← The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance
The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance
The Willpower Drug: How to Supplement Discipline : 1394
01:20:53
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A
If you're obese, you're not making enough and your body is storing fat instead of making energy. So you're relying more on willpower to try to lose weight and you have less, which is where willpower comes from.
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When our muscles are working really hard or our brain is thinking really intensely then runs short and is the system that comes to the rescue when things fluctuate. If we have more, we can power through that gap when demands went higher than normal without crashing.
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Giving to an obese person is going to be able to help their brain have more energy so they don't feel tired. You'll even get less cravings if you have enough a because low 8% body's like give me sugar, give me sugar, give me sugar. I used to weigh 300 pounds and I had a very round shape. You're listening to the human upgrade with Dave Asprey.
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For the long haul.
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I saw real results in just a week. If you strive for peak performance or plan to live a very long time like I do, you want clear vision to match, go to screenfit.com Dave or use code Dave to get $200 off and try it for yourself. You'll see what I mean. Literally.
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A
On today's episode, we're going to have a conversation with Greg Kelly, who's a naturopathic physician and he just wrote a book called Shape Shift and has worked for many years in alternative medicine. And of course he works with qualia. This is his third time on the show and we're going to talk about things like nootropics, creatine, longevity, regeneration and sleep and, well, how to lose weight and how to change your shape. This is particularly personal for me because as you might know if you have been listening for a while or read my books, I used to weigh 300 pounds and I had a very round shape. And the idea that you can do things to change, well, to change everything about you is really important. And particularly it comes down to mitochondria. I kind of like the way I look today versus the way I used to look. And some people have a problem with that, but that's usually because they need therapy.
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B
So there.
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A
Greg, welcome to the show.
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B
No, thanks for having me back on today, Dave. It's always a pleasure.
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A
I've been looking for someone to interview about creatine because in the past, a long, long time ago, I used to be a gym rat. Back when I was really heavy, I would go to the gym. This is late 90s, six days a week, 90 minutes a day, you know, eat all the protein powder, take all the creatine. That was when it was just for bodybuilders. And I learned that the bodybuilding community was some of the best biohackers on the planet. They knew way more about hormones and longevity doctors back then. Like, we didn't have longevity doctors back then. They called it anti aging and most of them were plastic surgeons. But you have this group of people who could change their state so dramatically. And they understood things like post cycle therapy and they weren't afraid of testosterone, but they might have overused it. So there's this big body of wisdom. And then there were these longevity doctors who had totally different knowledge and these neuroscientists. And part of the reason that I created the biohacking movement was to bring them together. Like, we just want to change how our bodies are, how Our minds are. And creatine actually came from that side, the bodybuilding side. But I wanted to talk to someone who's medically trained because so much has come out over the past 10 years about creatine, so we could go into it. And thanks for being my expert.
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B
Thank you, thank you. I was an editor for Alt Med Review and contributed articles back when that journal existed from let's say, 96, I think around 2013 was the last published issue. And in 97 I wrote a series of two articles on things that had studies scientifically for improving sports performance. And one of them was focused primarily on weightlifting, sprinting power, types of things. And Even by early 97, creatine had a lot of scientific evidence and it's just built into many, many areas, including the brain in the decades since.
- [06:08]
A
And that's what's intrigued me the most, probably even more esoteric than anti aging or longevity and bodybuilding back then was the realm of cognitive enhancement. And so one of my mentors who's been on the show, Steve folks, wrote Smart Drug News, which was a print newsletter that started in the 80s about how to enhance cognitive function. And I still have printed copies of all of those newsletters from way back then. And they were just full of all this wisdom. And I wouldn't probably be here today if I hadn't have learned nootropics and I hadn't learned some of the techniques from bodybuilding to get my hormones working and all the longevity stuff. But the crossover of creatine from bodybuilding into longevity and cognitive enhancement, it's super fascinating. So talk to me about creatine, why it would work for all three of these use cases.
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B
Yeah, can we do like a quick history lesson on creatine? Is that okay for the audience?
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C
Please do.
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B
Creatine was originally discovered around 1832, somewhere in that time frame. So a long time ago. And it was extracted from meat. Not a surprise. It's really the only legit food source of preformed creatine is meat. You'll sometimes if you google it, you'll see misinformation that there's some in vegetables, there just is not. What there is is some amino acids that could be made in to creatine and mistakes in original lab analysis that it led to that misimpression. So that's where the crea comes from. It's a Greek word for meat. And then it was just kind of sidelined for almost 100 years until I think it was around 1912 at Harvard University. They discovered that if you took creatine and this was in animals that creatine levels and muscles went up. They didn't know why, they had no idea what it did. The other cool thing that I think you'll appreciate and the listeners were at the time they found that wild animals muscle tissues had about 10 times more creatine than domesticated animals. And eventually when the role of it was figured out, it'll start to make sense why that's the case. And then the paper that I'm aware of that was the first one that looked what happens when humans consumed creatine was 1926 and it was titled something like the fate of creatine in man, something like that. But even way back then they found that there was a difference in people that exercise versus not in terms of how much creatine their muscles would take up. And they only looked at muscles in that original study and that oral creatine in humans would increase muscle amounts of creatine. And then it was just kind of parked. I think the main reason they had to extract it still from meat back then or what they synthesized was just really expensive. So the first time it came on the radar was when a couple British gold medalists won a Barcelona gold medal in 92. And in the interviews after they're like, oh yeah, we were taking this thing called creatine and that's where it exploded in 92 with that. So because of that it was so linked from the get go with the name to muscles with. When they measured it originally in men and women in the 1925, 26 time period going up, they looked at muscles. The first people that used it were gold medal athletes. And so it was embedded there. And to get back to your question, what they've they found somewhere in that gap is the main role of creatine is to buffer ATP. And by buffer what that means is ATPs constantly being used and being converted into kind of a used up form, adp. So missing one phosphate group. And I've never seen anything other than studies used to come up with this figure. But the general idea is that our body makes remakes and uses about our body weight of ATP a day. It's just constantly cycling and when something's working really hard, we run a deficit temporarily. And what creatine does is it goes between a creatine form and a phosphocreatine form. The phosphocreatine is creatine with the phosphate. And that phosphocreatine form can temporarily donate the phosphate. So ATP Can ADP gets recharged to ATP. And so when our muscles are working really hard or our brain is thinking really intensely, then ATP runs short, at least on those, those particular muscles, that part of the brain. And creatine is the system that comes to the rescue.
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A
The idea that your body has about 6 seconds of ATP available before you die came up in my, I think it was in the bulletproof diet or in my big brain book in Head Strong. So this is a really sensitive system. And the foundation of Headstrong was if you want your brain to work better, have more ATP or more electrons in the brain, and most of us are not running at full efficiency in making it. And your brain, if it has full power, will effortlessly use more complex algorithms to make better decisions. And if it's low on energy, you'll just go with a gut feeling, but they'll both feel like you thought about it. The brain's not going to tell you which one. So more energy in the brain equals better cognitive function. And there are other parts to it than that, but that's kind of the, the primary thing. There's neurotransmitters and then there's, you know, trauma and all kinds of other stuff, but we're not going to worry about that right now. It's just a bioenergetic thing. And since ATP has only 6 seconds, it can be used by your heart and the brain. Gonads are the big users. What buffering means. And as a network engineer, I think about all body stuff, like networks, it's really interesting because that basically means you have extra available, you can hold onto it. So that means when the body, or in this case the brain says, I need extra ATP right now, there was more of it available, right?
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B
Correct. Yeah.
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A
Okay. And this would explain why muscles work better and the brain works better. What else improves with creatine consumption?
