Creatine is having a moment. Does the science back it up?

Creatine is having a moment. Once largely the domain of bodybuilders and athletes, the supplement has surged into the mainstream. Google search interest for creatine has increased roughly 250% in the past five years. And across social media, dozens of physicians, physical therapists and fitness influencers recommend when and how much creatine to take and, in some cases, share that they give it to their children or elderly parents. 

The shift has been striking to researchers. Stacey Ellery, a pregnancy physiologist at Australia’s Hudson Institute of Medical Research, has studied creatine for 15 years, and has noticed a dramatic change in the conversation in the past 18 months. 

“It’s been quite fascinating to see how it’s exploded,” she said. Ellery attributes some of the boom to social media, but said it has also coincided with new research into creatine’s potential health effects, creating “a little bit of a perfect storm.”

The purported benefits of creatine have expanded, too — from building and maintaining muscle to improving cognition, supporting healthy aging and even potentially protecting against Alzheimer’s and dementia. 

“Creatine is incredible,” actor Bradley Cooper said during a January 2026 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

“It’s incredible for your brain as well,” Rogan replied.

The exchange prompted hundreds of comments on social media. 

“Amen. Creatine is a true lifesaver,” a physical therapist wrote on X. 

“Creatine is not a gym supplement. It is a longevity one,” said another.

But others are skeptical. “Creatine is terrible for your kidneys,” one person wrote on TikTok. 

“Creatine is NOT incredible for your brain,” another rebutted.

Unlike many supplements that explode in popularity before scientists have studied them, creatine is backed by a large, growing body of research. There is strong evidence it can improve strength and exercise performance, particularly when paired with resistance training. While emerging research points to potential benefits beyond athletic performance, the evidence for creatine’s effects on cognition, bone health and healthy aging — let alone its ability to prevent dementia — is limited but, in some instances, promising.

“The only firm benefits we have are around skeletal muscle performance or exercise performance,” said Darren Candow, a professor of exercise physiology, nutrition and aging at Canada’s University of Regina who has extensively studied creatine. “It definitely improves muscle performance, so that includes muscle strength, endurance, muscle power.

“After that, we probably fall into the brain big-hype category. We don’t have a lot of information on the brain yet, probably because it’s so expensive to measure brain creatine levels compared to a muscle biopsy,” Candow said. (Candow has received industry funding for creatine research, advises several companies that manufacture or sell creatine products and has served as an expert witness in legal cases involving creatine supplements. Candow said those relationships do not influence his research, noting that several of his studies have found no benefits from creatine.)

Some studies suggest creatine could have cognitive benefits when the brain is under unusually high metabolic stress, such as severe sleep deprivation. Early research has raised the possibility of benefits for people with neurological conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease. But those findings are nowhere near as established as creatine’s effects on muscle and exercise. 

“There’s a lot more research that needs to be done there,” Candow said. 

What is creatine?

Creatine is a compound the body makes naturally from three amino acids — arginine, glycine and methionine — the building blocks of proteins. It is produced primarily in the liver and kidneys before traveling through the bloodstream to tissues that need it. That’s mostly skeletal muscle — the muscles attached to bones that allow us to move — which holds about 95% of the body’s creatine supply. Smaller amounts are stored in the brain. 

The body produces roughly 1 gram of creatine per day on its own, according to the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Dietary Supplements. A typical omnivorous diet that includes red meat and fish provides about 1 to 2 grams per day, while vegetarians and vegans generally consume much less. 

Creatine’s primary job is to help cells produce energy. In muscles, much of the body’s creatine is stored as phosphocreatine, which helps replenish adenosine triphosphate, or ATP — the immediate source of energy that cells use to do work, especially during short bursts of intense activity, such as sprinting or lifting weights.

But creatine likely helps in other ways. Not only can creatine help muscles produce energy more quickly at the start of intense exercise and replenish those energy stores faster between bouts of activity, it may also help muscles conserve energy and store more glycogen, a form of carbohydrate they can draw on for fuel. Creatine may also accelerate muscle recovery after exercise.

This is why many bodybuilders and professional athletes have long turned to creatine supplements. These products contain synthetic creatine — most commonly creatine monohydrate — typically sold as capsules, gummies or a powder that can be mixed into water. Taking a supplement allows people to consume larger, more consistent doses than they typically get through food, increasing the amount of creatine available to the body’s energy system. Creatine monohydrate is by far the most extensively studied form, and newer, often more expensive formulations have not been shown to work better. 

