Why You Can Keep Trusting Your Creatine
A day or two ago, my phone started lighting up with the same link, sent to me by different people, all within the same day. A headline claiming a new study had linked creatine to cancer. My first reaction was somewhere between a sigh and a laugh, because if you've been in this industry as long as we have, this story feels less like news and more like déjà vu.
If you were around sports nutrition in the 1990s and early 2000s, you'll remember the headlines about creatine. It was going to destroy your kidneys. It would dehydrate you. It caused muscle cramps. It raised your risk of heat stroke. It wasn't safe for athletes. And, of course, the big one: it was basically a steroid.
Not one of those claims was ever backed by real evidence. But they didn't need to be, because fear travels faster than fact, and headlines don't wait for nuance. For years, that noise shaped how everyday people felt about one of the safest, most useful supplements available to them. It took over two decades and hundreds of human studies for creatine to shed that reputation and finally earn the mainstream attention it deserved, not just from the hardcore strength training crowd, but from everyday people using it to support their health, their energy, and their ageing bodies.
So when I saw this new headline circulating, I understood immediately why people were worried. I also understood, just as quickly, why they didn't need to be.
What the Study Actually Says
Here's the thing about headlines like this: they're built to be shared, not to be read. So let's actually read it.
The researchers did not show that creatine causes cancer in humans. That's not what this study set out to do, and it's not what it found. The core of the research was conducted in mice, using a forced metastasis model, meaning cancer cells were deliberately injected to spread, rather than observing how cancer naturally develops and progresses in a living body.
The human portion of the study involved just 11 healthy volunteers. None of them had cancer. They followed a high-dose loading protocol of 20 grams of creatine monohydrate per day for 14 days, well above what most people supplement with for everyday use. What researchers measured in these volunteers were platelet activation biomarkers, not tumour growth, not metastasis, not any cancer outcome at all, because there was no cancer to measure in the first place.
That distinction matters enormously. A mechanistic signal in a lab is not the same thing as a health outcome in a person. It's an early observation, a starting point for a hypothesis, not a conclusion about what happens in your body when you supplement with your daily scoop of creatine.
Why Mice Aren't the Whole Story
One detail worth sitting with is bioavailability, essentially how much of a substance the body actually absorbs and uses. In mice, creatine's bioavailability is quite low. In humans, it's close to 100%. That single difference is a reminder of why findings in animal models don't always translate cleanly to people, and why responsible science treats them as a first step, not a final word.
This is also, notably, still an emerging area of research. Some of the newer studies in this space do use human cells alongside animal models, which is progress. But progress in research doesn't always arrive with a tidy conclusion attached. Sometimes the honest answer is "we don't know yet, and here's what we're watching."
Why This Keeps Happening
I don't think the people creating this content are necessarily acting in bad faith. Many have good intentions. But they're also creating for platforms that reward alarm over accuracy, and a calm, accurate headline simply doesn't perform the way a frightening one does. The unfortunate result is that most people never make it past the thumbnail. They don't click through to the actual study. They don't see the caveats about mice, about dosage, about sample size. They just absorb the fear, and that fear is what gets repeated at the dinner table, in group chats, and in the comments section.
That's how myths get built. Not through malice, usually, but through repetition of something incomplete.
What I'd Ask You to Take With You
We are, at our core, an industry built on science, and I take that seriously. One early, mechanistic study should open a conversation, not overwrite decades of human research and reassurance. If new findings emerge that seriously change the picture… I promise you we'll talk about them honestly, caveats and all. That's what we've always done.
For now, what we have is a single early signal from a forced animal model and a small, short-term human sub-study that didn't even measure cancer outcomes. That's not nothing, but it's also not the headline.
You deserve nuance, not hyperbole. So take a breath, keep supplementing with your creatine as you always have, and know that we'll keep watching the research closely so you don't have to untangle it alone.
We all rise together,
Rachael Jennings | Co-Founder + CBO, Jenerise