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B
So other areas that have been looked at, this is mostly animal studies, but everything to do with reproductive health in both men and women. So men, there's been a few studies that have looked at testosterone, testicle function. Women like everything to do with reproductive health seems in animals to be upregulated, but again, those are energetically demanding tissues. And your explanation of buffering was right on the money. So where creatine is important is in tissues that use a lot of energy and have fluctuating demands. And that fluctuating demands is the key thing. And I like that original work on wild animals having a lot more muscle creatine than the domesticated, more sedentary Ones, because that's been shown in humans too. Like as an example, in an aging context, we could give the same amount of creatine to. In General, I'll be 64 in about a month and a half, shortly after this airs. I imagine when they've looked at people my age, it's harder to get muscle tissue levels of creatine up. And if an older person exercises, then it's easier again because adaptation, our system's smart. Right. If it's not going to use something, the networks and the systems that would allow us to have more of it to rely on aren't going to be as taxed. So one of the things with creatine is. Yes, absolutely. If we take more, our tissue levels in the brain, our muscles, these other hard working organs will go up, but maybe only if we're forcing them to work a bit harder, like you do and your audience does.
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A
Okay, where do we get creatine in the modern diet?
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Not exclusively meat, but basically meat. So like, you'll see.
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What does that mean? Like soy doesn't have enough to matter, but there might be one molecule of it or something.
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Yeah, no. As I kind of alluded to earlier, the idea that plant matter has creatine was based on mistaken analytics when they originally did it. The newer studies, there's just no creatine in plants. They don't have the enzymes to make it. All animal foods would have some, but let's just say we want to get someone eating a gram or two more of creatine a day. That would be about 60 eggs worth to get there. So eggs.
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A
60 eggs. Okay, that's not going to happen.
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B
Yeah. The same with milk. You'd need to drink gallons and gallons of milk. So really the only legit sources in terms of if we ate a reasonable amount, we could get a large. Basically a studied amount of creatine would be red meat. You know, fish, chicken, basically animal flesh.
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A
And red meat is the best.
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B
Red meat's the best.
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C
Your body makes less stem cells every year.
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A
If you ignore that, you start recovering slower and you age more quickly.
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And it starts earlier than you think. By your 30s, the number of circulating stem cells you have drops.
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A
Hard stem cells handle repair, recovery and tissue renewal. And fewer stem cells means fewer repairs. Maybe you feel like you do everything right. Yet soreness lasts longer, injuries linger, and you don't bounce back the way you did in your 20s. STEM regen targets the issue at its source.
- [15:46]
C
Every time you take it, it signals your body to release 10 million of.
- [15:49]
A
Your own stem cells into circulation. Stem regen also directly supports circulation. So those cells can actually reach your tissues that are stressed.
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C
And these cells already know what to do.
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They respond to damage. They support repair.
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Stem regen helps your body do the work that nature designed it to do.
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And I actually use it and I actually send it to my parents. So if recovery and longevity matter to you, act now.
- [16:10]
C
Go to stemregen co Dave 30 and.
- [16:13]
A
They'Ll give you 30% off your next order.
- [16:18]
C
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- [17:42]
A
My one pound of ribeye per day habit is going to have about how much creatine in it.
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B
One pound of rib eye that's going to be somewhere probably about 2 grams.
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A
Yeah, that's what my research showed as well. How many grams do men need versus women and is it body weight dependent?
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B
So I would say it would definitely be body weight dependent but also use dependent and my guess would be there was a so no one's really looked at. It's hard to measure brain levels obviously but muscle levels. That original study I mentioned the fate of creatine in men actually did look at men and women and at least in concentration. The lowest concentration was in the two heaviest people like most obese that they did in the study presumably because they were more sedentary. So there's lots of things that then factor into how much our tissues are willing to hold. And if we exercise our tissues, men or women, then they're willing to hold a higher concentration of creatine. And we usually can't get that from the diet. So the general sense, and this is an average, so averages aren't relevant to everyone, but it gives it directionally, is that we need to either make from our liver or get from our diet the equivalent, about 2 grams of creatine a day, because that's how much we're losing every day, because the phosphocreatine kind of uses it up after it's cycled back and forth. And that we can make on average about a gram a day. So without getting some from the diet, we can't saturate tissues.
- [19:21]
A
Is it accurate to think of creatine as kind of having a bigger mitochondrial battery? Sort of. Because you're holding more ATPs, you can call on it. So you can have a car with a small battery or the big battery. And if you get enough creatine in your diet, your body has extra capacity to flex energy, use when it needs to.
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B
Yeah, for sure. It's that idea of fluctuating. Right. So when things fluctuate, if we have more creatine, we can power through that gap when demands went higher than normal without crashing. Right. It's why sprinting, power, lifting were the original uses and it's why cognition now has really come on, why things like this is more of a biohacker thing. But I remember talking to Greg Potter back, I don't know, maybe 2018, who's a circadian rhythm expert and his jet lag hack was doing creatine when he arrived at his destination. So the use case is anything where energy is fluctuating and that we would have a bigger demand. Creatine just is what we need to fill the gap.
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A
It's, I would say before you get on the airplane would probably be even more important than when you land so that you don't take the hits when you're in the air. Okay, so if we make about 2 grams per day, but we want an upgraded high performance system, sort of like adding, you know, adding some extra things to the, the motor in your car. What's the appropriate amount for men? If I want to be upgraded?
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B
So the most common, like going back after the 1992 Olympians, the British Olympians, Linford Christie was the, the 100 meter male that launched a study that led to what we would think of today as creatine loading and what creatine was approached with a lot in the 90s and still today is often a high loading phase for about five days, where you would take about 5 grams of creatine spread out four times a day with several hours at least between them, usually no closer than two hours together. And then that quickly saturates at least muscle, tissue, brain. Like I mentioned, it's harder to measure. And. And then typically they would reduce creatine to about 3 grams a day. And the slower way to go, even way back in that 92 study and some other studies in the 90s, was to do about 3 to 5 grams a day. And over a month, whether you load and then decrease or go the more gradual, you get to saturation by about day 28 in muscle tissues, in brain tissues. The studies that I've seen in humans that have measured it have opted for a much bigger amount, and that's usually been the four times a day doing five grams. And the coolest thing that I saw in the initial study was they measured brain levels in four different regions of the brain. And they all went up. White matter went up, gray matter. But the area of the brain that went up percentage wise the most was the thalamus. And you had touched on that earlier, but the thalamus, when you were talking about basically making the harder choice and doing the smarter thing, the thalamus is really what integrates all of our sensory experience, alertness, focus, executive functions. So it was really cool that when you gave more creatine to humans, the area in the brain that percentage wise went up the most is this super important part that integrates information.
- [22:54]
A
That's been my experience with, with creatine in that it, it really doesn't enhance cognitive function, but not at 2 or 3 grams per day, at least not perceptibly. Most of the protocols I've seen for cognitive enhancement are at least 5 and sometimes 10 or even up to 20 grams per day. And it turns out that women need more creatine than men because they make less. So if you're dealing with fluctuating energy, and newsflash, if you're still in your years when you cycle, you have fluctuating energy. Like it's well documented. So on the days when you're not feeling so good, having extra creatine on those days can just give you that bump in energy so that you are better able to regulate yourself. And same thing if you're hungover or anything else that's affecting Your energy levels.
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B
One of the nice things about creatine is how quickly after doing an oral dose, it makes its ways into tissues. So it gets soaked up pretty quickly, you know, within 30 to 45 minutes or so. We've already taken the lion's share in that we're going to absorb from, into our tissues from that oral dose.
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A
So why do bodybuilders and like older research people say 2, 3 grams a day and biohackers say 10 grams of creatine a day.