Getting creatine through food rather than supplements has advantages. For instance, Candow explained, salmon not only contains creatine, but it also provides protein, omega-3 fatty acids and other vitamins and minerals that work together as part of what nutrition researchers call the “food matrix” — the combination of nutrients and other compounds naturally packaged together in a food — that help the body better absorb and utilize those nutrients. 

But while creatine-rich foods have some benefits, supplementation offers a reliable, concentrated dose without having to consume large amounts of meat or fish. For example, consuming 10 grams of creatine — a dose being studied for potential brain benefits — from food alone could require eating several servings of meat or fish each day, Candow said. 

You don’t have to be a bodybuilder to benefit

Though bodybuilders have long slugged creatine supplements, their benefits are not limited to elite athletes. Even for recreational exercises, creatine can amplify muscle gains from resistance training, helping people grow stronger and add more lean mass than they would from lifting alone.

In 2024, researchers from China, New Zealand, Canada and Spain published a meta-analysis reviewing 23 prior studies on creatine supplementation among adults younger than 50. They found that people who combined creatine with resistance training gained significantly more muscle — about 4 kilograms or nearly 10 pounds of upper-body strength and just over 11 kilograms or 25 pounds of lower-body strength. 

“There’s so many studies now showing that the combination of creatine with weight training seems to be the key to unlock its potential,” Candow said. The supplement can help people perform additional repetitions, lift slightly heavier weights and recover more quickly, which over weeks and months may translate into greater improvements in strength and muscle.

Exercise frequency and intensity seem to matter. Candow said a competitive athlete or someone regularly doing intense weight training, CrossFit or other high-intensity exercise is likely to notice more of an effect than someone exercising casually twice a week.

“They’re likely not going to notice any benefits from creatine supplementation per se,” Candow said of the latter group, although over several months they may find they recover better or can lift somewhat more weight.

Those relatively modest gains may become more important with age. Adults gradually lose muscle mass, strength and function as they age, which can contribute to frailty, falls and difficulty completing everyday tasks. Creatine has consequently become a major focus of research into healthy aging.

In 2017, Candow and several colleagues published a meta-analysis of 22 randomized trials involving 721 older adults randomly selected to take creatine supplements or a placebo for seven to 52 weeks while lifting weights two to three days per week. The researchers reported that those who took the creatine gained 1.4 more kilograms, or 3 pounds, of lean muscle mass compared with those who did not take the supplement. 

A more recent 2025 meta-analysis of 20 studies covering more than 1,000 people similarly found that combining creatine with exercise increased lean muscle mass and reduced body fat percentage but had no effect on bone mineral density, the amount of calcium and other minerals in your bones that are critical to maintaining strength and preventing fractures. 

Building and maintaining muscle isn’t just about appearance. Muscle strength helps people get out of chairs, climb stairs, carry groceries and remain independent. Candow said creatine studies have also found improvements in measures of physical function such as agility and balance, likely in part because stronger, better-functioning muscles make movement easier.

“Having an improvement in muscle health is likely one of the biggest contributors to a long, healthy health span,” he said. “Muscle is used for everything that we’re doing: movement, activity, metabolism.”

There is also some evidence that older adults may benefit even when they cannot participate in structured resistance training. 

Candow said studies of adults over 50 taking creatine without an exercise program have reported improvements in muscle mass and performance, and researchers have investigated whether supplementation could help preserve muscle during periods of inactivity or immobilization. 

Creatine is not, however, a silver bullet for maintaining muscle, nor can supplementation replace the benefits of exercise.

“If you’re building a cake in the kitchen and weight training or exercise is the cake, of course protein is going to be the delicious icing,” Candow said. “Maybe creatine are the sprinkles on top.”

What about the brain?

Muscles aren’t the only tissues that need a steady supply of energy. The brain accounts for a substantial share of the body’s energy demands, and creatine appears to play a similar role there — helping brain cells maintain the ATP they need to function.

Researchers have investigated whether increasing the brain’s creatine stores could improve memory and other aspects of cognition, particularly when the brain is struggling to meet its energy needs.

“We know that creatine is an important component of brain bioenergetics, which is how the cells in our brain produce, manage and consume energy to keep us alive and thinking,” said Ayesha Hammad, a master’s degree student who studies creatine, neuroscience and brain aging at Western University in Canada. “But how creatine supplementation works in the brain largely remains unknown right now.” 

