Ep #203:You’ve been asking, so here it is—an entire episode dedicated to creatine! This powerhouse supplement isn’t just for bodybuilders; it has major benefits for brain health, hormone balance, gut integrity, and even pregnancy. I’ll break down why you should be paying attention to creatine, how it supports overall health, and what you need to know about forms, dosing, and potential side effects. If you’ve ever wondered whether creatine is right for you, this episode will give you the answers. Topics Discussed: What are the brain health benefits of creatine? Why is creatine especially important for women over 35? How does creatine support hormonal health and methylation? Is creatine safe to take during pregnancy? What are the best forms of creatine for women, and are there any side effects? On This Episode We Cover: 00:00:00 - Introduction 00:00:50 - Brain benefits 00:04:35 - Women over 35 00:07:02 - Hormonal health and methylation 00:10:48 - Strength and body building 00:11:12 - Creatine, pregnancy, & postpartum 00:13:51 - Gut health and barrier integrity 00:14:04 - Women’s creatine tolerance 00:14:57 - Form & side effects Show Links CreaThrive - Use Code DRTYNA10 for 10% off Creatine Supplementation in Women’s Health: A Lifespan Perspective Further Listening: Strength Training Playlist Metabolic Health Playlist Sponsored By: LVLUP Head over to LVLUPHealth.com and use code DRTYNA at checkout to get 20% off your order sitewide. Purity Woods Go to puritywoods.com/DRTYNA or enter DRTYNA at checkout for 27% off Disclaimer: Information provided in this podcast is for informational purposes only. This information is NOT intended as a substitute for the advice provided by your physician or other healthcare professional, or any information contained on or in any product. Do not use the information provided in this podcast for diagnosing or treating a health problem or disease, or prescribing medication or other treatment. Always speak with your physician or other healthcare professional before taking any medication or nutritional, herbal or other supplement, or using any treatment for a health problem. Information provided in this blog/podcast and the use of any products or services related to this podcast by you does not create a doctor-patient relationship between you and Dr. Tyna Moore. Information and statements regarding dietary supplements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent ANY disease.
Chapter 1: What is creatine and why is it important?
You are tuned into The Dr. Tina Show with Dr. Tina Moore. For more, visit drtina.com. All right, guys, creatine. Let's talk about it. You guys have asked me so much about this. So I wanted to do an entire podcast about it just on creatine. We're going to do a quick and dirty here. So I'm going to get this done in under 20 minutes and we're going to jump right in.
Chapter 2: What are the brain health benefits of creatine?
So first off, I have to correct myself. I have been going around saying that creatine is a peptide because it is made of three amino acids. However, I am incorrect. They are not peptide bonded, these amino acids. So it's not a peptide. It's not a protein. It's its own substance. It's creatine monohydrate. It is used in ATP production. It is not a peptide. So I will correct myself there.
I apologize for any confusion I may have caused. I have gone around thinking for the past year that it was a peptide and I am wrong. So with that aside, let's jump into the many benefits of creatine. Number one, I think of creatine as a brain supplement, right? I've felt this way for a long time.
Back when I was running my big clinical practice, I tried to get as many people, especially my elderly ladies, on creatine as I could because I think of it as a neuroprotective supplement at the end of the day. I know that it's big in the bodybuilding space. I know it's big in the muscle space. I know all of that to be true, but I have always really thought of it
predominantly as a brain supplement. So some of the things it helps with is women, first of all, have lower baseline creatine levels in their brain. It supports mental clarity, focus, and cognitive resilience. A study just came out showing its impact on mood, low mood in particular.
So when you're under stress, you're having sleep issues, especially as we're going through perimenopause and menopause, creatine really is something to, you know, I think every woman should be on it, to be completely honest with you. I can't think of any contraindications. I can't think of any side effects that would be dangerous. I don't make blanket statements like this very often.
And this is not medical advice. Obviously, talk with your practitioner. But we've got over 64,000 studies on creatine. It's very, very safe. It's very, very well studied. It's not gonna interact with, I can't think of a single drug interaction. So talk to your, obviously your health professional that you work with, but it may reduce mental fatigue.
It may protect against reduced energy brain states. It may work to improve low mood. And it's something I wish I had discovered, honestly, decades ago, like with the way that my brain has been. I know some of you think I'm really smart. I don't feel really smart. I feel like I'm struggling. You know, as I get older, I'm struggling. It's just how it is. I'm not my brain.