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B
So the 2 to 3 comes from those original studies that really were just looking at trying to maintain muscle levels at a saturated amount. And for an average person, that amount will saturate muscle tissues, at least in those original studies that typically lasted about a month. Remember I mentioned that there could be a huge, almost a tenfold difference going back to that original work around 1912 in animals, with wild animals having far more creatine than the sedentary. My guess is when you talk about these hard driving people like your audience, the biohackers, they would be more like the wild animals, right? So these smaller, shorter, older studies that were about, okay, we'll just measure some random people and look at saturating their tissue levels aren't going to be as relevant to optimizing performance.
- [25:05]
A
That makes a lot of sense. If you do something like cryotherapy or cold plunging, or you do high intensity interval training, those are high demand, similar to what a wild animal would go through. And so over time, your body would naturally upregulate its creatine, if possible. Or you could just eat more creatine and the wild animals are eating every drop of red meat they can get, unless they're deer or something. And even then there's pictures of deer eating mice very happily when they could catch them. So maybe it's because each mouse has a little bit of creatine, who knows?
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B
And then I think the other thing would be more your interest. Right? It's hard to study the creatine content of a tissue like the brain, right? Muscle biopsy is not easy, but it's achievable measuring brain concentrations harder. So just in terms of my main interest, it's always been more like, okay, let's measure rather than look at bioavailability or tissue levels. These are kind of a means to an end. The end is the result. Did someone cognitively perform better? And you've alluded to it a few times. But just to be clear with the audience, most of the cognitive studies on creatine, whether that's for things like executive functions or an aging brain or mood issues have been these much higher than bodybuilder doses. Like, you know, really the most common that I've seen is 20 grams a day spread out, you know, 5 grams 4 times spread out over the day.
- [26:36]
A
Is there any issue with kidney function and taking creatine?
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B
No, it was so one of the, so it was originally thought creatine and creatinine. So creatine is something in our blood and if creatinine in our blood goes up, that can be a marker that the kidney is not getting rid of. Right. Like nitrogen sources. But creatinine doesn't damage the kidneys. So it's kind of a mix up just because of terminology. Creatine is among the most, I think I saw about a year ago, a review that said there'd been almost 700 human double blind clinical studies on creatine. It's literally one of the most researched compounds, non drug, non pharmaceutical drug compounds on the planet. Very, very safe.
- [27:21]
A
So if you take creatine, it could raise your creatinine levels in a lab test, but it's not a sign of metabolic dysfunction or danger.
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B
Right. So what's happening in Those original like 1920 time periods they were trying to sort out like creatine, creatinine and even acutely, if we were to take creatine, our creatinine levels wouldn't go up in the first few days. But what's happening is as our muscle tissue gets more creatine stores the phosphocreatine, the thing that's the buffering compound also goes up. And as that gets used more, eventually it gets used up and the breakdown from that is creatinine. So creatinine is more a measure of muscle being used and breaking down than it is of a challenge. If kidney function is poor, it would go up as well, but other things would go up as well. Very evident.
- [28:13]
A
Okay, that makes, it makes so much sense. So guys, you don't have to worry about creatine in kidneys. I guess even if you have kidney disease, this is a non issue.
- [28:23]
B
I honestly have not seen studies in, in kidney disease, but kidneys would naturally make creatine. So the, the main maker of creatine in the body is, is thought of the liver. And then the kidneys are also a really metabolically active tissue. So they make some for sure. And then the kidneys are constantly exporting it. And so the ratio I've seen is that the brain as an Example would have about tenfold more creatine stores or concentration than the liver. The liver doesn't hold on to much of it. It's just making and sending it out. And the kidneys also make some, but presumably more for their use because they're also a very metabolically active tissue.
- [29:03]
A
Totally makes sense. And that would explain why cognitive function is so much better with creatine. What is the research around sleep debt and creatine?
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B
So the original study on sleep and creatine was just a single day study. They sleep deprived people and then the next morning had them do and it was a high amount. I think it was 20 plus grams. It was more of a body weight based dose. So it would have probably for most people ended up 20 to 25 grams and then measured cognitive performance. So the output of that study was that cognitively in a sleep deprived state, people performed way better when they took these larger amounts of creatine. And then there was a study in women that was across their menstrual cycle, but when they took creatine and this was now overtime, not a single dose, that they needed slightly less sleep and performed better like muscle cognitively and sleep. And so that's the scientific basis. But then you have people like Dan Pardee, who's a sleep researcher and now works as the head of education at Qualia, and people like yourself that for many years have experimented with creatine and realized that, oh, I seem to need less sleep or pay back sleep debt more efficiently when my creatine stores or I'm taking some as a supplement.
- [30:32]
A
What can we do to get less bloating from creatine? Because a lot of people report this problem.
- [30:39]
B
Yeah, so that's, it's a super interesting thing. And I see the word bioavailability tossed around all the time. Not just with creatine, with things like magnesium as well. And I think it's a really poorly understood term. But I've seen again, if someone googles this or AIs that they may see misinformation that creatine is 100% absorbed. No, some's always getting to our gut microbiome, which is a good thing because they need creatine just like we do. Right. There's ideally very active on our behalves and the bloating is a combination of two things. So some can be that. Right. Less is being absorbed in our upper GI and getting to the lower GI and interacting with the, you know, the organisms that live there. And then some is one of the things that creatine does a fantastic job at is pulling water into our muscle cells. And we want our, our cells to be more hydrated, but that can feel like bloating for some people. And so there's that combination of things, right? Like it's, it's actually, in a sense, hydrating. And when our cells have the right amount of fluid inside, they're more capable. And then some can be that relatively poor absorption that often is a more temporary thing when someone is new to starting to take these higher amounts. And some can be the form. So Qualia launched a creatine product a little bit ago that has. So think of three terms. There's solubility, which means something completely goes into solution, and water. There's dispersibility. That means basically it looks like it's soluble, but it really isn't. It's just kind of dispersed, but it's not as soluble. And then there's something that would be more thought of as a suspension, right? So when you stirred it, it's kind of now mixed in the water, but as the water and time, it precipitates out, Right. So creatine in the amounts that we're talking about is more. It's not really soluble unless you put it in a lot of water, like more than a liter. It's somewhat dispersible, depending on the type of creatine. But more, it's that suspension, right? So the big issue with creatine monohydrates, which is 95% of the studies on creatine or creatine monohydrate, maybe more, is that it precipitates out over time. So at Qualia, we use two forms of creatine that are far less prone to that. So it doesn't precipitate out. So it's not a suspension. It's somewhere between soluble and a complete dispersion into the water. And that helps with bioavailability. The general idea, as it would be thought, is if something is fully soluble, then the receptors in our stomach, because absorbing creatine requires a transporter, a receptor that it's able to get to that better and less, then goes through the system and gets down to the colon, where it could cause more bloating. So, long story short, we did 60 people, we did as a safety and tolerability study on Laquagia creatine plus, and only two of the 60 commented at all on bloating. And for those two people, it was just the first few days. And by the end of the 14 days, no issues at all.
- [34:10]
A
There's a definite difference between the qualia creatine and the normal creatine monohydrate stuff you get. And you can tell you put it in water because it's ultra fine, like a super fine powder, and because you have two types of creatine in there, I think even in cold water it, it goes in and the goal is you want it to go into solution as much as you can. And the ultra fine particles do go into solution better and faster. And the parts that don't go into solution are still ultra fine. And that changes the speed of absorption. And what I do that, that changes it a lot is I will make my first cup of danger coffee and I'll put my qualia creatine in it because hot water increases solubility dramatically. And I did some extrapolated pharmacokinetic analysis and it looks like that's gonna get your plasma levels about four times higher than you would normally get. And if you get high plasma levels, it more easily crosses the blood brain barrier, so you feel it better. And I came across some research from seven people in the 90s saying that caffeine and creatine didn't mix. But then two subsequent studies that showed they did mix. Do you have an opinion on that?
