✶ Written by an AI · fact-checked before publication
Every claim in Is Creatine Actually Safe?, checked
This is the book's verification ledger, published in full. Every factual claim was extracted from the manuscript and handed to an independent blind checker — one claim, its cited source, nothing else. High-stakes claims (doses, safety, real diseases, trial numbers) were checked by three checkers who had to agree. Every checker first had to confirm the cited source actually exists.
42claims checked
41verified first pass
1flagged & corrected
The honest part: 1 claim did not survive first contact with its own sources — the checkers flagged it as misstated or unsupported. Each one was corrected in the text and re-verified by a fresh blind panel before the book was published. The table below shows the first-pass verdicts, because that's the honest number: what the machine got wrong before checking, not after.
| id | claim as written | stakes | first-pass verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| CR01 | Creatine (monohydrate) is one of the most-studied dietary supplements in existence, with hundreds of controlled trials and a formal international position stand backing its safety and efficacy. | low | verified |
| CR02 | Creatine is a nitrogenous organic acid the body synthesises endogenously in the liver, kidneys and pancreas from the amino acids arginine, glycine and methionine — it is not a hormone and not a steroid. | high | verified |
| CR03 | The body makes roughly 1–2 g of creatine per day endogenously, covering about half the daily requirement, with the remainder normally coming from diet. | high | verified |
| CR04 | Dietary creatine is obtained mainly from red meat and fish, supplying on the order of ~1–2 g/day in a typical omnivorous diet (and far less in vegetarians/vegans). | high | verified |
| CR05 | About 95% of the body's total creatine pool is stored in skeletal muscle, existing as free creatine and phosphocreatine, with phosphocreatine roughly two-thirds of the muscle pool. | high | verified |
| CR06 | Phosphocreatine rapidly donates a phosphate group to ADP to regenerate ATP (catalysed by creatine kinase), buffering energy during short bursts of high-intensity effort. | high | verified |
| CR07 | Supplementation increases total muscle creatine stores by roughly 10–40% above baseline (larger gains in those starting with lower stores). | high | verified |
| CR08 | The total body creatine pool turns over at roughly 1.7% per day (~2 g/day in a 70 kg adult), broken down non-enzymatically to creatinine and excreted in urine. | high | verified |
| CR09 | Anabolic-androgenic steroids are cholesterol-derived molecules that act by binding the androgen receptor; creatine has neither a steroid ring structure nor androgen-receptor activity, so it works by an entirely different (energy-buffering) mechanism. | high | verified |
| CR10 | Creatine has never appeared on the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Prohibited List and is a legal supplement in the same regulatory class as protein powder or vitamins. | high | verified |
| CR11 | The Australian Institute of Sport classifies creatine in Group A of its Sports Supplement Framework — the tier reserved for supplements with strong scientific evidence of benefit and an acceptable safety/legality profile. | high | verified |
| CR12 | In the one trial most often cited on creatine and hormones (van der Merwe 2009), total testosterone did not change significantly with supplementation. | high | verified |
| CR13 | The belief that creatine damages the kidneys is one of the most persistent misconceptions about the supplement, described in the literature as second only to the myth that protein harms the kidneys. | low | verified |
| CR14 | The ISSN position stand concludes that creatine supplementation is safe and well-tolerated in healthy people at doses up to 30 g/day for up to 5 years, including in populations from infants to the elderly. | high | verified |
| CR15 | A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials found creatine supplementation did not induce renal damage or significantly alter kidney function in healthy individuals at the doses and durations studied. | high | verified |
| CR16 | Serum creatinine (the standard kidney blood marker) can rise modestly with creatine supplementation because creatinine is the natural breakdown product of creatine — reflecting increased substrate turnover, not impaired filtration. | high | verified |
| CR17 | Because eGFR equations assume constant creatinine production, a supplement-driven creatinine rise can artefactually lower a calculated eGFR while cystatin-C-based estimates (independent of creatine) remain normal, confirming true filtration is preserved. | high | verified |
| CR18 | The reassuring kidney-safety data apply to people with healthy kidneys; those with pre-existing kidney disease or renal risk factors should get individual medical advice before using creatine. | high | verified |
| CR19 | The entire creatine-and-hair-loss fear traces to one 2009 study of 20 college rugby players (7-day load at 25 g/day then 14 days at 5 g/day), which reported DHT rose ~56% after loading and the DHT:testosterone ratio rose ~36% (still ~22% above baseline during maintenance). | high | verified |
