How Multivitamins and Creatine May Support Brain Health

Jack Neel: How does taking a daily multivitamin make you smarter? Is it just placebo?

Dr. Rhonda Patrick: No, it’s not. In fact, it’s been compared to placebo. Ten years ago, this big study came out talking about how multivitamins are useless. Not only are they useless, they’re harmful, nobody should be taking them, and it’s just expensive urine. Back then, I was fighting those studies. Then, 10 years later, we’ve come full circle. Now there are large randomized controlled trials comparing multivitamin use to a placebo.

What do we know? Older adults were given a multivitamin. It was actually a standard Centrum Silver multivitamin, the most inexpensive, widely available multivitamin that you can find in any store. They were given it for three years. After those three years, a battery of cognitive-function tests was done. They also looked at brain aging.

It turns out that, after taking that multivitamin for three years, they lowered their global brain aging by 2.1 years compared with those given the placebo. They also lowered episodic-memory aging. Episodic memory is the kind of memory involved in remembering experiences. They lowered this episodic-memory aging by almost five years—4.9 years compared with placebo. These were three large randomized controlled trials called the COSMOS studies.

Just recently, a couple of months ago, another arm of the COSMOS studies came out looking at multivitamins. This was a two-year study. Individuals were given the multivitamin or a placebo for two years, and researchers looked at biological age using epigenetic aging tests. They found that taking the multivitamin slowed epigenetic aging by about 5.7 months.

You might say, “Well, that doesn’t sound like a lot. I don’t care about that.” But you have to realize that it did that in two years. You take that vitamin for two years, and then two more, and then two more. It adds up. That 5.7 months is going to keep going, right?

Jack Neel: You age 25 percent slower.

Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Exactly. I think that it is globally affecting aging, and it is also affecting the aging of the brain. Why is that? Multivitamins are filling the micronutrient, vitamin, and mineral gaps that we’re not filling through our diets. That was the whole point that I argued 10 years ago. I talked about what these vitamins and minerals do in the body, how they affect aging, and how we’re not getting enough of them from our diets.

It makes sense that you would get benefits by taking a vitamin and mineral supplement to fill those gaps. I feel vindicated in a way. It’s the easiest thing that you can do to protect your brain and help yourself age well: take a multivitamin. I have everyone in my family taking one, from my child to my parents. Everyone is taking a multivitamin because nobody can eat the perfect diet. It’s really hard.

Jack Neel: Another topic that you were the first person I ever heard talk about is creatine. You said creatine can actually make you smarter and that people aren’t taking enough creatine for it to be effective. Can you tell me a little about that?

Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I became really interested in creatine a few years ago when I started getting serious about resistance training. I was looking into the studies and asking, “What dose do I need to take for muscle?” Creatine is stored as phosphocreatine. It helps your body produce and replace energy more quickly. When you’re working out, you’re using a lot of energy, so you want to replace that energy quickly.

Creatine increases your exercise volume, so you can do more work. It’s not growing your muscles like protein does. You can do more work, and that work can increase your muscle mass and strength. It turns out that every study I came across used about five grams per day for muscle. Once you reach that five grams over about three to four weeks, you saturate your muscles.

You might remember older loading studies. They load you with 20 grams and then give you five grams because the studies aren’t going to be three to four weeks long. But if you’re a normal person taking five grams per day and you’ve been doing that for three to four weeks, your muscles are saturated. They’ve taken in all they can. That’s where I was. I was taking five grams per day.

Then I started coming across studies discussing creatine in the brain. Creatine seemed to help with the effects of sleep deprivation. I started to dive into this research, and then I had Dr. Darren Candow on my podcast. He’s a researcher at the University of Regina in Canada. It became very clear that creatine is not only important for replacing energy in the muscles; it does that in other tissues as well, including the brain.

Studies have found that muscles are very greedy. When you take five grams, it predominantly goes into your muscles, particularly if you’re working out. If you’re not working out, creatine isn’t really going to make your muscles bigger. Once you get up to 10 grams, a study from Germany showed that you start to get spillover into the brain because your muscles are satisfied. That study found that brain creatine levels increased after supplementation with 10 grams.

Other studies started to look at the brain under stress, such as during sleep deprivation. People who were deprived of sleep for 24 hours supplemented with a high dose of creatine. The dose was based on body weight, but ultimately it was somewhere between 20 and 25 grams.

Jack Neel: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rhonda Patrick: They were not only able to perform better than they otherwise would have while sleep deprived; they performed better than their baseline before sleep deprivation, which was remarkable. It was a very small study. Nonetheless, other studies have examined other types of stress on the brain, including dementia and mild cognitive decline. People given 10 or even 20 grams per day for a period of a few weeks also performed better on cognitive tests.

Other studies show that, if you’re stressing the brain, it needs more creatine. Stress is very energy-consuming, so you want to replace that energy more quickly. You make creatine in your brain, but you’re only making about one to two grams. When you’re stressed, you’re going to need more than that. The same applies when you stress your muscles through force or exercise: you need to make more energy.

My rationale—and this is entirely my extrapolation of the data on stress to the brain—is that we live in a world with many ways to stress the brain. There’s financial stress, emotional stress, relationship stress, work stress, and sleep deprivation. I feel like my brain is constantly stressed through work and learning. It’s very cognitively demanding when you’re trying to learn a lot of science, being a mother and a wife, traveling, and losing sleep.

My baseline for creatine is now 10 grams because I want it to get into the brain. It could be entirely placebo, but I feel that, with 10 grams, I don’t get the energy slump in the afternoon or later in the day that I used to get. I’m even-keeled throughout the day. If I don’t have my 10 grams, I notice it. It could be placebo because I know I didn’t get it. Who knows? It’s working, right?

Jack Neel: Have you tried a higher dose than 10 grams?

Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Yes. When I travel or don’t get enough sleep—and when I’m traveling, I usually don’t get enough sleep—I go up to 20 and sometimes even 25 grams. I went to China recently, a completely different part of the world. I arrived in the evening and had to give a talk the next morning. You have to be on your game and ready, so I took 20 grams.

It seems to help with my jet lag and help me function cognitively. Again, it could be placebo. That’s fine because creatine is quite safe, and I don’t take 20 grams every day. I take it in certain situations. I do go above 10 grams. My baseline is usually 10, and there are only certain scenarios, such as sleep deprivation or travel, when I take more than that.

It seems to work for me. As I said, it’s safe, and I feel that, if it’s placebo, that’s fine. I don’t think it’s placebo, but I’m saying that it could be.