Creatine actually works — which is exactly why you should read the fine print

Most of my job is telling people that the numbers they hear on the news or on podcasts are misleading or not as important as they sound. Supplements are one of the easiest topics for this. Somebody gets excited about a compound, a study gets misquoted, and six months later there’s a $40 tub of it in every kitchen in America.

So it was a bit disorienting to sit down with the literature on creatine and find that the hype is actually attached to something real. Well, mostly real. Let me show you where the seams are.

Start with what creatine was actually invented to do. A meta-analysis out this year in Frontiers in Nutrition pooled eleven randomized trials of over-60s who lifted weights, half of them also taking creatine. The creatine group got stronger — significantly stronger, on average, than the people doing identical training without it.

Granted, the effect size of 0.31 sounds more impressive than it is until you translate it. An effect size of 0.31 means your average creatine-taker finished stronger than roughly 62 percent of the placebo group. Turn that around, and 38 out of every 100 people who took nothing still beat the average person in the study taking creatine. So that is a real edge, and I’d take it. It is also not what is being sold to you on Instagram today.

Now here’s the study that should make you distrust your own bathroom scale: A team at the University of New South Wales published a trial last year in Nutrients. They supervised 63 adults — half on five grams of creatine a day and half on placebo — through 12 weeks of supervised lifting. However, they also built in a seven-day “wash-in” before anybody touched a weight, and they scanned everyone with DEXA at every stage.

After that first week of creatine and precisely zero exercise, the supplement group had put on half a kilo of what the scanner read as “lean body mass.” But muscle doesn’t materialize in seven days. Rather, that was just water being pulled into muscle cells, which the DEXA scanner obligingly counts as lean tissue. Then, over the........

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