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> I don’t know. Maybe a little.
is not the right way to interpret the null result (insufficient evidence to reject null hypothesis that it has no effect) because the prior for supplements that people are trying to sell you is so low. In the absence of clear, strong evidence, you should assume the the whole thing is just an example of motivated reasoning. People want nootropics to be real, and other people really want to sell you readily available powders by claiming they have nootropic properties. In that environment, they were always going to trying to concoct a similar narrative about some supplement, and it just happened to be creatine. Those efforts were always going to result in a handful of "positive" studies that turn out to be non-reproducible, maybe because of p-hacking, maybe because of publication bias, maybe because of outright fraud. This is what the literature always looks like for stuff that just doesn't work. If it did work - if the effect size was large enough that you could personally detect it in your own life - then the papers would be trying to put error bars around the effect size, not trying (and failing) to barely distinguish it from a placebo.
“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” - Ernest Rutherford
So this is more like trying to determine whether ginseng is good at keeping away colds or whatever. Maybe it does (actually quickly searching this, it definitely does but let's pretend it's as folksy as it sounds for a minute) but even if it doesn't then it's harmless and has a bunch of other effects, so when one takes it - the whole possible cold prophylaxis can just be seen as an added perk.
It doesn't make you a genius. I think a better view on it is that it may mitigate some of the adhs symptoms (at least for me).
I can keep on track for a significantly longer time since ive started supplementing with it at ~15g/day - and while i dont feel a difference, i can observe it when actually paying attention to what i do / how often i drift off etc.
Basically, HN doing HN things - having a good deep think about topics outside their realm of expertise, then debating the minutiae. I'd just rather trust someone who has spent their career researching this stuff, thanks (unless that's what you do - in which case please tell us more).
The fact that there's a biologically plausible mechanism plus mixed statistical evidence makes "maybe" a perfectly reasonable conclusion.
“There's a sucker born every minute.”
I think mostly through placebo effect, people buy a supplement to treat condition X and they think it's getting better, so they keep buying.
I mean, just look at the wide variety of homeopathic "cures" that are often so diluted that there might not be any molecules of the active ingredient left. Yet people keep buying it.
Their conclusion seems like an absolutely fair interpretation of what they saw, and it also strikes me as dangerous -- perhaps more dangerous -- to suggest "writer genuinely believes, or doesn't believe, a thing, but they should say it differently from their own interpretation because..people are dumb?" Something like that.
If I know I'm only going to get a few hours of sleep, I'll take 5–10 g of creatine, drink plenty of water, and go to bed. The next morning, I usually don't wake up with a headache.
If I skip the creatine under the same conditions, I'm much more likely to wake up with a headache after a short night's sleep.
Now it's become a habit, I automatically take creatine whenever I know my sleep duration is going to be much shorter than usual.
So drinking water part is consistent with or without creatine. I do know the creatine takes a while to build up, so i don't know why it works but it does.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21517-dehydra...
>Headache pain often appears along with other signs and symptoms of dehydration, including darker-than-usual pee, dry mouth and fatigue
none of these symptoms are true for me.
BTW, it tends to trash the eGFR test which relies on an unbiased creatinine reading.
Anecdotal so safe to ignore this… but my hair did thin out but only after I was lazier on my work outs. Stopped taking and hair mostly returned to normal thank God.
Since taking creatine I feel so much more energized. I can make it through the day with just 2 coffees (was previously drinking 5 coffees and an energy drink).
Maybe it's placebo. Maybe it's not. I don't really care. I feel the benefit and I love it.
At a certain point I was wondering if it was just placebo, stopped taking it for a month or so, and was quickly back to feeling tired after training. Started taking it again, back to feeling energized. It really does work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40170474
"Other studies already proved those effects with creatine with a normal dose schedule, what they were testing is if a single high dose would have a beneficial effect too, which it did. A normal schedule is 3-5g per day with an optional loading phase of 10-20g per day during 7 days.
In the study they used a single dose of 0.35g/kg which means 20-40g per dose. How do they not get diarrhea? The loading phase is usually split into several doses to avoid diarrhea and I can personally attest to that being a good idea."
What the above doesn't tell you is that taking a loading dose can draw water into your intestines causing diarrhea. You probably can guess how I found this out.
There's also no shortage of expensive water bottles being sold, and smart water bottles that track your drinking frequencies and flavor pods sold via subscription.
