How Creatine Exploded in the 1990s: From Olympics to MLB

Although creatine was discovered in the 1830s and received a decent amount of public acknowledgement for decades — in some instances even being advertised to be the compound that granted meat its healthy essence — nothing exceptional about creatine had been revealed that could permanently embed it into the public’s awareness. That all started to change in 1992, when creatine exploded onto the fitness scene in connection with the world’s most popular international sports festival. 

At first, people wouldn’t be quite sure what to make of creatine due to the challenge of neatly categorizing it alongside the most popular of the era. The fact that the era’s most popular nutrient hacks were squarely rooted in concepts like carbohydrate loading prior to aerobic events, or full-fledged steroid use for size, strength, and power increases, meant that creatine would also be competing against unfair comparisons that would be imposed upon it. 

Creatine Revealed

Although the revelation of creatine’s full potential occurred in 1992, none of that would have transpired without the important public disclosure that was made in 1984. That’s when the results of the most thorough creatine-based study to date were shared with the world. Dr. Samuel Bessman of the University of Southern California provided the first multidimensional explanation for how creatine is formed, and how it operates in the body.

“Scientists have long been aware of the existence of creatine, but have believed that it plays only a minor role in energy generation in muscle cells, Bessman told a news conference,” reported The Los Angeles Times in February 1984. “But Bessman’s research indicates that the substance, when combined with phosphorus to form creatine phosphate, is the primary energy-transfer compound in cells.” 

Bessman then described creatine phosphate as “a kind of shuttle between muscle fibers” that is consumed by cells during muscle contractions. He also added the rudimentary form of a viable explanation for how creatine might contribute to the acceleration of muscle growth that would take more than 40 years to catch on, even amongst fitness researchers.

“When the shuttle is working properly, exercise stimulates energy generation,” Bessman said. “Energy is needed for protein synthesis. So, when you generate a lot of energy, you make a lot of protein, which builds muscle.”

In time, this explanation would be amended to support how creatine’s presence in muscle cells and tissue provides additional energy to the process of muscle protein synthesis, stimulating the growth of lean muscle tissue supported by the intake of protein. This is different from the theory presented in 1984 that exercise generates protein on its own.

The intent of Bessman and his research team had been to make a connection between a lack of creatine and corresponding muscle weakness in kidney disease patients. However, by establishing that funneling creatine to muscle tissue in large quantities could supply muscles with more energy, Bessman had inadvertently forged a public connection between creatine and muscle performance that would ultimately be too alluring for some of the world’s best athletes to ignore.

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Creatine Questioned

Around the time of the 1992 Summer Olympics, the news leaked out that 100-meter sprinting champion Linford Christie of the United Kingdom had  been taking supplemental creatine. Only four years removed from an Olympic Games that saw several sprinters disqualified and stripped of medals for illicit steroid use — including initial 100-meter gold-medal-winner Ben Johnson of Canada — the language used to reflect Linford Christie’s use of the “legal muscle-builder” creatine was steeped in suspicions that he was exploiting a loophole simply by taking it.

“Creatine is a natural constituent of muscle and other tissues and it plays a vital role in the provision and transfer of energy,” penned former Olympic hurdler  Peter Hildreth in an article for The London Telegraph. “Before last week, my slight knowledge of it was gleaned from a conversation I had a year ago with the former British Olympic sprinter David Jenkins, who has settled into normal life after serving a sentence in California for dealing in counterfeit steroids. Jenkins, who confesses to a lifelong fascination with methods of metabolic manipulation, told me he knew a doctor who had supplied creatine to Spanish athletes competing at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. ‘Take some of that stuff,’ Jenkins confided, ‘and you’ll come off your blocks real fast.’” 

The suspicions about creatine extended beyond its effectiveness in improving human health, fitness, and performance, as some experts even speculated about what it would mean to the sport of horseracing if large amounts of creatine were included in the daily rations of thoroughbreds.

