Can Creatine Make You Smarter?

IN A SMALL Missouri pharmacy, Drew Dible carefully measures out a five-gram dose of a fine white powder. The almost crystalline substance isn’t for a customer, but for him. And it’s not a prescription medication, but a supplement: creatine monohydrate.

Dible is a 31-year-old pharmacist with an athletic build, standing 6’4″ and weighing roughly 200 pounds. He’s always stayed in shape—5Ks, 10Ks, weightlifting—but he’s never taken any supplements except for a multivitamin.

“Most of this wellness stuff always struck me as a bit scammy, so I didn’t waste my money on it,” he says. But Dible isn’t taking creatine because he’s looking to enhance his kipping power, or hit a race PR, or really for any reason related to physical fitness. He’s taking creatine for his brain.

When he hit his early 30s, Dible says, he wanted to hedge against any age-related mental decline. For all of us entering our 30s, distractions accumulate and the mental sharpness we took for granted in our teens and 20s gives way to something else. “I didn’t feel a lack of focus at the time so much as a desire for more focus,” Dible says.

During the pandemic, he started listening to Huberman Lab, the powerhouse podcast from wellness influencer Andrew Huberman, PhD, associate professor of neurobiology at Stanford Medicine. Since 2021, Huberman has released eight episodes with “creatine” in the title. He and his guests have extolled the numerous mental health virtues of the supplement, from boosting memory to mitigating the effects of traumatic brain injury and concussion.

“Creatine, known for its role in improving physical performance, has also been shown (in several quality clinical trials) to improve mood and help the symptoms of major depression,” Huberman posted on Twitter in 2021.

He’s all in—taking 10 to 15 grams daily—and so are longevity and performance expert Peter Attia, MD, and bro-whisperer extraordinaire Joe Rogan. So Dible began taking creatine, stirred into water and chugged before work. The hope was that it would help him maintain focus during his busy days.

Once relegated to the dark recesses of bodybuilders’ gym bags, creatine is creating all kinds of buzz in the neuroscience world for its supposed brain benefits and is muscling its way into mainstream wellness culture. You may have noticed: Creatine is everywhere.

You can now find the stuff featured as the special ingredient in protein bars, energy drinks, and (because it’s 2025) gummies. Next-gen supplement companies like Momentous, Thorne, and Onnit are making creatine cornerstone products—and many of them are spotlighting brain health benefits as part of their sell.

The market for creatine is booming. The Vitamin Shoppe’s trend report from 2023 showed creatine sales up 120 percent year over year. The global creatine supplement market is currently valued at a hulking $501 million—and projected to swell to $923 million by 2033, according to Future Market Insights.

All this is wild if you consider where creatine was 35 years ago. Back then, the supplement was widely regarded as (and sometimes even marketed as) a cousin of steroids. Any talk of creatine’s powers was not broadcast, and there were, supposedly, risks.

Creatine could help you bulk up fast, but it might also wreck your kidneys, destroy your liver, and bloat you beyond recognition in the process. Supplementing with creatine was considered by many a potentially dangerous ploy by strength athletes in need of a boost.

Now you can find the stuff at Target. What’s changed? And are all these supposed brain benefits for real?

TO KNOW WHERE creatine is going, it’s important to know where it’s been—and especially what the stuff actually is. Biologically, creatine is a compound found in red meat, fish, and milk. Your body can make creatine on its own, but not close to the levels found in modern supplements. And those supplements, up until just a few years ago, were marketed as muscle enhancers. That’s because creatine’s primary function, according to research from as far back as the 1930s, is to enhance performance of quick bursts of activity by producing adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, the body’s energy currency.

Creatine monohydrate, the synthetic form of creatine, wasn’t commercially available until 1993. Taking the supplement wasn’t without some sense of risk, either. Back in the early ’90s, the FDA possessed limited power to regulate supplements—the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which equipped the FDA with some oversight authority, wasn’t passed until 1994.

Plus, there were no third-party testing facilities to verify the safety and quality of supplements. (Those facilities didn’t really exist until 1999.) So if you wanted to take creatine monohydrate—or, really, any supplement—you were on your own in terms of effectiveness and risk. In addition, the scientific research that existed on creatine monohydrate in the ’90s was largely conducted by the same companies that were pushing supplements.

Despite the roll-the-dice nature of taking creatine back then, the supplement gained popularity in key markets: professional and collegiate athletes looking for a legal competitive edge, as well as teens looking to bulk up their mirror muscles. But as creatine use spread, so, too, did the rumors that the supplement would damage your kidneys and liver—and might even be just as hazardous as steroids.

A front-page New York Times story from 1997 connected deaths in wrestling to creatine use. (Soon after, the FDA determined that creatine was not the cause of death, and in fact, the weight-loss drug ephedrine may have played a role.)

Bad press didn’t stop supplement manufacturers from selling creatine—or trying to expand its reach. Experimental & Applied Sciences, the first big-name supplement company to market creatine for muscle builders in the ’90s, was sold for $320 million in 2004 (roughly $535 million in today’s money). Creatine still lingered on the fringes. Even if lifters loved it, the general public was scared off by reports of its alleged dangers. The independent scientific community still hadn’t determined if the supplement even delivered on its promises, either. Except—plot twist—the research would soon come through.

