← The Neuro Experience
The Neuro Experience
The Hidden Power of Creatine: Prevent Brain Decline & Boost Memory in 30 Days
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Hi, everyone. My name is Louisa Nicola. I'm a neurophysiologist and human performance coach. And in today's video, I'm going to talk to you about the benefits of creatine. And creatine is really getting a lot of attention right now, and rightfully so, because over the last 20 or 30 years, creatine was sold to us as this bodybuilding drug, right? Take this supplement to get bigger muscles. Take. Take this supplement if you're a bodybuilder. Take this supplement if you want to have better gains at the gym. So it was marketed really towards men and people who want to bulk up. But we now have substantial evidence to show that creatine has incredible benefits for your brain. So my primary area of research as a neurophysiologist who works in neurosurgery, specifically neuroplastic neurosurgery, so working with the brains of patients who have undergone tumor resections, I can definitely say that creatine is absolutely fundamental to your brain health regime. So for those of you who don't know, creatine is a naturally occurring molecule. It is produced in our liver and in our pancreas. And when it's produced, 95% of that is stored in our muscle and 5% of it is stored in the brain. Creatine is a. It helps with cell energy metabolism. So we have trillions of cells in our body, and within those cells, we have something called the mitochondria, and that's at the seat of our energy production. And in order to produce energy, to perform everyday tasks, from thinking to texting, to running, to breathing, we need energy. And in order to produce that energy, we get it from our mitochondria. And creatine helps with producing more energy. So more creatine means more production of energy within the mitochondria of the cell. And here's where it gets really interesting. Even though our brain is 2% of our total body weight, it consumes 20% of the energy that we consume. So 20% of the calories that you eat goes straight to the brain, because the brain is a hungry and selfish organ. So that means it takes a lot of energy to run, to operate. That's why when you're sleep deprived, you don't have that much energy. That's why when women go through menopause, they experience a loss of brain energy. Their fatigue fatigued, they've got brain fog, they don't feel their best. It all comes down to how much energy the mitochondria is producing. So when we have higher brain creatine stores, we have greater energy resilience, we have better neuronal survival, and we have enhanced cognitive performance. So when we talk about brain creatine stores, we're really referring to the total creatine content that is stored in brain tissue. And it turns out that we only. Because we only store 5% of the creatine in our brain that is naturally produced by the liver, we don't get enough of it. So we have to supplement with it. And over the last 20 years, the standard dosage was 5 grams a day. And what we have learned is that 5 grams will saturate the muscle to the amount that we need. So you will go to the gym, and when you lift weights, you lift really heavy. If you take 5 grams of creatine per day, you can probably lift harder, lift faster, and that results in greater muscle mass, a better workout, more energy at the gym. We only just found out that we need to actually supplement with more creatine for it to get into the brain, to raise the brain creatine stores. So the body only produces about 1 gram of creatine per day, and most people need around 3 to 5 grams per day just for maintenance. Brain creatine synthesis is slow and limited, especially in older adults or those with metabolic issues. Vegetarians, older adults, and people under a lot of cognitive and physical stress tend to have lower levels. That's why supplementing ensures saturation in tissues like the brain, where it matters most for performance and resilience and Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. So when we're actually looking at dementia and brain aging, we experience while patients in this category experience low brain energy. So it makes sense to supplement with creatine to raise their brain creatine stores. And there was a really fascinating study that I posted not too long ago on my Instagram page, which I'll link below. So in this study specifically there, the patients were taking 20 grams of creatine per day, and after eight weeks, they rose their brain creatine levels by 11%. This resulted in better memory, better reaction time, better fluid intelligence, as I mentioned. So when we think about these things, they are all functions of our frontal lobe. So at the front of the brain sits our prefrontal cortex that houses our executive functions. And, and this is one of the first things to go during Alzheimer's disease. This is why one of the first symptoms of Alzheimer's disease is memory, short term memory. I've. I've lost my keys. I forget where what street I live in. I forget his name. I forget that book that I read last week. These are all dysfunctions of the prefrontal cortex. But we can halt that with creatine. This was the first ever human trial in Alzheimer's disease patients showing cognitive improvement from creatine alone. So it shows that creatine acts as a neuroprotective agent by reducing the dysfunction of the mitochondria, which, again, is a hallmark of neurodegeneration. And not just that. By days 7 to 14, the participants reported that they had increases in muscle power, muscle strength, and that's probably because creatine pulls water into the cell. That's why when some people take creatine, they feel maybe puffy or bloated, but they're just more hydrated. So let's talk about some of the reasons why you might not be taking creatine. You probably heard somewhere that creatine increases dht, which means that your hair will fall out. That is false. That's a myth. So creatine will not make your hair fall out. It will not increase dht. The second myth is that it may cause kidney dysfunction. There has been no research to suggest this. There is another myth that states that you will bloat from this. Now, I say it's a myth because everybody's different, right? If you bloat, maybe what you want to do is halve the dosage. So if you're taking 10 grams of creatine per day, maybe you want to take 5 grams of creatine per day and you really want to go upwards from there. If you've never taken creatine before, I would suggest taking 2.5 grams a day and then go up to 3 and eventually get to 10. I was taking 5 grams a day for the last 10 years, but now that I've read the research on the cognitive benefits of taking 20 grams a day, I take 10 grams a day because I'm still raising my brain creatine levels. If I'm going to go in and do a really hard day, sometimes I present at the hospital, I'm doing grand rounds. Sometimes I've just got a really, really big day of podcasting, producing. Maybe I'll take 15 grams of creatine per day and I might even split that up in a seven and a half gram dose in the morning and a seven and a half gram dose at night. So how do you take creatine? You can take it in your coffee. It doesn't degrade in hot water, which is fantastic. You can take creatine in a pre workout, you can have it in your smoothie. You can have it any time of the day, any time of the day. It doesn't have to be even in a window of working out, you'll still get the creatine benefits. It doesn't matter when you take it. Creatine monohydrate is the one that you want to stick to. It's the most widely studied supplement on the market and it's fairly cheap compared to other creatine, compared to other supplements. But what you want to really look out for is the manufacturer. So if you are thinking, well, which brand do I take? It's really, really important to know that creatine is a supplement and supplements are unregulated, especially here in the us. So you want to look at the website of the company that you're buying from, make sure they're doing third party testing, make sure they have NSF certified on their website and on all of creatine. That means that it has been tested by a governing body, by a third party governing body. So you know that the standards of the quality is there. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, let me know other topics that you want me to explore in the realms of brain health and Alzheimer's disease. Other than that, put your questions below and I'll see you in the next video.