And I think it's, you know, to be totally honest with you, I think it's just incredible high levels of stress for an extended period of time. Eventually, it just chews up your brain. So couple that with some perimenopause and some hormonal shifts and voila.
obviously working out helps, good nutrition helps, good essential fatty acids help, all of those things help, hormones help, but creatine, it really is something that I keep in my pocket. It supports mood, depression, and anxiety straight up. We have data to support that. So creatine enhances emotional resilience. It may support mood regulation.
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Chapter 3: Why is creatine especially important for women over 35?
It builds and preserves lean muscle. This is going to directly impact your brain. Your brain and frailty are very intimately tied together. There's data to support that. The more frailty that we walk into as we get older, and we all will deal with frailty if we don't actively combat it. The more frailty, the more dementia. That's just how it goes.
So when I think of preserving lean muscle mass, I am not just trying to avoid a hip fracture. I'm not just trying to avoid, you know, getting old for vanity's sake, although that's part of it, of course. I'm trying to keep my brain functioning. And so therefore I need a slab of muscle on this bod. This meat suit needs to be built so that the brain works and the brain continues to work.
So I don't forget my name. I don't forget all this awesome information that I spent half a million dollars or more learning well over that actually. These are the things I think about. And this is why I supplement creatine. It's especially important for women over 35. We're losing muscle mass. I could give you some terrifying stats. I just went through this in my Protein Quest group.
We do live calls every week. And I was sharing with them the Come to Jesus stats around frailty, sarcopenia, muscle wasting. So we want to preserve the muscle we have because as we get older, that muscle wasting accelerates. Creatine plus lifting. truly equals more strength, more tone, faster recovery, better endurance. We have data on this.
We have stacks of data on this, old data, new data, current data. It supports bone density. Creatine has been shown to support bone mineral content when paired with resistance training. And so something else I was sharing in the Protein Quest is these things stack upon each other. So we don't just do one thing. We don't supplement and hope for the best.
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Chapter 4: How does creatine support hormonal health?
Supplements are meant to supplement a good, healthy lifestyle. So we are lifting weights, we are hitting our protein macros, and then we are adding supplementations to sweeten the deal. Prime it all up, if you will. We're stacking our good lifestyle habits. They synthesize. They make each other work better. And creatine is, you know, no exception there.
It's especially beneficial for postmenopausal women because... Our muscles and our joints and our bones are BFFs. You guys have heard me say that multiple times. And if your muscles are wasting, I promise you your bones are wasting. And if your muscles and your bones are wasting, I promise you your joints are wasting. So we don't think about that.
People come into my clinic all the time and they're like, I'm bone on bone. And I'm like, welcome to the club. So is everyone else who walks in here. If you don't eat enough good collagen and get enough protein and put enough pressure on those joints, they will start to dissolve like everything else.
And so something I learned a long time ago is that if you start to see wrinkles on your face, you can bet that your bones are getting wrinkly. So something to think about there. When does our face get wrinkly? When our estrogen bottoms out, right? And when our nutrition starts to bottom out, our stomach lining atrophies, you guys.
As we get older, it's harder for us to actually absorb the foods that we're eating. So we have to eat more protein to hit muscle protein synthesis thresholds. It's crazy, I know. But creatine, it's affordable. It's something to have in your back pocket. I think this is something that young people could benefit from. I think it's something that older folks definitely need to be on.
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Chapter 5: Is creatine safe to take during pregnancy?
Heck, I have my dogs on creatine, you guys. I've had every elderly dog for the past 20 years on creatine just to keep them going. We don't mess around in this house. It supports hormonal health and methylation. So creatine synthesis uses up to 40% of your methylation capacity. So making creatine in your body burns up your methylation capacity.
And for those of us who have MTHFR mutations, you can see this might be a bit problematic. So supplementation of creatine frees up methyl donors for hormone synthesis, detox, and neurotransmitter production. That study is going all the way back to 2007, Bronson and Bronson. I just like saying that. It boosts energy and metabolic health. It helps regulate ATP, our body's main energy currency.
Your mitochondria are the powerhouses of your cell. They are bacterial, you guys. They are symbiotic bacteria, if you can believe it. No one ever tells you that. I wrote a paper about it in undergrad. I was like way ahead of the pace. I think it was like pre, you know, prefacing my career, but... We need our mitochondria working.
And as we get older, as we get hit with more toxicity in the world, as we get hit with more stress, our poor mitochondria peter out. And so we can hone them by strength training. We can nurture them by helping with autophagy, by doing some intermittent fasting. But we don't want to stress ourselves the F out as middle-aged women because we're already stressed the F out. So what can we do?
