Will the Real Creatine Please Stand Up by Jerry Brainum 12/22

 

If I was asked about taking only one supplement to aid resistance training progress, I would unhesitatingly suggest creatine. No other food supplement in existence can match the level of research associated with creatine. According to studies, creatine works for 80% of those who use it, with the exceptions being those who consume copious amounts of meat and fish, which are the richest natural sources of creatine. But how did creatine become such a popular supplement? Creatine was discovered in 1832 by a French chemist who extracted it out of an extract of skeletal muscle. He named his discovery "creatine," which is derived from the Greek word for meat. Creatine was largely forgotten after that, only to emerge about a century later when scientists began to study the properties of creatine. They didn't know the value of it back then, only that it was a compound found in natural foods such as meat. One of the first things they noted about creatine was that even after consuming large amounts, most of it wasn't excreted. This led the scientists to realize that creatine was stored in the body, but why? In 1912, another group of scientists found that ingesting creatine greatly increased the content of creatine stored in muscle. The next significant finding about creatine was that it was stored in muscle primarily attached to phosphate, thus making it creatine phosphate. That supplied a hint as to what creatine does in muscle.

The immediate energy source for cells is adenosine triphosphate or ATP. As the name implies, ATP produces energy when one of its three phosphate bonds is broken. Creatine stored in muscle acts as a phosphate donor, thus allowing the partially depleted ATP to be reconstituted. This process has been compared to creatine phosphate stored in muscle acting similarly to a second battery in a car, with the second battery kicking in when the first battery goes dead. The compound phosphocreatine was first reported in 1927, but it wasn't until the 60s that the mechanism where phosphate is added to creatine in muscle was determined. The process was catalyzed by an enzyme called creatine kinase or CK. CK is often used as a marker for muscle damage because it's released in large amounts in the blood following muscle damage, especially severe muscle damage.

Even with this newfound knowledge about how creatine worked in muscle, its true value still went unrecognized with few exceptions. One such exception was Russian and East German elite athletes. In the 60s, both Russia and East Germany had sports institutes whose sole function was to improve the performance of elite athletes. The communist countries equated athletic superiority with a general world dominance, as if to say since our athletes are the best, we are also the most powerful nations in the world. And sure enough, East German and Russian athletes tended to dominate Olympic sports in the 60s and 70s. While athletes . . .