Leah:

Hello and welcome to the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. I’m your host Leah Higl and I’m here with my co-host Aidan Muir and today we will be answering the interesting question, do women benefit from creatine supplementation more than men? I’m going to just briefly set the scene before we jump into things. So creatine is a supplement that we’ve talked extensively about and we’ll probably continue to talk about, but it is the most well studied and effective supplement that we have, particularly in the realm of sports nutrition.

It definitely has become a bit broader than that as research has become more extensive and there actually may be like some potential cognitive benefits too and all the stuff that we’ve covered about creatine in the past. From a sports nutrition perspective though, we do know that often the research is skewed much more towards men than women. And that’s, I mean, that’s not even just in sports nutrition, just in general, but it is definitely highlighted a lot more in that space. But due to how well creatine has been studied, how extensively it has been studied, we actually do have a pretty large volume of female specific research, which is pretty rare and pretty cool. And there are some reasons to believe that potentially creatine may have more benefits for women on average. So today we’re going to unpack that a bit.

Aidan:

So one of the main reasons why it’s proposed that women might benefit more is because on average they have lower baseline stores than men do. Something that is wild is that one of the things that prompted me to create podcasts and blog content and stuff like this on this is that I saw a few really intelligent people mentioning that women had 70 to 80% lower stores of creatine than men.

That made me want to look into it a little bit more because I’m like, that’s a very large difference. And like being truly honest, I was like, that doesn’t make sense to me. I’m going to look into this because if I look into this and then create content, like this is an interesting thing or this will get engaged in or whatever, I’d seen that range pop up quite a bit.

And when I was even looking at studies as part of preparing for this, multiple studies had the same claim. I’ve even linked one in the show notes, which is the biggest one. It’s very often cited when people make this claim. Towards the end of creating some comprehensive content on this, I was still curious and like a lot of things adding up here, but not that that one detail is not adding up. like I was literally on chat, GPT like asking this being like, this doesn’t seem to make sense to me.

Like, why is it so much slower? And it basically wrote back. Yeah, that’s just a typo. That just is a typo that happened in a study that got repeated in multiple studies. And because it’s repeated in multiple studies, a lot of people creating content based on it. But taking out that typo for context, like the research actually has found that when men and women are at the same weight, women on average do have lower creatine stores. It’s just nowhere near as low as that 78% quoted figure.

So the logic with why women might benefit more is partly based on the fact that due to lower initial stores, there could be more potential for creatine to help when muscles are fully saturated.

Leah:

So why are stores lower potentially in women? Why do we actually see this? So it could be a combination of a few different things, including hormones, body size and intake of creatine. For background context, we do naturally produce some creatine in our body, but we do also get it through food. Namely, your red meat and seafood are the predominant sources. With food, people tend to average one to two grams of creatine per day from dietary intake. And it is, like I said, often found in those animal-based foods. So from a plant-based perspective, I guess you could argue a very similar thing where plant-based people tend to have a lower dietary intake and therefore lower starting stores and therefore can potentially benefit from creatine more.

So it’s a very similar argument, but there are just more things potentially impacting why women may have lower starting stores, given everything else is the same. So on average, women have lower intakes of creatine from diet than men and a slightly lower proportion coming from actual creatine rich foods within that. On average, women also have less muscle mass as well, which will also reduce how much creatine is both produced and how much creatine is stored. But note those two factors are simply averages and can be way different on a case by case basis. For example, pretty sure Aidan and I are roughly the same body weight but I’m like substantially more jacked. like, you know…

Aidan:

I saw you, I saw you responding to a comment the other day. Pretty sure I can’t remember what you were saying, but you basically said it pretty sure I’m stronger than you.

Leah:

Yes. A man was saying that men are inherently stronger than women. And I was like, I’m pretty sure I’m stronger than you. So don’t think that’s inherently always true. Anyway, I to throw that job in, those are my points. Play on.

Another factor proposed is that the hormonal differences can also play a role. So it’s been proposed that oestrogen can actually reduce the amount of creatine stored. I wouldn’t focus on that too much, particularly since we also do see so much promising post-menopausal research when it comes to creatine.

Aidan:

So there’s heaps of things through from that like mechanistic side. You can also see like hearing all of that why I was a bit skeptical about the 70 to 80% reduction. I was like, well, that would explain a reduction, but it doesn’t explain 70 to 80%. And even some of those things like the muscle mass thing. Let’s talk about that. Like even if muscle mass was lower, that wouldn’t necessarily explain creatine helping more. Cause you could only still fully saturate to the same point.

Obviously the dietary intake thing could make a difference, the oestrogen thing potentially can make a difference and there’s multiple mechanisms beyond even that from a hormonal perspective. But I was like, I just don’t see 70, 80%. And that’s why it’s not that. It’s less than that. But there still is a bit of a difference, right? Now, talking about outcomes, because we could talk about mechanisms all day, but we care about outcomes. That’s actually the question. Do women benefit more from this?

So a meta analysis that we’ve linked in the show notes was looking at performance and body composition and it actually found a huge difference. This is a bit of an older meta analysis from memory and you’ll be able to see if you look at show notes. I think it was from like 2006, but we had so much research on creatine even prior to 2006 still. And it wasn’t designed to be looking at men versus women. It’s just that the data just happened to be there. So I could obviously easily find it. And from an average of 10 weeks of creatine supplementation,

Women experienced around a 15% improvement in performance and men average around a 6% improvement in performance. Lean mass gains were also favourable towards women from a percentage perspective. Emphasis on percentage perspective, because if you only looked at the total mass gain, it would not be anywhere near as impressive. That’s pretty compelling. I’m definitely not personally going to be out here saying women get almost three times the benefit from a performance perspective as men, but it’s actually interesting to look at it through the lens of like, well, the data was definitely leaning in favor of women getting a little bit more performance benefit or a lot in this case, a lot more performance benefit.

Leah:

To summarise, one thought on our mind is if the difference is super noticeable and there is this huge discrepancy between how men and women can benefit from creatine supplementation, why isn’t it more discussed? Even like from like the plant-based perspective, that’s something that I do see all over social media and it’s discussed a fair bit, but this isn’t. So why is that?

Personally, we’re both not super keen to make a ton of noise about something unless there are smart people in the space also sharing a similar opinion. I think sometimes people can jump the gun and look a bit silly on social media. I think sometimes we need to kind of see what that kind of consensus is in the evidence-based community to kind of confirm what we may think the evidence is saying. These are also just averages.

The differences likely apply even more when dietary intake is lower at baseline, but we are working on averages at the end of the day. And I also wouldn’t read too much into that three times out performance in that review since it does seem a bit too good to be true. And like a lot of the numbers that we have referenced in here, like all seems like maybe it looks more significant than what it actually is in practice.

Aidan:

Yeah. And 15% from any supplement is pretty insane. Yeah. So like I would turn it down a little bit. And as we’ve got a lot of things, it also doesn’t change anything from a practical perspective. If somebody was going to benefit from creatine, I’d recommend it anyway.

You could say that this is further incentive maybe for women, but like if I see a woman who is into resistance training and all cares about the cognitive benefits of creatine, probably going to recommend creatine and I would do the same for a guy as well. It’s just maybe there is a small difference or a noticeable difference in things. It just doesn’t change anything though, in terms of what I’d recommend.

Leah:

Yeah. I’m not going to say, men stop taking creatine because you don’t benefit from it as much. Like that’s a silly recommendation. I think we can all benefit from it, even if there is some small discrepancies there.

Aidan:

Yeah, so this has been episode 208. As always, if you could please leave a rating and review, we would massively appreciate that.