Researchers know that creatine — whether made by the body, obtained from food or taken as a supplement — can travel through the bloodstream and cross the blood-brain barrier, the tightly controlled layer of cells that acts like a security checkpoint between the body and the brain. Once across, creatine can enter brain tissue, where it helps brain cells maintain the energy they need to function. But scientists aren’t sure how that might translate into changes in cognition. 

So far, the human evidence is intriguing but limited.

Samantha Marshall, a PhD student also at Western University, recently led a systematic review examining creatine and cognition in adults 55 and older. The researchers identified only six relevant studies, and while five reported a positive relationship between creatine and cognition — particularly improved memory and attention — four were observational, meaning researchers could not determine whether creatine itself was responsible for the differences or whether people who consumed more creatine differed in other ways that could affect cognition. Those studies also relied on participants recalling what they ate to estimate creatine intake, a method prone to inaccuracies.

Only two studies included in the review were interventions, in which researchers gave participants specific amounts of creatine for set periods of time and measured whether their cognition changed. In one study, 15 participants who took 20 grams of creatine per day for one week improved significantly more on several cognitive tests than 17 who took a placebo. The other — a randomized controlled trial, considered the gold standard for determining cause and effect — followed 56 older women for 24 weeks and found no significant cognitive benefit from creatine, regardless of whether it was combined with resistance training.

“If you actually break down the results, overall we’re seeing a positive association, but that’s because most of the studies are observational,” Marshall explained. “What really prevents us from drawing these stronger conclusions is that there is a lack of randomized, controlled trials. We really need those to be able to determine the cause-and-effect evidence of creatine on cognition and brain health.”

Cognitive benefits may depend heavily on who exactly is taking creatine. Marshall said most of the research points to positive effects among people under high metabolic stress — “those who are heavily sleep-deprived, those who are mentally fatigued, or have something called hypoxia, which is when the brain isn’t receiving enough oxygen, as well as our older adults and people who don’t consume a lot of creatine through their diet. So those who are vegetarians or vegans.”

“For a generally healthy young adult, supplementing with creatine isn’t going to do much,” Marshall said. “It’s not going to be a magical supplement for the brain.” 

Researchers are particularly interested in whether creatine could help people experiencing cognitive decline or diseases such as Alzheimer’s.  

“What we know right now is that impaired energy metabolism in the brain is known to be present before we see any symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease,” said Hammad. There is evidence that the brain’s creatine system is disrupted in those with Alzheimer’s, she explained. Because creatine plays a central role in energy metabolism, increasing creatine levels in the brain could improve that energy supply. 

So far, however, most of the evidence comes from animal research. While several studies in mouse models of Alzheimer’s have produced promising results, only one creatine supplementation study has been conducted in people with the disease. In that small 2025 pilot study, researchers at the University of Kansas Medical Center gave 20 people with Alzheimer’s 20 grams of creatine daily for eight weeks. Brain creatine levels increased by 11%, and participants improved on several measures of cognition, including working memory and attention. But the study had no placebo or control group, making it impossible to determine whether creatine caused those improvements. The researchers said larger randomized controlled trials are needed to find out.

Should women take creatine? 

One trend in creatine’s newfound popularity particularly worries Candow: the idea that women shouldn’t take it.

“The biggest one I see now is that creatine is only for males,” he said. “That’s very concerning.” 

Women respond to creatine supplementation, he said, and there is no evidence that the supplement is inherently a male-only product.

The misconception partly reflects the history of the research. Like many areas of exercise science, creatine studies have disproportionately focused on men, leaving researchers with less data on how the supplement affects women — and whether changes in hormones, metabolism and body composition across the female lifespan might alter those effects.

Ellery and her colleagues in Australia have documented several key differences in how women naturally produce, store and use creatine. Women appear to produce creatine at a lower rate than men and store less creatine overall because they tend to have less muscle. However, when researchers compare equal amounts of muscle tissue, women may actually have slightly higher concentrations of creatine in their muscles. Estrogen appears to influence both creatine production and how cells use it for energy, potentially causing creatine metabolism to shift across the menstrual cycle and throughout a woman’s life.

Existing research, albeit limited, does suggest women can benefit, particularly when creatine is paired with resistance training, although the results are less consistent than the broader body of creatine research. In 2025, researchers at Australian Catholic University conducted a systematic review and identified just 27 studies examining exercise performance specifically in active women. Only a minority found significant improvements in strength, power or aerobic and anaerobic performance compared with placebo; however, the review’s authors pointed out that the studies were generally small, varied considerably in their methods and often failed to account for female-specific physiological factors.