“A prohibitive substance is defined as one originating externally whether or not endogenous [originating within] to the horse,” explained Horseracing Forensic Laboratory director Neville Dunnett in an August 1992 edition of The London Guardian. “If creatine is being abused we are going to have to do something about it.”

In his efforts to correct misconceptions about what creatine could effectively do to help the physical performance of both humans and horses, Dr. Roger Harris of the Animal Health Trust used an analogy for how creatine functioned within an athlete’s body that downplayed the body’s ability to store it within saturated muscle tissue.

“Creatine is not a source of fuel,” said Harris. It is not like a tank full of petrol, more like an oil which makes the motor work better. It is premature to say we can transfer the findings on humans to horses but it is something which we cannot afford not to investigate. Creatine is a natural product which merely increases the upper level of normality, but to find the normal level of a particular animal would mean taking a muscle biopsy of all horses and foals. It could become a very difficult problem to resolve.”

The same article also repeated a common belief of creatine at the time that would soon be questioned: the assertion that creatine “does not build muscle.”

This is an assertion that would eventually be proven false; the collective results of 16 randomized controlled studies concluded that “creatine is an efficient form of supplementation for muscle growth” for people “with adequate training in a variety of dosage strategies and athletic activities.” [1]

Creatine for Sale

In 1993, creatine was made publicly available for sale in a tablet form under the name Ergomax, and researchers who specialized in the study of creatine, like Eric Hultman of Sweden, who had been studying creatine for 20 years by that point, stated that they hoped creatine would be “a good alternative to drugs.” Hultman included the most accurate practical description of creatine to date when he said that creatine supplements “can increase the store of energy in muscles, maximizing performance in short-burst activities and reducing fatigue and recovery time.”

Making the point about the benefits of creatine, the Associated Press listed the top athletes, nearly all of whom were English, who had capitalized on the near-exclusive access that Europeans had to creatine thanks to the location where most of the research on creatine was being conducted.

“Several British Olympic athletes used creatine in training for last summer’s Barcelona Games, including 100-meter gold medalist Linford Christie, women’s 400-meter hurdles champion Sally Gunnell, and 110-meter hurdler Colin Jackson,” disclosed the AP. “The Cambridge University rowing team used Ergomax during training for three months before defeating heavily-favored Oxford in the Boat Race in March.”

The article then revealed that Alan Wells, the 100-meter champion at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, had “experimented with Ergomax for several months” after it had been made publicly available, and was shocked by the results.

“It’s uncanny,” Wells explained. “You do a hard (training) session, and the next day you can still do a hard session. Your levels of energy are much higher and more prolonged. For someone coming up to his 41st birthday, I’ve never felt like this in the last 10 years.”

Revealing that the fine line between enhanced and unenhanced creatine consumption had not yet been neatly identified, the Associated Press report disclosed that most athletes were taking 20 to 30 grams of creatine daily to achieve its benefits, but added that “the recommended dosage of Erogmax is two one-gram tablets a day.” 

Studies would later show this latter quantity to be relatively ineffective at achieving an enhanced level of physical performance for most people. In the International Society of Sports Nutrition’s original position stand on creatine, it was stated after much testing that “ingesting smaller amounts of creatine monohydrate (e.g., 2–3 g/d) will increase muscle creatine stores over a 3–4 week period, however, the performance effects of this method of supplementation are less supported.” [2]

Moreover, it was later demonstrated that taking 5 grams of creatine daily was sufficient for nearly all athletes to maintain whole-body creatine stores at optimal capacity, and that only clinical populations with creatine synthesis deficiencies might benefit from taking significantly more creatine (i.g., 10 grams or more) on a daily basis. [3]

Still, at the time, the AP article presumed that the benefits of creatine consumption were commensurate with the amount of creatine consumed, and included conjecture from physiologist Roger Harris that if athletes were successful while taking daily creatine doses of 30 grams, “an athlete will say, ‘Why don’t I take 40?’ Who’s to stop it?” 