I drink lots of water. Lots and lots, to the point that it’s already kind of annoying how frequently I have to piss. I’m fairly skeptical that drinking yet more would yield any benefits.
Yes. It’s very rare for a supplement to have such strong and consistent evidence.
A widely-cited review says that short-term supplementation increases maximal power/strength by 5-15%. This in turn may increase the long-term gainz from strength-training exercise. Creatine also increases sprint performance by 1-5%. Though, there seems to be little if any benefit for endurance exercise like long-distance running.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5469049/#CR46
this is wrong [0] , it's just hard to measure.
[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32314956/
If it’s really hard to measure because the amount is so small that it requires precise equipment, it’s not significant relative to the rest of the body’s energy expenditure.
Also search for 'sleep' in this comment section, seems many see similar improvements!
[0] https://gwern.net/creatine
The cited paper in Wikipedia might be accurate and the author is just expecting "at rest" to mean awake but mostly idle. I'd wager that during sleep, we use less than 100W. For the sake of argument if you take out 8 hours (asleep time) from a 24 hour period, you end up with a rate of ~0.8681 grams per second, much closer to 1g/s. Anyway, just a little fun with numbers.
They missed a zero behind the comma, didn't they?
Like being tired, stressed, etc...
Here are the sleep deprivation studies
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54249-9
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16416332/
Well, yes. It is well known that you must eat fish, beef, i.e., animal protein, to get close to optimal levels of creatine.
The vegan/vegetarian is a big spectrum. A vegetarian eating plenty of dairy products and eggs should in theory be much better creatine-equipped than a poor vegan student feeding on noodles and ketchup pastas. A lot of pseudo-meat for vegans are full of processed shit.
Confusion will be even higher if you include fish in the vegetarian diet, which is odd but some people do that.
Could the cognitive effect works in the case of creatine deficiency (vegan) and not in the case a vegetarian (low creatine but not deficient) ?
Meat Is Murder but Fish Is Justifiable Homicide.
Is creatine safe to supplement for children?
Up to 50 Cal extra over ~2 hours of intense thinking IS significant given brains consume 240-400 Cal over 24 hours.
> Start thinking hard, and watch as your heart rate does not increase.
And yet you soon get tired and slow down. Now try the opposite. Stretch or punch the air a few times to get the heart rate going. You'll sustain brain performance for longer. Try it.
Perhaps the problem is that higher brain activity SHOULD trigger heart rate increase, but doesn't due to one of many design defects of the human body.
The one thing this misses is many supplements are tainted, which skews the popular perception of both upsides and risks. This was especially true in the US prior to 2005 or so when prohormones were still legal over the counter. Anything branded that wasn't just pure creatine was extremely likely to actually be a low-dose oral steroid, which really can make you lose hair and will increase strength quite a bit more than any dietary supplement.
This also misses caffeine as the other a-tier supplement that consistently shows strength increases in RCTs, though of course, caffeine is more frought than creatine because you build tolerance and it can disturb sleep.
Perhaps you can say "danger to your hair is rare", but there's very clearly (to me at least) an effect there, and the way it gets hand-waved away is strange to me.
Last I checked, the only study actually focusing on this is n=38, out of Iran, and has heavy conflict of interest issues (funded by the supplement industry).
That's not remotely sufficient to consider this a settled fact.
Creatine is not an anabolic steroid and does not increase testosterone levels, according to Harvard Health, so while there was 1 suspicious study that claimed that creatine increased DHT, that study has afterwards not been able to be replicated, and since creatine does not manipulate hormones but rather energy instead, it seems to as closes a possible to being a settled fact sans the final nail in the coffin.
In college Ripped Fuel wasn't banned yet. We would take two, go to the gym for 2 hours, shower, then go out until the sun came up the next day. It's no surprise it was eventually banned. I think some people ended up dying by taking too many.
I never ended up doing it because you had to cycle it, and it was just one more thing to track
Is it the same case in 2026? Is there a simple pill I can take?
You can just take 3-5g daily.
As for pills, yes, there is about every form of creatine supplement now, even chewing gum, but this is just dumb, how much of creatine do you think you can consume this way in a day?
if you truly want fuel for the brain nothing beats keto
> Does creatine make you smarter?
> I don’t know. Maybe a little.
It safely builds muscle and boosts cognition.
More like "probably", "yes", and "probably not."