LET’S SAY THAT you wanted to chisel a Mount Rushmore of creatine’s elite researchers. You’d honor three men: Darren Candow, PhD, of the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada; Richard Kreider, PhD, of Texas A&M University; and Scott Forbes, PhD, of Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada.

In 2001, for example, Candow backed up what many weightlifters and bodybuilders already knew: that supplementing with creatine and protein powder resulted in greater lean-muscle gains than with protein powder alone. In 2003, Kreider helped determine that long-term creatine supplementation (we’re talking 21 months) produced zero negative health changes—including to the kidneys and liver. In 2008, Forbes and Candow showed that lifters who took creatine experienced greater muscle endurance and power on the bench press than those who didn’t.

The mounting evidence largely cleared creatine of its stigma. In 2007, the International Society of Sports Nutrition issued a statement saying that creatine was “safe, effective, and ethical.” In the next decade, as online shopping made it easier for customers to buy supplements, creatine joined protein powder as a go-to for muscling up.

As the popularity of creatine grew further, creatine researchers decided to comb through prior studies on the supplement. What they found was that the benefits of creatine supplementation extended far beyond the bench press. In 2017, Kreider, Candow, and their coauthors assessed nearly three decades of research—hundreds of studies—on creatine and saw a trove of potential benefits.

Among the data that prior scientists had gathered, but not studied, was a link between creatine and brain health. There were signs that creatine supplementation, in clinical settings, might ease symptoms in people with neurodegenerative diseases, stroke, and even adolescent depression. This promise of creatine as a mental health hero set off a new wave of ongoing research on the supplement.

“We’re seeing a lot of other applications for creatine now in terms of its role with certain neurodegenerative diseases, its role in brain health, and potentially both a prophylactic and treatment role for [traumatic brain injury] and concussion,” says Shawn Arent, PhD, CSCS*D, chair of the department of exercise science at the University of South Carolina.

For instance, one 2024 meta-analysis of 16 creatine studies in Frontiers in Nutrition found that supplementation may improve memory, attention, and information processing in adults. Even more surprising: A Scientific Reports study from last year found that an acute dose of 15 to 20 grams of creatine monohydrate actually mitigated the drag of a bad night’s sleep by revving up the brain’s mitochondria.

The possible mechanism behind creatine’s mental health benefits is complex. Scientists believe that your brain, like your muscles, is metabolically active, accounting for as much as 20 percent of your body’s energy consumption. Your gray matter—while not a muscle—may also store ATP, that valuable energetic compound made from creatine, which it uses for tasks and its general health.

So influencers and forward-looking supplement companies might be onto something with their creatine-for-all recommendations. Emphasis on might.

IF EXPERIMENTAL & Applied Sciences was the company that pushed creatine monohydrate into the world of muscle builders, Momentous is the company best known today for pushing the supplement to everyone else.

The “human performance” company (don’t call it a supplement seller) was founded in 2016, but it struggled to find success in a crowded supplement market.

In 2021, Jeff Byers, the current CEO of Momentous, along with business colleague Erica Good bought the company. Byers’s résumé is far-ranging and includes both an MBA from the University of Southern California and a four-year career as an NFL center. “In my playing days, I never understood creatine beyond building muscle mass,” Byers says. “I didn’t realize the cognitive and neuroprotective benefits until about three or four years ago.” And Good has said in company materials that, after watching her grandmother slip away to Alzheimer’s, “I’m a daily user of creatine…and probably will be for life.”

In 2022, Momentous decided to lean in harder on the brain sell of its creatine supplement, which it had launched the year before with some success. But Byers says the decision to emphasize the mental benefits of creatine didn’t come without lots of input. “We started hearing more and more about it from our advisory board and research partners,” he says. “Everyone was telling us that this is what people should be doing for long-term brain health.”

On the product’s label, Momentous now advertises: “Daily supplementation may help improve muscle performance and cognitive function.” (Emphasis added.) The move, along with stronger messaging around creatine and brain health in its press and marketing materials, worked. Creatine is now one of Momentous’s best-selling supplements and is sold as part of the Momentous Three, a $130 bundle of the company’s most essential products (the others being protein powder and an omega-3 supplement).

Momentous’s advisory board is vast. Beyond pro athletes and coaches, it includes human-performance scientist Andy Galpin, PhD, and neurophysiologist Louisa Nicola, who has a master’s degree in medicine. And since 2022, Momentous has also had one high-powered creatine advocate on its board: Andrew Huberman.

Byers says Huberman had a direct role in the company’s pivot to focusing on creatine for brain health. (Huberman discloses on his website that he receives financial compensation from Momentous for serving as a scientific advisor. Momentous is a former sponsor of Huberman Lab. Huberman did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)

Byers predicts that creatine will become a staple for Americans, much as multivitamins are. “Our market is everyone—from executives to stay-at-home parents to seniors—who can benefit from taking creatine daily,” he says.

That older demo is especially interesting. Sales of brain health supplements (not just creatine) are projected to rise, due in part to baby boomers looking to slow or prevent cognitive disorders. Seniors. Taking creatine. Who would have thought, right?

FIRST, UNDERSTAND THAT the overwhelming majority of creatine supplements on the market still aren’t third-party certified for sports, meaning that athletes who routinely take them may risk being banned if their creatine is tainted and they’re tested. Also concerning: Uncertified products may not contain the level of creatine advertised on the label.

Which is important because, second, dosing is critical. The actual amount o