| CR20 | That 2009 study measured a hormone (DHT), not hair, and the DHT values stayed within the normal physiological range — it never observed or measured any actual hair loss. | high | verified |
| CR21 | The 2009 DHT finding has never been replicated, and for over a decade no study directly measured hair-follicle outcomes in creatine users. | high | verified |
| CR22 | The first randomised controlled trial to directly assess hair-follicle health (12 weeks, ~45 males, 5 g/day creatine vs placebo) found no significant difference between creatine and placebo in DHT or hair-follicle measures. | high | verified |
| CR23 | DHT is genuinely implicated in androgenetic (male/female pattern) hair loss in genetically susceptible people — the biological premise of the fear is real even though the creatine link is not established. | high | verified |
| CR24 | Creatine draws water primarily into muscle cells (intracellular water), producing a fuller muscle rather than the soft, under-the-skin (subcutaneous) puffiness people picture as 'bloat'. | high | verified |
| CR25 | Creatine itself does not add body fat — it is not a caloric or fat-storing agent; any early scale increase is water, not fat. | high | verified |
| CR26 | An initial 1–2 kg rise in body weight over the first days-to-weeks is largely increased total body water from the muscle uptake of creatine, and is accelerated by high-dose loading. | high | verified |
| CR27 | Longer-term increases in lean/fat-free mass seen in trials occur in combination with resistance training, not from creatine ingestion alone. | high | verified |
| CR28 | Transient gastrointestinal discomfort and a 'puffy' feeling are reported more with high-dose loading than with steady low daily intake. | high | verified |
| CR29 | Women have roughly 70–80% lower endogenous creatine stores than men, a physiological rationale for why supplementation may be at least as relevant for females. | high | verified |
| CR30 | In pre-menopausal women, creatine supplementation is associated with improved strength and exercise performance. | high | verified |
| CR31 | Post-menopausal women may see benefits for muscle size/function and, combined with resistance training, favourable bone effects, with the trial literature using higher doses (~0.3 g/kg/day) in some studies — described here as what trials used, not a recommended regimen. | high | verified |
| CR32 | Despite the depth of creatine research overall, evidence specifically in females has historically been under-studied relative to males. | low | verified |
| CR33 | Creatine kinetics and phosphocreatine resynthesis vary with female hormonal status across menses, pregnancy, post-partum and menopause. | high | verified |
| CR34 | Muscle creatine can be saturated either quickly via a short high-dose loading phase or gradually by a low steady daily intake (~3 g/day for ~28 days), which reaches the same muscle saturation endpoint (Hultman 1996). | high | verified |
| CR35 | In Hultman's study, muscle total creatine rose ~20% by both the fast (20 g/day for ~6 days) and slow (3 g/day for 28 days) routes — the difference is speed of saturation, not the final level reached. | high | verified |
| CR36 | A loading phase is therefore optional rather than obligatory — the complicated 'loading ritual' is not a requirement to reach full stores (stated as a description of the evidence, not a protocol for the reader). | high | verified |
| CR37 | The ISSN position stand identifies creatine monohydrate as the most effective and most extensively studied form, with a strong overall safety profile. | high | verified |
| CR38 | Supplementation can increase brain creatine content, but the downstream effect on cognition is mixed and not settled — the brain/longevity story is emerging, not established. | high | verified |
| CR39 | A 2023 meta-analysis reported a memory benefit from creatine, but on reanalysis with appropriate methods the overall effect was no longer statistically significant except in older adults. | high | verified |
| CR40 | A 2024 meta-analysis found significant creatine effects on memory, attention time and processing speed but not on overall cognition or executive function, with larger benefit in younger adults (18–60), people with disease, and women. | high | misstated → corrected |
| CR41 | Claims that creatine extends lifespan or prevents age-related disease are at an early, unproven stage and should be reported as hypotheses, not settled outcomes. | high | verified |
| CR42 | Australian primary-care guideline tiers (RACGP, eTG, AMH) are largely silent on creatine supplementation because it is a non-scheduled OTC sports supplement, so the load-bearing evidence in this book is drawn from the international sports-science tier (ISSN) plus the Australian sports tier (AIS) — a fallback flagged explicitly. | low | verified |
Ledger exported 2026-07-23. Found something we still got wrong? Tell us — corrections happen in the open. How the books are made: the honest method.