That last limitation is important, Ellery said. Earlier studies often failed to account for hormonal fluctuations during a woman’s menstrual cycles, which affect muscle physiology, water retention and exercise performance. 

“That old caveat of ‘creatine is not useful for women’ or ‘as useful for women as men,’ I think that is now well and truly debunked,” she said. 

Researchers are especially interested in whether creatine supplementation could help women maintain muscle and bone when estrogen levels decline during menopause. A 2026 meta-analysis of seven randomized trials involving 608 postmenopausal women found that creatine produced a small increase in lean mass and improved leg strength, with the clearest effects among women taking at least 5 grams per day while resistance training. The same analysis, however, found no overall improvement in bone mineral density.

Creatine production and supplementation during pregnancy presents another intriguing — but far less understood — area. Pregnancy and fetal development require substantial amounts of energy, and creatine appears to play a role in helping the placenta and developing fetus meet those demands. Both the placenta and fetus even produce their own creatine, Ellery said. She and her colleagues have found that pregnant women’s creatine levels initially drop about 25% early on, then remain stable. 

But there are still many unknowns. “In terms of its distribution around the body, whether it goes to the placenta, the fetus, mum’s muscle, up to her brain, we just don’t know at this stage,” said Ellery. 

Much of her research has focused on whether creatine could help protect the fetus if something goes wrong. In animal models, giving mothers creatine throughout pregnancy increased the amount available to the fetus and appeared to protect the fetal brain from some of the damaging effects of a sudden loss of oxygen, during an umbilical cord compression or other complication during delivery. Creatine essentially provides an additional “energy buffer,” Ellery said, helping cells continue functioning when oxygen and nutrients become scarce. 

One day, creatine supplements might help protect newborns from conditions such as cerebral palsy — disorders affecting movement and posture that can result from damage or a lack of oxygen to the brain around birth. Ellery cautions that the research is still in its early stages. Much of the evidence comes from animal models, but Ellery and her colleagues are considering how best to test the hypothesis in pregnant women, a challenging population for clinical trials.

For now, Ellery said there is no evidence that women already taking creatine need to stop during pregnancy, but there also isn’t enough human data to definitively say supplementation is safe. 

“I certainly don’t have any evidence from any of my preclinical modeling to suggest that it isn’t safe,” she said, but added that “it’s just a really tricky one to say it is safe” without more data. 

Is creatine safe?

Despite persistent claims online that creatine damages the kidneys or liver, research has generally found creatine monohydrate to be safe for healthy adults at commonly studied doses. A 2026 meta-analysis of 20 randomized trials found no significant differences in kidney function between people taking creatine and those taking a placebo. Creatine did slightly raise levels of creatinine — a waste product commonly measured to assess kidney health — but researchers concluded that increase reflected the way the body processes creatine rather than evidence of kidney damage.

Candow said that someone taking creatine could have elevated creatinine on a blood test even when their kidneys are functioning normally. He recommends telling a doctor about creatine use so results can be interpreted appropriately. People with existing kidney disease or other medical conditions, however, should consult their doctors before supplementation.

For healthy consumers, Candow said a more practical concern is what is actually in the supplement. The quality and purity of dietary supplements can vary, and products may not always contain the amount of an ingredient listed on the label. He recommends sticking with creatine monohydrate, the form with the largest body of evidence, and looking for products that have undergone third-party quality testing rather than assuming a higher price or more elaborate formulation means a better product. 

Who should take creatine?

Researchers are increasingly considering whether supplementation could make sense for a much broader swath of the population.

For older adults in particular, who tend to both consume and produce less creatine, Marshall thinks the potential benefits of a supplement may outweigh the uncertainty surrounding some of creatine’s newer purported uses — so long as patients talk to their physicians first. 

“From an older adult perspective specifically, I think that for anybody, it is something that could be included on a daily basis,” she said. “It is known to be very safe and can be effective for muscle mass and strength. So even if it doesn’t have an effect on brain and cognition, it wouldn’t hurt to take it.” 

For younger, healthy adults, creatine may not turn a casual gym-goer into the Hulk overnight, but its strong safety record indicates there may be little downside for many people who want to try it. 

While there is unusually strong evidence behind some of creatine’s uses and intriguing early research behind others, that does not make every claim equally credible.

“It’s taken on a life of its own,” Candow said. “I kind of chuckle each day that I think it is getting overhyped. A lot of people think it’s like a cure and it’s going to save the world, but it’s not.”

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