Creatine

Creatine monohydrate reliably improves performance in short, intense efforts such as lifting and sprinting, and that finding has held up across dozens of randomised trials and several meta-analyses. Trials typically use 3–5 g per day, with or without a loading week. Claims beyond exercise — cognition, mood, muscle preservation in older adults — are actively studied but far less settled than the performance results.

Reviewed 2026-09-20

Official sources

Reviewed ingredient

This topic is also a reviewed ingredient, with dose context and claim-level evidence.

How this list was built

We searched Europe PMC for English-language papers published since 2015 whose title contains “creatine” or “creatine monohydrate”, kept meta-analyses, systematic reviews and randomised trials, then ranked them by study design first, then recency and citations. Retracted papers are removed.

Open a paper to read its abstract and ask for an AI brief of what it found.