- [35:24]
B
Yeah, I think the early ones were incredibly flawed.
- [35:28]
A
Yes.
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B
Bodybuilders and people like you and I have been doing creatine with caffeine for a long time. And it's a great stack.
- [35:35]
A
It works just fine. And there's a few coffee haters, which is hard to do scientifically like coffee. There's just, I mean, so many studies on so many beneficial outcomes. So you have to sort of have a bias to just hate on coffee for this one negative reason, despite the hundred positive reasons or whatever. And that said, you might have weird genetics, you can't drink it, whatever, that's fine. But the combination of hot coffee and creatine feels very different than either one by itself. I think there's a multiplicative thing here, and it's probably because more creatine is getting in the brain, but there isn't a study on that because it's hard to do a punch biopsy on someone's brain. But I can think of at least three people who probably I would like to give them one, but that's just me. We gotta do some forgiveness work.
- [36:21]
B
Well, you're right. And that's the key thing. The colder water is, the less ability it has for something even very soluble to be, you know, to go into full solution. Something like creatine would be, you know, the warmer the water is. In one of the studies I saw think of like more room temperature water was far could make a much larger amount of creatine soluble than, you know, ice water as an example. And so like a, you know, hot coffee, hot tea is going to make the amount of creatine that can go fully into solution much higher. And that's maybe the most important thing for getting plasma and blood levels up quickly. The other thing, as with something like magnesium, if our tissues need more, our body tends to allow more to be absorbed, especially the second, third day that.
- [37:14]
A
We start doing something like this makes sense to me. And the implication here is if you get generic creatine monohydrate. Well, there are issues with that we'll talk about in a bit. But if you put it into, say, a cold smoothie, you're not going to get very much of it to dissolve at all. You'll just have chunks of it suspended in the smoothie and it'll still go in. But your chances of getting bloating or other side effects are meaningful. If you take the qualia form, which is two different creatines that are excessively small. And I just got to say a side effect of that is you might find little flecks of creatine dust that sort of leap off the spoon, which is totally fine. That's a sign that it's really, really small. If you put that in a cold smoothie, it's going to absorb better because the particles are exceptionally small. But if you were to instead make your coffee, add the qualia to the coffee, it has a neutral flavor. I don't think it screws up even the really good coffee that I drink. You're going to get better absorption and then you drink the smoothie and that's how to do it. Right. You could even just put it in hot water with some electrolyte. You guys make a good electrolyte too. You just put it all in there and drink that and then have your smoothie. So I highly, highly recommend hot liquids because of the benefits there. What are the different forms of creatine that we can get and why did you choose the ones you put in the quality of product you formulated?
- [38:38]
B
Yeah, so the, the, the most researched form is creatine monohydrate. And even going back to that original 1920, creatine hydrate was what they used. The other thing they would have used back then is creatine anhydrous, which anhydrase just Means, you know, it's. There's caffeine anhydrous too. It's. It's made so that it's in theory won't absorb as much water. But like any of these things are very water loving. So creatine hydrate, now thought of as creatine monohydrate, is by far the most studied, as I said somewhere, 95 plus percent of all studies. So for listeners, if you see in the news, like creatine does this for sleep or this for cognition, it's generally creatine monohydrate. So that's by far the best. What happened starting maybe like late 90s, early 2000s, was people trying to come up with a better creatine. So creatine ethyl ester was one that was tried. When that's been compared to. And stepping back, most of these were trying to theorize how can we do something to make it more soluble? And you had mentioned just in my intro, my book Shapeshift, which I published 15 years ago, a long time ago, but each chapter of that book has different quotes from the Sherlock Holmes character. And one of my favorite has always been something along the lines of, it's a capital mistake to theorize in advance of evidence. So a lot of what these newer forms or other forms of creatine. All right, we have a theory. If we do this to them, it'll be more bioavailable, so it should work better. And at the end of the day, that's theorizing in advance of evidence the.
- [40:26]
A
Way Charlotte, don't you have to theorize in order to gather evidence.
- [40:31]
B
So you would have to have like a theory, but then you need to test it. Yeah, right.
- [40:36]
A
You got to test your theory before you roll it out to people. Right.
- [40:39]
B
The reason Sherlock Holmes character pointed this out is people become then married to their theories and actually never gather the evidence.
- [40:46]
A
Oh, now we're getting. Oh, wait, are you talking about COVID.
- [40:50]
B
Yeah, all kinds of things. Right. Six feet, man. Okay.
- [40:54]
A
I'm telling you, six feet. Okay, sorry.
- [40:55]
B
We get so married to our idea that we actually never then show that it does what. What, what we're theorizing that it should do. So that's why it becomes dangerous. And so the way I would go about showing if one of these other forms of creatine was as good or better than creatine monohydrate would be doing a study that compared some outcome with people taking both to a placebo. And when those have been done, creatine monohydrate performs Equally as well as these ones that are far more expensive and most of these more expensive, like the creatine hcls. The creatine there was the. It was a creatine lysine. It was in an energy drink. I won't throw that the brand under the table. But they claimed at the time that this creatine was the best creatine and when it was eventually studied it had 0% bioavailability.
- [41:50]
A
So you did theorize, but then you tested the quality of creatine on 60 people. And it's funny, one of the people in your study is listening live now from the Upgrade collective. Like I was in it. So what did you, what did you test to show that the quality of creatine is better?
- [42:08]
B
So the, the main thing we did in that particular study we were looking both for like tolerability so the safety. We wanted to see that it was really well tolerated and it was exceptionally well tolerated. Then we also used a cognitive questionnaire. Promise. Promise is like a big collection of different questionnaires. So we used the promised cognitive and over a couple week period we saw a 12% change from baseline and people self rated cognitive performance. Wow.
- [42:37]
A
And did you compare it to monohydrate?
- [42:39]
B
We just used ours alone in that particular study.
- [42:43]
A
Okay, so you had improvements in tolerability compared to other normal creatine stuff and a 12% cognitive improvement.
- [42:51]
B
Correct. And that was over a 14. No, a 15 day trial period at what dose? And that was at 5 grams a day. So roughly one scoop.
- [42:59]
A
So then using math, if you take four scoops you should get a 48% improvement, right?
- [43:04]
B
Well that math probably wouldn't translate but like that would be. That would rock.
- [43:10]
A
Just take the whole thing. Sadly that's not how biology works. But I wish it was. Sometimes I have tested on myself going up to 20 grams a day and if I go above about 15, I have a hard time sleeping at night. Why is that?
- [43:31]
B
So it wouldn't. Creatine is not stimulating, but that's really common even at lower amounts. I've seen that commentary and it's one of the reasons people tend to skew their amount or dosing of creatine earlier in the day. When you're doing that 20 grams usually then it's spaced out. Typically if they're doing 20 grams will do instead of all at once. 5 grams spread at four different time points with some of those later in the day. And I think it has to do with the brain energetics again that our brain now has more capacity to do things like rumination, which is rumination happens. Rumination that, like low level mental chatter, is something that the default mode network naturally does more of as sleep time is approaching. So we're giving the capacity to do more of those thalamic activities for everything. And if someone has a lot in their mind, you have your hands in. I'm sure I'm underestimating. If I said 20 different things on a given day. Oh, yeah. That would then, you know, maybe still be on your mind later in the day. And with more capacity to still think about them, most humans will still think about them.
