Is taking creatine bad? The use of creatine as a food supplement is becoming more common, but many people have doubts about the safety of using this type of supplement. Could it be bad for the kidney or the liver?
What about long-term use? Does it have any side effect? If you want to understand what science says about this topic, this video is for you!
Hey guys here who speaks is Dr Alberto de Carli - Sports Doctor and this is the Minuto Sports Medicine channel. Here we discuss matters of medical interest related to sport and physical conditioning, always with a technical and scientific basis. If you're new here, don't forget to subscribe to the channel and leave your like button below.
The benefits of using creatine as a dietary supplement are well studied and documented. I myself have a video explaining the effectiveness of creatine in gaining muscle mass. But there are also other benefits, and there is a study suggesting the potential use of creatine in the treatment of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's, dementia and Parkinson's.
In addition to the positive effects of its use in pregnancy and also in anti-aging therapies. But the theme of this video is to understand if it is safe to use creatine with a supplement or not. To start discussing this topic, we need to mention that creatine is a protein that we produce and that naturally already exists in the body, 95% of which is located in the muscle and 5% in the brain.
So you see, for the organism to function properly, a person weighing 70 kg needs to acquire at least 1 to 3 grams of creatine per day. Part of this creatine we produce and part we ingest through our diet. Mainly through eating meat.
So when we talk about supplementing creatine, we are actually giving it a little more than what we naturally produce or ingest in our diet. So creatine is not a foreign substance in our organism. But then the first doubt that exists is: I'm going to overload my kidney with this excess of creatine and that's going to make me sick.
So here we go: most creatine supplementation protocols aim to give 3 to 5 grams per day. Which is usually a teaspoon -sized scoop . But there are also protocols that give much more, such as 20 grams a day for a week and then gradually decrease the dose.
But then does it overload the kidney? This fear exists mainly because of a study that gave creatine to rats with cystic kidney disease and saw the disease progress. But in this case, they gave massive doses of creatine, which, if we convert the units proportionally to a human being, is equivalent to giving 140g of creatine to an adult weighing 70 kg!
Since a sculpt has only 5 grams. That is, the dose is 30 times greater than what we use. At the same time, there were other reports of people who used various supplements, including creatine, and had kidney problems and this made me start to study the subject in depth.
As a result, starting in the 1990s, literally thousands of articles evaluating the safety of creatine supplementation have been published. The use of creatine has been studied in children, adults, the elderly, even for long periods of up to five years continuously, and no evidence of damage to the body or kidney problems resulting from the use of creatine has been found. Most reports that cite these findings are based on evidence without scientific rigor of cause and effect and that are often wide open in the sensationalist media.
Still, as an overzealous precaution, some sources recommend that if you have pre-existing kidney disease or a kidney stone, consult your physician about the safety of creatine use, but many studies find creatine safe in both the normal population and the general population. with kidney disease. The only side effect evidenced in the use of creatine is a small weight gain during the first days of use, probably due to the increase in muscle hydration.
But therefore, it is simply a slightly greater retention of water that may not be so interesting in some modalities such as fights, in which weight control is important for an athlete. Finally, I leave you with the official conclusion of the international society of sport nutrition, and I also leave the description in the link for those who want to read the article and learn more about this topic. Creatine monohydrate is the most effective ergogenic nutritional supplement currently available for athletes intent on increasing high-intensity exercise capacity and lean body mass during training.
in healthy and diseased populations from infants to the elderly there is no convincing scientific evidence that short-term or long-term use of creatine up to 30 grams per day for 5 years has any harmful effect on healthy individuals or among clinics who may benefit from supplementation of creatine. Did you like the video? Got questions?
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