Team, if you haven't yet, head on over to 3Pillers Method.com to start a five-day free trial on my app. This is where you can go through the entire Three Pillars Method process to develop your own personalized nutrition plan for those weight, health, and fitness goals. That's 3Pillers Method.com, and the link is in the show notes. Let's get into the show. Hello and welcome to the Consistency Project podcast. My name is Patrick Cummings. As always, I'm here with E.C. Sinkowski. Every week on the show, we aim to simplify the science of nutrition, health, and fitness, cutting through the noise to focus on the principles and practices that will help you perform better, feel better, and live better. Thank you so much for tuning into the show this

week hello and how are you we see hey there good how are you doing wonder us we're going to

talk about creatine today something we haven't talked about in a number of years give us

the give us a little bit of skinny why are we talking about creatine what do we need to know

let's get some background yeah I actually have gotten a little bit of a skinny why are we talking about creatine what do we need to know let's get some

background yeah i actually have gotten a good number of questions about creatine and brain health

or cognitive function because there definitely has been some rumblings about that on the inner webs

yep yeah i see that in the marketing now it. It's for muscle and for brain now.

Yes.

Yeah.

And so, you know, wanted to kind of touch on that because I really hadn't looked too

much at that research yet.

But I think just from some background, since it's been a while since we've really talked

about creatine, creatine is not a protein and it's also not an amino acid. It's actually made from various amino acids, but again, it's not technically a protein or amino acid. It's called a non-protein nitrogen compound, which I'm sure is totally irrelevant for most people, but just chemically speaking, it's neither. And I just make that distinction because I have

had the question of people like, oh, do I add this to my protein total each day or does a substitute

protein? And it really isn't. It's a different compound. It is naturally occurring in meat and fish

foods, I guess also naturally occurring in your supplement. You could take it that way, but the body does produce it from other amino acids.

And it's produced in the body in a number of different places, but primarily the liver and the brain from those amino acids, as I mentioned.

Now, what's interesting is when we look at like vegetarians versus omnivores, we do find that they have a lower

amount of creatine in the muscles, which makes sense, right? If natural occurring sources are

meat and fish, we'd expect that vegetarians might have less. But then we find that they don't

have a significant difference of creatine levels in the brain, which then would suggest that perhaps the amount in the

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