..people are dumb?" Something like that.

There was actually a VERY recent study on mega-dose creatine for sleep deprivation:

  > "Single dose creatine improves cognitive performance and induces changes in cerebral high energy phosphates during sleep deprivation"

You need a dose high enough to penetrate the blood-brain barrier, around 0.3g/kg (so ~30g for a 100kg person).

Apnea sufferer here, for whom cpap stopped working after weight loss. It turned out that my mouth was opening during sleep, reducing the effectiveness of cpap, and after adding a chin strap to keep my mouth shut I have had very few apnea events.

The mouth-tapers aren’t always wrong (though we do always look silly).

For sleep apnea you may look into playing the didgeridoo for 30 minutes a day. The circular breathing every day really improve people's symptoms, and I've heard you see results after a few weeks or months. I'm in the middle of trying this but unfortunately I just haven't been doing it every day.

I've also heard just practicing circular breathing by blowing through a straw into a cup of water can produce the same effect but playing a didge is just so much cooler.

Thanks for sharing, that is very interesting. The article quoted several of the studies as saying that the benefits of creatine are mostly on "stressed" population. Maybe that's what's going on here?

It might have some kind of neuroprotective effect. For people who are already very healthy, there may be no measurable difference. But for the rest of us, it may be more helpful.

I'm reminded of something I read about dual n-back. (I forget where, it might have been Gwern page on it.) Someone said that when they are sleep deprived, they feel totally fine, but their n-back score absolutely tanks.

It might be interesting to test that, the intersection of sleep deprivation, creatine and objective measures of executive function. That could give us more data on the "helps most in stressed cases" theory.

Last year, I was severely sleep deprived, but needed to focus. On a whim, I took 25 grams of micronized creatine and it removed the issue with the dampened cognitive abilities. It just worked. It's nothing I would recommend as a long-term solution to sleep problems, but as a possible solution in a pinch, it could work.

FYI, your sleep hygiene sounds good, but doctors have started to agree that primary, idiopathic insomnia doesn’t exist. It’s either anxiety or evidence of some severe disease or physiological condition.

So as long as you’re trying things, CBT is the most evidence-based long-term solution for the (very likely) cause of your insomnia.

I also started sleeping measurably better when I started taking creatine, but the broader evidence strongly suggests this was some kind of coincidence

It's my understanding that creatine doesn't directly make you stronger, instead it gives your muscles the ability to work a bit longer. This means you can do more strength training per session which is the part which makes you stronger.

Im curious, since I don’t drink coffee nor take protein supplements and the like, my question is: is the plan you keep taking what you take, let’s say, “forever”? Because the moment you stop taking, wouldn’t you notice a big drop?

if you added back the creatine along with the herring, you could become a superhero.

Do you still drink water when you skip creatine? Being dehydrated causes headaches, so it may be the extra water intake that's helping and not the creatine.

> If I know I'm only going to get a few hours of sleep, I'll ... drink plenty of water

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21517-dehydra...

I do the same thing with pickle juice. Works for me.

Do you take monohydrate or HCL?

I don’t know. I personally wouldn’t take it if you aren’t also working out/lifting frequently (even if you drink a ton of water).

Anecdotal so safe to ignore this… but my hair did thin out but only after I was lazier on my work outs. Stopped taking and hair mostly returned to normal thank God.

I was taking 5mg of Creatine and was in the ER for an unrelated reason. My metabolic panel measured creatinine at 1.34 mg/dL. A panel from last year without the supplement was a very normal 0.95. These were gummies and I wasn’t slamming water.

BTW, it tends to trash the eGFR test which relies on an unbiased creatinine reading.

The people who deny that Epsom salt has any effect say the same thing. They say it’s only the hot water relaxing your muscles not the Epsom salt.

But they fail to account for ice baths with Epsom.

Similarly you fail to account for anyone who takes creatine with any other food or beverage.

So I don’t love such theories.

Plausible-sounding mechanisms like you're presenting here do not add value to the discourse without data. There are tons of plausible mechanisms we could make up absent empirical evidence to distinguish them.

A pity that water isn’t being sold as an expensive supplement. Or is it?

I slam a lot of water. I also have a toddler and baby who suck at sleeping (I've done all the things, these kids just suck at sleeping).

Since taking creatine I feel so much more energized. I can make it through the day with just 2 coffees (was previously drinking 5 coffees and an energy drink).

Maybe it's placebo. Maybe it's not. I don't really care. I feel the benefit and I love it.

I take my creatine with as little volume of water as possible, probably less than 50ml. I doubt that 50ml is having much impact on my overall hydration.

This is nonsense.

Creatine works because of buffering ATP and creatine kinase.

A problem though is that 1lb of chicken breast contains about 1.5 grams of creatine.

If a person is already eating a modern high protein diet, they are most likely already getting a decent amount of creatine.

I would imagine a vegetarian taking creatine would get a much better effect.

This is not true. Did you read the article?

just reminded me to buy a decent waterbottle - thank you

Interesting. I had heard that chess players burn a crazy amount of calories during tournament matches, but when I looked it up just now it seems like that isn't true: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/06/30/its-sapols...

The original claim is not wrong. Thinking hard does not burn significantly more calories.