- [44:51]
A
Yeah. Ruminating is biologically very expensive. I do my best not to do that. And if I catch myself ruminating, I just have more creatine. It goes away. Not really. Now I actually do 10 or 15 grams all at once in the morning. Any reason not to do that?
- [45:07]
B
So I think for someone like you, you're well adapted to that. I would say for someone new to creatine. My experience when I worked as a naturopathic doctor, it's usually a much better strategy with people to start slowly and incrementally increase than to overdo it and have to scale back. So my general recommendation for someone new would be, no, don't do that. But that amount, especially the 10 grams or so a day for women, is the most common thing I've seen over the last year. I've thought of the last year as creatine having a big moment and making its way outside of the main niche, which has been more athletes into particularly women and realizing what a game changer it can be for them when they do even the 5 grams. But the 10 grams, you know, I've seen, I think Rhonda Patrick was promoting that amount as something that she does every day.
- [46:05]
A
If Rhonda Patrick was substantially heavier, would she need more?
- [46:10]
B
So again, going back to what I mentioned earlier, it's using muscle and brain that matters. If being overweight, at least extrapolating from the studies I've read, it's just harder for them to take up what we're doing. So even a bioavailable form may not be retained while in their tissues.
- [46:31]
A
So based on lean muscle mass is really how you would do it?
- [46:34]
B
Yeah, I just think of our body and brain are so good at understanding and adapting to circumstances. When we give them a reason to do something, then, super cool. I need more of this. I'll make more or I'll take more in from the diet and creatine. The main thing is when that wild animal Idea. Right. When we're doing things that convince ourselves that they would do better with more creatine, then they'll actually act like they're starving for it. I think Chris Masterjohn had an ex post a year and a half ago, but it started out, your cells are starving for creatine. And I think your audience, that would be true. An obese, sedentary person, yes, their cells need a lot more, but it won't be put to as good a use as it would be in our listeners today that are active and driving themselves hard in us. Our cells literally are starving for more, and we'll put to good use the more that we give them.
- [47:40]
A
Okay. I think even in the case of an obese person, creatine might be even more important. And the reason is that if you're obese, and I'm speaking from personal experience here, and from doing a lot of research, you're not making enough ATP and your body is storing fat instead of making energy. So you're relying more on willpower to try to lose weight. And you have less ATP, which is where willpower comes from in multiple studies that I've cited in my books. So giving creatine to an obese person, even if they have less muscle mass, is going to be able to help their brain have more energy so they don't feel tired, which is really common when you're obese, which means you're better able to regulate your emotions because you have more energy in the prefrontal cortex in the thalamus.
- [48:30]
B
Right.
- [48:31]
A
Which is going to make it easier to lose weight. You'll even get less cravings. You have enough ATP, because low ATP, your body's like, give me sugar, give me sugar, give me sugar. Because it's kind of desperate for energy. So the difference may not be in muscle activation, but it may be in brain activation for obese people. So if you're like me, you have chronic fatigue and you're obese, which was my kid, creatine would have been a lifesaver, but I was only doing, you know, two to five grams a day sometimes when I got around to it way back then, if I was obese now, yeah, I'd be using a GLP1 at the lowest dose possible. I'd be taking my creatine, I'd be getting, you know, 200 grams of animal protein per day because that's my body weight. And then I'd be lifting heavy a couple times a week. And that's going to get rid of most of the side Effects. I have a whole protocol on, on things you can do with GLP1s, but it makes a lot of sense. But doing a GLP1 without creatine, it's not as good as with creatine. In fact, almost everything is better with creatine, as far as I can tell.
- [49:24]
B
Yeah. And the, the one just, like, caveat for, you know, like, if there was an overweight obese person listening to this. Creatine can make it sometimes look like you're losing when you're winning if you're just measuring on a scale, because initially it will pull more fluid into your muscles, which is a good thing. We want them hydrated, they'll perform better. But that can make it look like our weight isn't changing where our lean muscle mass, our body fat are improving. So a scale is not the best way to show that creatine is making a big impact in those areas that you were just mentioning. Dave.
- [49:58]
A
I would recommend anyone who's near an upgrade, labs go in, we'll do a free cell health analysis, and we'll tell you exactly how much lean muscle mass versus fat and where it is and all that kind of stuff. So you can really see what's going on in there. Because like I said, if you take creatine, you gain weight. You could be, oh, no. But it was the kind of weight you wanted to gain because having more hydration inside your cells is just critically important. Is there an interaction between creatine and testosterone in men or women?
- [50:25]
B
So I've seen two studies in men where creatine has increased testosterone levels. And there's not a great mechanism other than probably ATP mitochondria. Right. Hormones like testosterone are made in mitochondria.
- [50:41]
A
And if you look at mitochondrial density in the body, heart, brain, gonads, those are the highest things. And we know that red and infrared light on the testes will increase testosterone production, and it does that because it's increasing ATP, it's increasing mitochondrial function. So taking creatine at the same time, it would follow. But like you said, we're just hypothesizing. But there's a mechanism that makes sense and there's anecdotal evidence that this actually happens. So I'm going to say that's the likely mechanism.
- [51:08]
B
Yeah. And I both like male and female, as I mentioned near the beginning, there's a lot of evidence now in animals that's coming out about the importance of creatine for reproductive health across the lifespan. And it's because those tissues do have a Lot of mitochondria, A lot, a lot of mitochondria and they are very energy demanding tissues and tissues that there's a fluctuating energy demand, which is the key thing. So my guess will be 10 years from now, if you and I are somewhere talking about creatine, there'll have been a lot more studies showing the importance for that aspect of things. Cognition for sure. There's going to be, continue to be a lot. You know, it's so well established for exercise performance and muscle performance that it almost seems like, you know, ashamed to, you know, put more research into that when there are these other cool areas that creatine clearly looks like it would help that we just need the, the human evidence to validate it.
- [52:11]
A
All right. In women, specifically with creatine, are there specific times during the menstrual cycle, during pregnancy or during menopause that creatine is more or less useful?
- [52:22]
B
What I've like in animals across really the entire reproductive span, before pregnancy, during pregnancy, postpartum, across the menstrual cycle, I have seen again, this is more from the brain aspect. Creatine has quite a few studies that I would put in the mood category, low level depression, anxiety. So because of that, across the menstrual cycle, creatine is felt or can be felt very differently, but it tends to make that cognitive experience more stable and better across the entire cycle.
- [53:00]
A
So you don't want to have it specifically when you're menstruating or right before. You just take it every day throughout the cycle.
- [53:08]
B
It's mostly taken every day, but because within, like I mentioned earlier, somewhere 30 to 45 minutes after an oral dose, at least in our muscle tissues, it's gone up quite a month. Our muscles will soak that up, we'll urinate out some of the rest and that typically by the second and third day, then we even absorb a bit more of it and retain a bit more into our tissues so it can be pulsed. There was a few old studies that did it every other day as an example, instead of daily. So it's a fairly flexible thing. We're not going to run dry in a day or a week. If our tissue levels are high, we will usually feel it fairly quickly after we take it. The one thing to be aware, when we cease taking it and then just rely on our diet, then over a month, the tissue levels tend to gradually decline back to whatever our baseline would have been without supplementing it.
- [54:05]
A
Now, low ATP levels are a source of subtle biological stress and high ATP levels or high mitochondrial function create peace in the body. I was like, all right, I got all the energy I need in case there's a tiger. I'm ready, I can handle things. Resilience comes from ATP. So my experience is that people feel more resilience on creatine or other mitochondrial enhancers. I also know because I wrote a major book on it that having adequate ATP is really important before you get pregnant and during pregnancy. But I don't know about dosing. Do we have any animal studies or human studies on creatine and pregnancy outcomes?
