Recent advances in creatine nutrition and physiology suggest that the quantity of creatine the body naturally synthesizes is not sufficient to meet human needs. As a result, humans have to obtain enough creatine from the diet, which nominates creatine as an essential nutrient in certain circumstances.
Favorable safety and promising impact of supplemental creatine on human well-being and functioning emanated from plenty of small-sampled interventional studies perhaps suggest a need for recommending creatine to the general public.
The health and ergogenic effects of dietary taurine, creatine, carnosine, anserine, and 4-hydroxyproline are expected to reverse the drastic decline in consumption of red meat (e.g., beef) in the U.S. due to an inadequate understanding of animal-source foods to provide functional amino acids, peptides, and creatine.
Recent findings strongly suggest that the capacity of renal AGAT, and thus endogenous creatine production, progressively decreases with the increasing degree of chronic kidney disease (CKD), to become absent or virtually absent in dialysis patients. We hypothesize that with increasing degree of CKD, creatine coming from meat and dairy in food increasingly becomes an essential nutrient.
The daily requirement of a 70-kg male for creatine is about 2 g; up to half of this may be obtained from a typical omnivorous diet, with the remainder being synthesized in the body Creatine is a carninutrient, which means that it is only available to adults via animal foodstuffs, principally skeletal muscle, or via supplements. Infants receive creatine in mother’s milk or in milk-based formulas.
Evidence suggests that creatine pharmacokinetics are nonlinear with respect to dose size and frequency. Skeletal muscle, the largest depot of creatine, has a finite capacity to store creatine. As such, when these stores are saturated, both volume of distribution and clearance can decrease, thus leading to complex pharmacokinetic situations.