If it’s really hard to measure because the amount is so small that it requires precise equipment, it’s not significant relative to the rest of the body’s energy expenditure.

I was missing both the effects for the sleep deprived and the elderly in the article. Particularly those with dementia.

It clears my brainfog. But I'm burned out because of 3 years in crunch mode doing a one man startup and chronically sleep deprived because of small children. So I'm definitely in the stressed category.

Do you regularly measure your own blood pressure on a daily basis? I’d imagine if this were common most people wouldn’t know.

Yep. From what I read mental fatigue (mental math problems is what the study used) or sleep deprivation are two scenarios in which creatine boosted cognition and memory.

Here are the sleep deprivation studies

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54249-9

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16416332/

Likely. I did one time a creatine loading week of 30gr a day at 100kg body weight and I had to drink 7L of water to not feel like I have a hangover.

"poses no danger to your hair" I keep hearing folks say this, and even in this thread there's someone who's experienced that and had it stop when they eliminated creatine. I too have experienced exactly that with exactly the stopping of issues once I stopped taking creatine.

Perhaps you can say "danger to your hair is rare", but there's very clearly (to me at least) an effect there, and the way it gets hand-waved away is strange to me.

> This also misses caffeine as the other a-tier supplement

In college Ripped Fuel wasn't banned yet. We would take two, go to the gym for 2 hours, shower, then go out until the sun came up the next day. It's no surprise it was eventually banned. I think some people ended up dying by taking too many.

> poses no danger to your hair,

Last I checked, the only study actually focusing on this is n=38, out of Iran, and has heavy conflict of interest issues (funded by the supplement industry).

That's not remotely sufficient to consider this a settled fact.

I feel extremely lethargic whenever I take even 5g of it. I also drink 2 - 3 liters plain water a day, so I don't think it's dehydration.

You don't have to cycle it. You also don't need to load it (a marketing ploy to get you to buy more).

You can just take 3-5g daily.

Cycling creatine was the guidance from the 90s. 5g/day and drink plenty of water is all you need to do.

I've never heard of cycling it. We're you a teen during the steroid arrival? Maybe people were confusing things. I've always just done 5mg a day, but now people are talking about taking mega doses of like 20-30mg a day, shrug

That’s never been the case, you were getting bad information.

Yes, they did, and many still do write it on the package, but it is, and always was a myth born God knows when out of precaution, because nobody really knows anything about how all this stuff really works now, and they did know even less than that 30 years ago. There never really was any evidence that you have to cycle it, and nobody (aside from the manufacturers) ever says it anymore. It makes about as much sense as cycling protein powder.

As for pills, yes, there is about every form of creatine supplement now, even chewing gum, but this is just dumb, how much of creatine do you think you can consume this way in a day?

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I'd say probable in some situations - maybe more effect for people who are not eating well. I am not someone who takes or used drugs or alcohol - but the 90s I used pure low dose of creatine at about half teaspoon a day to help repair neck muscles damaged from treated-too-late whiplash. At the time my diet was probably poor even though I ate meat daily, had a low grade cold I hadn't been able to shake off for three years, and would blow a fuse easily around idiotic BS. After a few weeks I was pretty mellow and easy going, not to mention the cold had finally cleared up. I stopped taking it for various reasons, needing to be on top of BS quicker was one of those reasons. Later in life I have used it but not with the same pronounced effects.

Perhaps the desire to start creatine and hairfall are correlated to a third thing? Or causation is reversed?

You would have to start and stop several times before you could even start making anything out of that. Any one time correlation can very well just be chance.

It’s always been popular among athletes and weight lifters but now nootropic influencers have gotten ahold of it. It’s one of the few supplements with robust scientific evidence of a strong effect but that’s in athletic performance not nootropics.

I've been taking 5g/creatine daily for nearly 30 years. In weightlifting circles it's always been popular because it's cheap and one of the few non-steroidal supplements that actually works.

JRE mentioned it several times recently, I imagine it could have spiked interest but overall it's been growing over the past decade because of the advances in fitness trackers, IMO. It's been very easy to see its effect with trackers measuring FTP and VO2max.

Health fads come and go

Yeah, enough people say this that I avoid taking creatine knowing I have the genetic predisposition for male pattern baldness, despite the lack of solid evidence.

Although OP's post says "There is no mechanistic reason to think that would happen." but I don't think that's true. Creatine is known to increase DHT, and higher levels of DHT is linked to hair loss.

When you realize that, you got a little smarter

> if you include fish in the vegetarian diet, which is odd but some people do that.

Meat Is Murder but Fish Is Justifiable Homicide.

in other words, it doesn't do much of anything, similar to most powders, supplements, and minerals/vitamins

People are throwing away their money

No, it does not.

More like "probably", "yes", and "probably not."

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Productivity isn’t the only reason to be smarter. For example, there’s also the benefit of asking fewer inane questions on the internet (hypothetically)

Of course it is. LLMs aren't as smart as you think, or at least their "intelligence" isn't comparable to ours. They're just a useful tool, and they will always need someone to guide them.

that was hard to parse, but yes, because then you can ask smarter questions to the LLM which saves you money, so you can afford supplements

Yeah, mix some creatine in with the thermal paste. It should help!