- [54:47]
B
That's a great question. Human know and if like, if our audience googled creatine in pregnancy it's going to generally say like stay away from it or you know, it's that it's unproven in pregnancy. In animal studies it's been given and it's been safe in pregnancy and which makes sense, right? Just again, going back a way that I think about things, things that our body's naturally trying to make and that it's obtaining from, you know, what would be a more optimal diet at that dietary amount or the amount that our body can make. Of course they would be safe during pregnancy doing the 20 grams a day, you know, that is being studied probably not, but a more we mentioned it earlier but I'll reiterate it that the general sense on average is that we need about 2 grams of creatine a day to stay in balance and that we can make about a gram of it. These again average numbers and need to get about a gram from the diet. And pregnant women like having more, you know, like a steak frequently is going to help them stay in balance. But for someone that was is a vegetarian, it's really hard to stay in balance. The few studies that have measured changes in creatine and phosphocreatine levels in muscle when they've shifted people from, let's say an oval like a diet that contains meat to a vegetarian diet within a month to two months, their tissue levels of creatine are a lot lower. And when they then either give creatine and not a lot, just a gram a day has been a lot sufficient to put them back in the black and start to re accrue some levels. So in pregnancy I tend to be super conservative. But what I would think of is more on the micro dosi or low dose creatine of 1 to 3 grams a day is going to hedge against any dietary inadequacies.
- [56:45]
A
I, I appreciate saying that. V. I've never seen studies on it in humans. And if I was having more babies, as the author of a major book on how to have smarter, healthier babies without autism, I would definitely do 5 grams a day because I understand the woman's body is building massive amounts of muscle. It's called a baby. And a lot of other tissues that you normally don't have to. And that is an energy intensive task. So that should reduce stress and it should reduce or should increase mitochondrial function. And the healthier the mom is in the three months before conception, the more energy she has. That changes the egg selection process and the health of the egg, the health of the ovaries, which are the most mitochondrial dense tissues out there. So I think creatine is maybe under respected when it comes to fertility in pregnancy as an important input because we know mitochondria are driving so many of those processes. And again, there aren't a ton of studies. I'd also say there are no studies of Cheetos in pregnancy either. Yet people feel totally safe eating those. And your body doesn't make Cheetos every day the way it makes creatine every day. So we have kind of a double standard for all this weird stuff that's out there.
- [58:00]
B
Yeah, it's one of the strange mental models, right, that these things, because they're sold as food, are great for pregnancy. And these things that our body naturally would make and would be in the diet. Oh, we need to somehow prove that these are safe.
- [58:16]
A
What's the connection between magnesium and creatine?
- [58:18]
B
That's a great question. So one, magnesium is a super important mitochondrial nutrient on its own. But anytime moving phosphate groups around occurs in the body, magnesium's always involved. So when you hear ATP functionally in our cells and mitochondria, it's always a magnesium ATP complex because that phosphate group can't be moved to the enzyme. So from ATP to activate the enzyme without magnesium complexing it. So magnesium's indispensable for phosphate groups. And then the other place that a phosphate group is moved is when creatine becomes phosphocreatine, because creatine, phosphocreatine, the other name for it is creatine phosphate. It's creatine with a phosphate put on. And that's why it can buffer ATP. It can donate that phosphate group and that reaction requires magnesium as well. So to activate creatine into phosphocreatine, magnesium is required. And then to donate that phosphocreatine phosphate to ADP to recharge it to ATP, that requires magnesium and then for ATP to do its job, that requires magnesium. So while it's largely been missed outside of maybe bodybuilders and the makers of the Magna Power creatine that Qualia Creatine plus uses, which is a magnesium creatine chelate, the importance of creatine has just been largely completely overlooked. And we just can't activate and use creatine without having adequate magnesium. And as your listeners know, that's a super common inadequacy in the western diet.
- [60:05]
A
And that's why you've added magnesium into the quality formula.
- [60:08]
B
Yeah, and we use that particular chelated form because they've done one human studies on it. But one of the cool studies they did is they looked at intracellular water and hydration status and performance and they gave placebo in one group they gave creatine plus magnesium and then they gave the creatine chelated to magnesium and the chelated worked better than even creatine and magnesium on its own.
- [60:36]
A
Got it. So you chose a specific form. People listening to the show have heard a lot about methylation and so many people have genetic differences in how they methylate. What is the connection between methylation and creatine?
- [60:51]
B
Creatine is made from a combination of three different amino acids. So creatine would be like in the amino acid category, but it's not thought of as like a protein building, meaning it's not like an essential amino acid. Right. It's a preformed thing that does these roles we've mentioned. But it's made from arginine, glycine and ultimately S adenosyl, methionine and glycine being like a methyl compound. Same methionine having both a sulfhydryl and a methyl group. So creatine, if we're inadequate in methyl groups in our diet, then we will run even shorter on creatine because we need methyl groups to make it. But the methyl groups on creatine aren't used like the methyl groups on like trimethylglycine or your betaine. Once creatine is made, it shuttles back and forth between that creatine and phosphocreatine form and eventually gets used up into the creatinine breakdown product. So it requires it soaks up methyl groups, requires them to make it if we're synthesizing it, but it doesn't then do the methylation kind of reactions we think of when we would talk about methylcobalamin or methylfolate or trimethylglycine. Does that make sense or did I confuse you or your listeners?
- [62:11]
A
It makes sense. Should I be taking extra trimethylglycine along with my creatine?
- [62:16]
B
It's a great question. So I'm a huge fan of trimethylglycine. So the other common name for that is betaine. And a lot of us aren't getting enough the way creatine is absorbed, both in a digestive system sense and then to get into our tissues that use creatine transporters. So very specific receptors and they have a big preference for creatine. But things like taurine and betaine can compete. So it's probably not ideal if we want to optimize creatine uptake to do a big amount of trimethylglycine at the exact same time, but some other time in the day, I would say, heck yes, Betaine or slash, trimethylglycine is a crazy important nutrient that many of us aren't getting enough to optimize our performance.
- [63:03]
A
There's at least one study I've come across that shows that taking about 1.5 grams of TMG or trimethylglycine per day had a similar effect on ATP and energy as taking creatine via different mechanisms. So you might find 1.5 grams of TMG in my daily stack along with 10 to 15 grams of the qualia creatine in danger coffee. The TMG isn't but the creatine is. And man, that combination's really good. And for clarity, TMG is known as betaine, but betaine HCL or stomach acid is not tmg. So people who've heard an episode on digestion, we get low stomach acid over time and for that you take betaine HCL and for mitochondrial function you take tmg, which is sometimes called betaine, but it's not the stomach acid form. Does that make sense?
- [64:01]
B
Yeah. So they would both have like betaine would be trimethylglycine in either case, but the use case would be different. The betaine HCL would be the literal scientific would be trimethylglycine just bonded to hcl. It's going to be a lower proportion of that with the HCL for stomach acid.
- [64:21]
A
Where does betaine HCL help with methylation also?
- [64:25]
B
Yeah, yeah. Because it's still trimethy interesting. Is trimethylglycine interesting?
- [64:30]
A
I did not know that it category.
- [64:32]
B
It can be other things, but the way in supplements retains always trimethylglycine. It's whether it's it's anhydrous or bonded to HCL that's the difference in terms of how it's usually then referred on the label and part of the reason that you would have mentioned that it helped cells make creatine. I don't think that's your exact term, but it's such a robust. I mentioned glycine is one of the building blocks for creatine and trimethylglycine, you know, is glycine with three methyl groups. And the methyl groups can be repurposed to help our cells make anything that needs those methyl groups. And one of those is creatine.
