Hello and welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition's Ask a Nutritionist podcast brought to by Nutritional

Weight and Wellness.

My name is Leah Kleinshrode.

I'm a registered and licensed dietitian, and we've been thrilled to celebrate

20 years on air discussing the connection between what you eat and how you feel. Thank you so much

for your support and listenership over the years. And if you've been enjoying this show,

let us know by leaving a rating or a view on your favorite podcast platform.

Your feedback makes all the difference and helps others find these important real food messages.

On today's show, I will be answering one question that we received from one of our Dishing Up Nutrition listeners.

And this listener asks, what are good sources of

creatine? It's a great question. I feel like creatine has been having more of a moment in the sun

recently. And I have personally been doing a little digging into creatine. So I was excited to see

this question. So let's do a little background as to what creatine is, why we care about it, and then we'll get into where we find creatine in the diet.

So creatine is a natural peptide or this small little protein fragment that our bodies can make on its own.

Our kidneys, our liver, and our pancreas are the big organs that

make creatine. And then creatine gets stored mostly in our muscles. So the body makes creatine

by combining a few different amino acids, notably methionine, arginine, and glycine, and then that creatine, again, gets stored in our muscles.

But we also consume creatine directly from our diet, and that creatine also goes into our muscles.

Now, creatine is important because it helps the body make and reuse something called ATP, which is our

energy currency in the body. This is the energy that all of our cells run off of. So our body makes

this ATP from creatine. It can also make it from other things like our carbohydrates, like glucose and from some of the fatty acids that we make or that we eat.

But the creatine pathway has a bit of an advantage because it makes energy the fastest and it regenerates the fastest.

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