Creatine

Is Creatine 💊 the missing ingredient from your Longevity diet?🧬

Creatine has been the superstar gym 🏋‍♀️, sport, and training supplement for well over 3 decades, offering a whole variety of benefits, such as increasing muscle size and improving physical performance and energy production.

Creatine is non-essential nutrient produced naturally in the body by 3 main amino acids arginine, methionine, and glycine, as well as three enzymes: L-arginine: glycine amidinotransferase (AGAT), methionine
adenosyltransferase (MAT) and guanidinoacetate methyltransferase (GAMT).

Around 50% of the creatine that we use up each day can be replaced in our day-to-day diets. But one major issue is that since dietary creatine is only provided in animal products, such as meat, eggs, and fish etc. Then vegans for optimal health really should look to supplement with a small amount of creatine each day.

There are also many other positive health benefits to be gained from creatine other than the well-documented muscle building and performance related ones.

For instance, creatine has been shown to lower both inflammation 🔥 and cortisol levels, as well as crucially being involved in a process called methylation.

DNA methylation (DNAm) 🧬 is a process that is essential to life, and which happens billions of times per second, where tiny chemical markers called methyl groups will attach to one of the four nucleotide bases on your DNA.

These methyl groups act like billions of switches, which will either hypo (low) or hyper (high) methylate regions across your genome, which will then affect how specific genes and biological processes function.

It also has notable effects on the brain 🧠 and cognition with research actually spanning back multiple years. The primary way it is believed to influence brain function is through its role in energy metabolism.

Creatine is also believed to aid in the formation of ATP, which is key for cognitive function, whilst also offering neuroprotection to certain conditions.

Muhdo Health decided to check this premise by checking our dataset of creatine monohydrate users (>12m) between the ages of 30-60 (n=298) against a cohort of non-supplement users of the same age bracket (n=761) utilising our memory age DNA methylation clock.

Surprisingly the mean of two key genes in the algorithm showed significant (p=1.65 × 10-34) hypomethylation which we indicate as superior cognitive ageing. These genes were: SLC25A43 and TMLHE.

Our calculations show that by taking creatine monohydrate consistently for a year or over you may reduce memory age by -6.2 years on average (mean). With our accelerated memory age being correlated with cognitive disease and subjective memory loss we would consider creatine a potential staple/essential nutrient.