- [65:09]
A
Got it. It's, it's sounds relatively complex if you want to summarize it all. At least 10 grams of creatine and probably a gram and a half of TMG would be a good strategy. But start with a creatine because I think that's more foundational.
- [65:27]
B
Great recommendation. I think both of those nutrients have been very underappreciated except in audiences like yours and for users like your you.
- [65:35]
A
There are a lot of, we'll call them cheap, low quality forms of creatine. Actually let me say that again. There are a lot of no brand untested creatine forms out there. What are the potential contaminants from lower quality creatine?
- [65:52]
B
So normally what you would see is there's going to be more of the breakdown product creatinine in it proportionally. Gummies are an example. I've seen two different studies on creatine gummies in part just because over the last year and a half to two years they've exploded in popularity. One was done by now foods. I think they pulled, I want to say it was 12 different creatines off. I think they just got them off Amazon and found that five of the 12 had somewhere between almost zero to certainly much less than label claim of the amount of creatine. And recently there was another group called SUPCO that I believe they looked at the eight most popular selling creatine gummies on Amazon and five of the eight had literally undetectable creatine like they had none and three met label claim and even the ones that met label claim all still then had more of this breakdown product as well. Just because creatine in a moist environment or like, you know, the reason creatine is not in energy drinks is because if left in a solution it degrades into its breakdown product and that process unfolds not in minutes or hours, you know, when we would put it in like the danger coffee, but certainly over days to weeks. So the, the big takeaway from that SUPCO study or what I thought was interesting is the most, the ones that sold the most sold the most in part because they tasted the best. And the ones actually that MET label claim and had creatine didn't taste as quite as good. So they sold less. So it's certainly a buyer beware out there in the market.
- [67:37]
A
So one of the problems is that even if these companies, I'm going to assume most of them are good, but there are some people who are just scammers but. Or just counterfeits. Even if they put the right amount of creatine and when they manufacture the gummy, it's not stable in the gummy. So unless the gummies are freshly made, you're not as much creatine as you think, if any.
- [67:54]
B
Yeah, the. That would be part of it I think because there's inherently going to be some moisture in a gummy, you know, heat other things in making it. So there are gummy manufacturers I've spoken to that feel like they've solved it but, but they need to put a lot larger overage in it. And Even comparing the now study of those 12 products and the subco one, one of the products that SUPCO found Met Label claim didn't meet it. That that same brand did not. It was slightly below it in the NOW study. So it's just a harder form factor for creatine to be stable. And it's why like if I'm, you know, even before qualia creatine plus I'm a creatine fan, I would have just taken the powder rather than assume the gummies are going to still be to meet label claim, you know, because I don't know when they were made.
- [68:47]
A
Got it. I have had some probably freshly made gummies that definitely worked and I apologize, I don't remember the brand but I wouldn't count on them for exactly that reason. There's also issues with manufacturing and there have been studies of Chinese creatine specifically. I'm not saying all Chinese creatine. There's just a lot of unregulated or less regulated manufacturing plants. You don't know what you're getting. And up to 3.4% di cyan D amide, if I'm saying that right, or DCD and up to about 0.1% of dihydrotriozine, which is similar to other carcinogens, but we haven't tested it in humans. And quite often there's creatinine instead of creatine for instance, like 44% of samples in Italy had that in it, and Chinese products can have about 1.3%. So if you're getting a real bargain on, you know, a blank generic thing of creatine monohydrate, it's probably not the stuff that's pure and these things are not good for you. So I do think quality is an issue. I'm assuming that Qualia tests the creatine you use for all these impurities.
- [70:03]
B
We test all of our ingredients and then we test finished products as well. And there's a few, like good brand. Like the most well known branded creatine over the years has been Creapure, which a German company makes. There's another branded one that's made here in the US we use optic creatine. And the commonality of all those is the really high purity.
- [70:26]
A
That doesn't surprise me, and I think listeners may know this from other episodes, but I've been an advisor to Qualia for many years. I've spoken with your formulation team. I'm a shareholder in Qualia. And the amount of rigor in your manufacturer, your clinical studies, it rivals some pharma companies. And I know, I know the percentage of revenue that you spend on R D and clinicals is way in excess of any other supplement company I've worked with. So I would expect it to be high quality. But just to be really clear, guys, you know, I put my money where my mouth is on this stuff. The reason that I'm particularly concerned about impurities in creatine is we take creatine in order to increase mitochondrial function. But that contaminant from the tainted Chinese creatine, it's not good stuff because if you're taking 10 grams a day and you've got the contaminated stuff, you get 340 milligrams of dicyandi amide, which converts to hydrogen cyanide and stomach acid. It's not a dose big enough to kill you, but cyanide is directly toxic to mitochondria. So don't, don't take the really cheap stuff because it will move your mitochondrial function in the wrong direction. And since you took creatine to have better mitochondria, not cyanide mitochondria, it just makes good sense to take a good creatine. And yes, I support the Qualia stuff. That's what I used this morning because, well, as I just said, I'm a shareholder and an advisor and we're doing this episode to talk about it. So I just appreciate the commitment to quality that you've got there.
- [72:08]
B
Thank you. Yeah, there's. I started out in 96 being a student rep. 95 for Thorne. You know, Thorne still makes great products. There's, there's good actors and there's bad actors. And, you know, the types of companies that you attach your name to, in addition to Qualia, you know, are companies that are really doing it right. So, you know, we're fortunate as a community that you've built that you've done a lot of vetting to make sure that you know the, where you're pointing your listeners and your community to our companies. Whether it's supplements or red lights or your, the, you know, the truedark glasses that I have and we're all the time are just exceptionally high quality products.
- [72:55]
A
It just shows over 25 years of working in the field, you can tell there's companies that, that in their values, they, they do it right even though it's more expensive. And my bet has always been that people are smart enough to sometimes pay a little more to get something that's actually better and works better. But what they taught me in business school at Wharton was that it's actually cheaper to spend the money on marketing to tell people that your cheap crap is healthy. And I feel like that explains oatmeal. Like, oh, look, it's the cheapest peasant food. Let's spend some money telling people it's got superpowers, despite the fact that you could have ice cream for breakfast and be healthier than eating oatmeal. So it's one of those things where you just learn over time which are the trustworthy companies. And I'm consistently impressed with Qualia, so thanks for having me be a part of the company too.
- [73:45]
B
You're welcome.
- [73:46]
A
Is there anything else about creatine that you think people either don't understand or need to know?
- [73:51]
B
Usually like to make sure people don't overcomplicate things because it's so easy to do. So I would say the most important message is just make it easy on yourself. Do something like what Dave and I did this morning. Dave putting it into his danger coffee. Me doing the same with my coffee. And you know, that's I'm good, right? I don't need to worry about creatine now until tomorrow again. So just make it easier on yourself. Find a way to integrate it into something you're already doing and then reap the benefits. Because there are a lot of benefits to upping our creatine intake in that.
- [74:26]
A
Line, you'll never find me. Take five grams of creatine four times a day. It's just too much work. I'm gonna have to carry it around with me. I'm gonna have to remember it. I'm gonna have to find some hot stuff each day. No, I. I just do it in the morning, but I'm used to it. And if it caused gastric distress, I would probably take it twice a day. I guess the final question is, have you noticed creatine before bed causing improvements in sleep for some people?
- [74:52]
B
You know, I've not personally worked with it like that, but my sense is that it might do a really interesting thing for some people with lucid dreaming and certainly others with sleep, just because, like, think of all the sleep disorder breathings, everything from snoring, sleep apnea. You know, some of that's our nervous system, but some, you know, ultimately it goes back to mitochondria. So I think it would be an interesting thing to look at for sure.
