Creatine and Brain Health

 

Creatine is not just for building muscle. According to cognitive performance expert Louisa Nicola, it may be one of the most powerful tools we have to protect the brain as we age. In this conversation, Louisa explains why cognitive decline can begin decades before symptoms appear and how low brain energy is linked to dementia risk. She breaks down the science behind creatine and why brain metabolism matters more than most people realize. She also explains how sleep deprivation, inflammation, and stress quietly accelerate cognitive decline. This discussion reveals that creatine is now being studied for Alzheimer’s disease, cancer prevention, sleep deprivation recovery, and long term brain protection. I can't say enough about creatine. This is a really cheap and effective way to get everything you want from both your physiology and your neurophysiology.

Creatine is a naturally occurring molecule. We naturally produce around two to three grams of creatine per day... a bit from the brain, but a lot from the liver. But two to three grams a day is not enough. So, we need to supplement. For the past thirty years people were supplementing with five grams a day. With more recent brain health studies we have found that creatine has enormous benefits for the brain. But here's the problem. When you just take in five grams of creatine per day, you're just saturating your muscles. The muscles are so hungry, so they get first dibs and they take up all of that creatine and there's none left for the brain. We also lose a bit of the bio-availability when the creatine goes into the brain. It crosses the blood-brain barrier, but when it goes into the brain, we lose some of it. So, we have to supplement with more than five grams.

And one of the studies that changed my thinking came out last year. It was the first ever pilot study done on Alzheimer's disease patients. You're talking about patients whose brains are under attack. They're in an energetic crisis. They cannot produce energy effectively. ATP is all skewed. Brain glucose metabolism is skewed. They don't remember left from right. Cognitive functions are declined. They put them on 20 grams of creatine per day. That's a lot. What they found was that these patients not only preserved their cognitive functions, but they had more energy and they were able to exercise more. And it blew my mind.

It's all reward. There is no risk. It's helping with cell energy metabolism, helping ATP create energy. So if you're someone that is low energy, you should definitely be taking creatine. People with brain fog too.

It's actually a protective molecule. What studies show is that at high doses of creatine - around 30 grams a day – can protect you... it can protect your brain against a concussion. It can protect your brain against a stroke. It can protect your brain from stress.

The best thing about creatine is that it works in the background of stress. That's where you get most of the benefits from. Cancer patients are having success with it. As an anti-cancer measure they are dosing at 0.36 g per kilogram of body weight. So if you are a 70 kilo person, you're looking at around 25 grams of creatine per day. The NANS 2025 study, which was a major study involving over 25,000 adults, found a linear negative association between dietary creatine and cancer prevalence. For every standard deviation increase in dietary creatine intake, the risk of having cancer decreased by roughly 5% to 18% depending on the demographic.

This protective association was strongest in adults over the age of 50, suggesting that as we age, maintaining higher creatine levels might be more critical for cellular health and immune surveillance.

If you think about life and think about energy, we need energy to survive. We need energy to fight off infections. We need energy to fight off stress, preserve our normal bodily functions. So when we are at the mercy of a low energy crisis, we can't fight off tumor cells. We can't fight off these debilitating diseases. So it actually makes sense that with more functional energy, meaning our cells can function better, you see a reduction in cancer incidents, and you see a reduction in Alzheimer's disease incidents.

There has been phenomenal research to show that you can also basically creatine your way out of sleep deprivation. So, if you've had a long night and you you're sleep deprived, you can take a high dose of creatine in the form of 15 to 20 grams a day and reverse the negative effects associated with that sleep deprivation.

Does it matter what time you take the creatine? It doesn't seem to. It doesn't really matter what time you take the creatine. It doesn't matter whether you're taking it right before exercise, during exercise, after exercise... it always seems to work phenomenally. Some researchers are even now wondering if taking it at night before bed helps with sleep performance.

I think every person, no matter what age you are, should be supplementing with creatine. Some people might experience a feeling of GI distress when they take it. All I have to say is that's not a reason to stop taking it. Maybe start with two or three grams at a time and work up, but don't stop taking it.

from YouTube @TheDiaryOfACEOClips on February 19, 2026