I have always been a fan of the Olympics, particularly the 100-metre sprint to decide “the world’s fastest human.” Like all Canadians, I was elated when Ben Johnson won the event at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, then devastated when we learned that he had cheated by doping with stanozolol, a muscle-building synthetic steroid.

Then in 1992, at the Barcelona Olympics, British sprinter Linford Christie was crowned “the fastest human” and passed his urine test for any banned drugs. But he did admit to using a dietary supplement of creatine, which was then, and is now, allowed in athletic competitions.

Since Christie’s victory, creatine has raced from the track into hockey arenas, swimming pools, football fields and baseball diamonds with athletes looking to it for a quick burst of energy. The white powder has even made it into kitchens where people dissolve it in water and consume it with hopes of improving the results they obtain in the gym from resistance training.

And there is more. Preliminary evidence has surfaced indicating that creatine can not only provide energy to muscles, it can even energize the brain and improve cognition.

My first encounter with creatine was long before it garnered attention after Christie’s win. I had always referred to the compound in my organic chemistry lectures because it was first isolated by French chemist Michel Chevreul, one of the fathers of organic chemistry.

In 1823, Chevreul published a landmark book, Chemical Researches on Fatty Bodies of Animal Origin, in which he described that while investigating the chemistry of soap, long known to be made from animal fats and wood ashes, he discovered that fats were substances that could be split into fatty acids and glycerol. He went on to categorize the different fatty acids and even improved candle-making when he found that stearic acid, which he isolated and named, made for harder, cleaner-burning candles.

In 1832, while working on meat extracts in connection........

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