We can supplement strategically. And I think creatine is not going to break the bank. And it's something that...
again i think everybody can tolerate i learned a long time ago from my mentor that gut health isn't just about digestion it's the gateway to your entire well-being your gut health plays a critical role in nutrient absorption immune function and resilience when your gut lining is strong your body can better handle stressors process nutrients improve your immune function and maintain balance in the system
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Chapter 6: What are the best forms of creatine for women?
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It may improve glucose tolerance and body composition, especially with training. So you'll see this in the bodybuilding community. You'll see this in the strength and conditioning community. They're all on creatine and they all swear by it for good reason. So if we can help anything regenerate ATP, which is the...
that's like the cash, the energy cash that the mitochondria make, then I'm game, right? That's our currency, energy currency. It supports pregnancy, it supports postpartum and reproduction. I don't know a lot of things that we can just say are blanket safe to take in pregnancy and postpartum, but creatine is one of them. Again, check with your practitioner.
I'm not your doctor, this is for educational purposes. Creatine needs increase during pregnancy. So being on a good solid creatine can be helpful during that period and postpartum. It may protect maternal brain function. This is crazy. The stats around how much a woman's brain shrinks and how much muscle she loses in a pregnancy is pretty shocking.
And I know we're resilient beings, but for those of you who get pregnant like every year, every other year, you really need to be taking good care of yourselves because... That's hard on the system. I don't have any other way to say it. Be kind to your body, right? And growing a human being inside of you frequently as you're rearing a family, it's a lot.
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Chapter 7: What are the potential side effects of creatine?
So creatine is something that may be protective there and helpful. And I think postpartum, for any of you who struggled with postpartum depression like I did, that was something else. And it really impacts your children. So this might be something to look into is all I'm sharing. It's crucial for vegans and vegetarians.
I don't counsel much on vegans and vegetarians because I quite honestly don't think that's an ideal way to live. We have a variety of teeth for a reason. I'm not here to get in fights with vegans and vegetarians. I spent a decade as a vegetarian.
Chapter 8: How does creatine support gut health?
It was the sickest I've ever been and I ruined my body for the rest of my life because of that because it was during a very critical hormonal period of my young life. I was 14 to 24 and I was a vegetarian and I... I am so angry at myself. My cartilage is thin. There's just so much there to unpack. We won't get into it, but plant-based diets lack creatine. So we have to supplement it.
So getting some creatine in, if you're vegetarian or vegan, it can be very, very helpful because we want to support cognitive performance. We wanna support our bones. We wanna support our muscles. And those diets are very difficult to get everything you need to do that. supports gut health and barrier integrity. This is a big one. Most health issues go back to some form of leaky gut.
At least in my world, that's, you know, all illness and health starts in the gut. And so we wanna always support healing the gut. That's kind of goal number one. So if you get back some concerning labs, the first thing you do is you look at what foods are inflammatory in your diet and you take them out.
It's not that I'm worried about the inflammation throughout my whole body that those foods may be causing, although I am. I'm predominantly thinking I just want good poops and I want my gut healthy and happy. I just want to help my gut out. So creatine can help you with that. Creatine fuels the intestinal epithelial cells and helps maintain gut lining integrity. That's huge.
It may reduce symptoms of colitis and support mucosal healing. We have data to support that. And it is a key player in the gut brain axis resilience. That's a big one, guys. It's safe, it's effective, and it's very well tolerated in women. Creatine monohydrate in particular is one of the most studied supplements on the planet.
Extensive evidence shows that it's safe, effective, and well tolerated across the female lifespan. Lots of studies to support that. And there was recently a great one. It's called Creatine Supplementation, A Rising Tide for Women's Health, a 2024 deep dive on creatine's role in cognition, strength, bone, hormone health, and metabolism. I'll put that in the show notes.
Great read if you're a female and you're considering creatine. How do you do it? It's kind of all over the board. You know, standard dosing, I think for men, they say five grams a day and it just mixes into whatever. It doesn't really taste like anything. I just put it in my smoothie or I mix it with my essential amino acids or I... You know, whatever. You can put it in water and drink it down.
It's not a big deal. It's pretty tasteless. It might be a little bit better. It depends. Does form matter? Not really. I think creatine monohydrate is what you want. That's what you want to go for is the monohydrate. Across the board, it's very affordable and you can get it pretty much anywhere. It can cause some bloating and some distension and some discomfort.
And it can also cause just kind of like a edematous swelling. And that tends to go away after you stick with it for a while. I do struggle with that. So it's like the onboarding phase. They used to say you have to take a whole bunch of it to front load it. You know, you take 20 grams a day or some crazy, I don't even remember, but like that was not tolerable for me.
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