- [75:16]
A
If your problems with sleep are caused by low mitochondrial function, which could just be something as simple as low blood flow in the brain when you sleep, which is a problem for us, or because of snoring or breathing problems or anything else like that. Creatine before bed could be helpful. And I referenced a couple studies in one of my books showing that the glymphatic system, the one that basically washes your cerebral spinal fluid out of the brain to get rid of toxins and replaces it, that that system is driven by mitochondria. So sleep efficiency could go up with creatine. But if you're like me, if I take creatine right before bed, I've already optimized my mitochondria. And then I tend to wake up at four in the morning and I have less sleep drive. I just don't want to go back to sleep. And it probably would be a good idea after five hours of sleep to go back to sleep, but I'm done. And then I wake up and I go get in the sauna and do all this stuff. But I don't think sleeping five hours a night is a really great thing for long periods of time. My goal is six and a half hours. Normally if I wake up at four or five, then I'm just gonna go right back to sleep. And I don't normally wake up unless I drink too much water the night before. So I don't do it before bed. But I think for some people it's gonna be life changing. And for other people you just won't sleep. Well, the only way to do it is to try it a couple times. Just don't do it when you have a really big day coming up because, well, you gotta see how it works first. All right, this was a great masterclass on creatine and how to use it, why to use it, what to watch out for, what's likely to work, what isn't likely to work. We hypothesized about some pregnancy stuff. There are no human studies of that. There probably won't be. And almost every supplement on the market, unless it's a prenatal, it says don't use if you're pregnant. And the reason we do that has to do with insurance and regulatory. So even something as simple as liver powder and I do make an organ supplement in the subgrade line, but it's going to say don't use when you're pregnant. Pregnant women have been eating organs since the beginning of time. In fact, tribes in the US would specifically save the organs and salmon eggs to give to pregnant women. And even when there was inter tribal warfare, they would trade fish eggs with the inland tribes just to make sure the next generation would be healthy. So that said, there's no studies of fish eggs. So if you made a fish egg extract, it would say not for use during pregnancy, even though obviously it should be. So this makes it really rough on pregnant women because if you follow the labels, everything says don't take when you're pregnant. And this is why you want to work with a functional medicine practitioner and someone who's familiar with pregnancy or preconception. And shout out to Ann Shippy, who was just on the show and wrote a new very detailed book on preconception, talking about supplements that are beneficial during pregnancy as well. So I bringing this up because we kind of need more babies right now. And we don't just need more babies, we need healthy, healthy, vibrant, strong babies. And so if I was redoing my book on a pregnancy from years ago, I would include creatine in it. And if you are vegetarian or vegan and you're pregnant, please take creatine. I'm just saying this outside of any commercial aspect here, but you're gonna need it. And the studies show very clearly you will run out of it. And that's the time when your body needs it most. So I think you can be a healthy vegetarian, but it takes work. I do not think you can be a healthy vegan. And I'm a former vegan. Creatine would help in either Case creatine is vegan or vegetarian, both of those. But you need it even more in those cases. And if you're studying, you're flying, you're an entrepreneur, you're working out all the time, you're working on recovering from chronic illness, for God's sake, get your ATP back. And creatine is affordable, it works very, very well. And it's a broad spectrum thing. Every system in the body, which is pretty much everything but your red blood cells, has mitochondria and they could all use a boost. And if you take enough, you should feel more emotional regulation. It takes less work to not get pissed off at people. And you should feel the ability to focus if you have something like ADHD or any other cognitive dysfunction. More mitochondria equals it's working. More mitochondrial function equals it's working. So you gotta manage all of those states. And this is just, it's well studied, 700 studies, it is abundant, it's a natural compound found in food. And there's a really clear case for adding this into your supplement stack. And as I said before, I do use the qualia stuff and you can go to qualialife.com humanupgrade or use code human upgrade and get an extra 15% off. What about teenagers or kids? Is creatine safe for them?
- [80:20]
B
So it seems like it's the same kind of dilemma we have with pregnancy where the default is like, oh, ask your doctor type of advice. And then doctors like no, don't do it. But yes, there's been a number of studies that have been done, especially in teens for creatine being very safe. In those studies, there's probably not a high school football team or middle school football team you'd go to in the country that a fair number of those athletes aren't already on their own using creatine. So similar to adults, same uses and same needs. Right. They, you know, if they were doing a more, you know, hunter gatherer or very heavy meat diet, they would naturally be getting more in their diet and using more. So, you know, if I was working with a teenager in practice, which I'm not in practice anymore for listeners, I would be very comfortable, you know, having their, that teenager use creatine with a child. Then, you know, I think it's, it can be important to work with a functional medicine MD to do a low amount of creatine. Again, I would think would be very safe even in a child. And by a low amount we're talking more just augmenting the diet. So maybe half A gram, up to a gram, completely safe. Doing more than that, I think that it may be prudent in amounts that we've been talking about, like the five plus grams a day, to maybe defer that until a child gets a bit older. Unless you absolutely need. Needed.
- [81:59]
A
I love the way you think about that. And if you have kids who are not neurotypical, working with a doctor, playing around with going up to 4 or 5 grams, it could have a profound beneficial effect or it could not. And there's no way to know because, you know, every biology is unique, but it is a very safe compound compared to even something like vitamin C. And it. You reminded me of a story once. I years ago was working with an allopathic doctor and I said, hey, do you think I could take some vitamin C along with whatever he was recommending? Do you see any reasons not to? And he goes, oh no, you shouldn't do it. And I said, well, why? He said, well, there's no studies. And I just looked at him and said, there's no studies of lotion along with what you're telling me to do, but you haven't told me not to use lotion. And he just kind of paused and he looks at me and goes, you have a really good point. Yeah, I don't see any reason not to use vitamin C. But they don't teach this in medical school. So there isn't like a creatine 101 course or even really a mitochondrial biology one on one course unless you're in a certain specialty, you know, you'll learn the basics of them, but not how to enhance mitochondrial function. So finding a functional doctor or one familiar with, with functional kids medicine would be really beneficial. So thanks for, for sharing that. I, I would feel very confident giving my kids up to a gram a day when they were young, which I did not do. And as teenagers, at the later half of being teenagers, 2 to 5 grams I'd feel very comfortable with, especially, you know, maybe during exam week or during emotionally stressful things or during sports tournaments and things like that where you know that their biological output needs to be higher or their energy output needs to be higher, or when you know that there's strong emotional stuff going on because kids are struggling to regulate their emotions because they haven't learned how to do it yet. And some of those emotions are just coming online with hormones. But so giving them a little bump of ATP. Probably a good idea.
- [83:55]
B
Yeah, I think the key term for me, creatine's a conditionally essential nutrient and you know, as opposed to like an essential amino acid that we absolutely have to get from our diet. You know, things that are categorized as vitamins, those are well established, those are essential, like we can't get them somewhere else. Conditionally essential means we can make it. We with creatine we know we don't make enough and then there are circumstances, that is conditions where clearly we need a lot more. So that doesn't it doesn't matter how old we are or what life stage we're in. Creatine is always conditionally essential. There are circumstances where we are going to need to get more than our body can make.
- [84:39]
A
Greg, thanks for sharing all of your knowledge. I love the the level of detail and the level of integrity in the way you approach all the questions and formulating products. And it's always a pleasure to work with you.
- [84:51]
B
Thank you Dave. And thank you to all the listeners that invested their time with me today and with you.
- [84:57]
A
If you like this episode, you know what to do. You probably should pick up some qualia creatine qualialife.com humanupgrade or if that's not your vibe, get it some other way and shout out to putting your creatine in hot beverage. You know which one I'm going to choose. See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.
- [85:23]
D
A Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully read all labels, and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast is does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.