Credit for stopping the creatine arms race of the day was credited to the expense of creatine; one month worth of Ergomax tablets — presumably being taken at a dose of two grams per day — cost $63 in 1993. This is the modern equivalent of $140, meaning that a classic five-day loading phase of 20 grams of creatine per day would cost the modern equivalent of more than $230.

In practice, the natural limits to creatine’s effectiveness would have prevented a constant escalation in the creatine intake levels of athletes, since it was later proven that there was no tangible advantage to be gained by a continuous upscaling of creatine doses. [3]

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Creatine Cleared

Most of the initial uproar caused by creatine’s emergence in the athletic domain had died down by the summer of 1995, which enabled Saffron Davies of The London Guardian to publish what would soon be one of the last responsible articles published about creatine before it became connected to a major U.S. sports scandal. 

Davies framed his reporting by asking whether or not creatine would become “the non-testable alternative to anabolic steroids” that the first wave of fearmongers described it as.

“It seems unlikely,” said Davies. “Anabolic steroids act like the male hormone, testosterone, to build up muscle — changing the metabolism, physiology and structure of this tissue as training progresses. There is little evidence that creatine changes muscle structure, although one or two anecdotal reports have suggested that creatine may help muscle growth.”

In the years that followed, the first modern wave of creatine studies rolled out. This included a Penn State University study reported on by the Associated Press in 1996, which described creatine’s proven benefits without a media frenzy being overconcerned with its fairness in sports competition.

During the study, college-aged men were divided into a creatine-supplementation group and a placebo group for one week, and trained using the bench press and jump squat. After one week, the creatine group was able to perform a significantly greater number of bench press repetitions, and improved the peak power output of their lower bodies by an average of 50 watts during each of five sets.

“The effectiveness of creatine for short-term energy is much greater than that of caffeine or carnitine,” said Dr. Lawrence L. Spriet in response to the study’s results. “Athletes who must repeat a sprinting activity over and over may be able to improve performance with creatine. This includes players in soccer, ice hockey, tennis, and all athletes who train in engaging in short bursts of energy. So far, we have not observed negative side effects of creatine, but no data exist for long-term use.”

Creatine Smeared

By the fall 1997, creatine had already seeped into the weight rooms of high schools and colleges after being embraced by several professional sports figures with impressive physiques. In the pages of USA Today Baseball Weekly, muscular baseball star Mark McGwire called creatine “the best product on the market today,” while tight end Shannon Sharpe of the Denver Broncos openly promoted creatine in advertisements. 

Meanwhile, Dr. Priscilla Clarkson of the University of Massachusetts declared in The NCAA News “Creatine has become the most popular nutritional supplement of the last decade; we need to determine whether long-term use of creatine is safe.”

In the meantime, the beneficial effects of creatine were now considered to be undeniable. The Birmingham News reported in September 1997 about the results of a study conducted at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Recognizing that all the creatine studies she had seen had been conducted using male subjects, UAB dietitian and doctoral candidate Enette Larson conducted a study using women from the UAB soccer team as test subjects.

“After five weeks the players who were not taking creatine improved their bench press an average of 7.9 pounds,” stated The Birmingham News. “The players who were taking creatine improved their bench press an average of 15.4 pounds. After eight more weeks, the placebo group improved, on average, another 3.1 pounds. The creatine group improved another 4.4 pounds. Both groups also improved their times in the 300-yard shuttle run, a series of 25-yard sprints, but the creatine group made much greater improvements after just three weeks of supplementation.”

With all of the evidence landing in creatine’s favor, the pushback against it was steeped in concerns about long-term side effects and perceived unfairness. This became especially true when the aforementioned McGwire broke the 37-year-old Major League single-season home run record of Roger Maris. 

Over time, all of the concerns raised about unwanted side effects linked to creatine use proved to be completely unwarranted; research proved that creatine did not cause long-term water retention, dehydration, muscle cramping, hair loss, body fat gains, or kidney damage in healthy individuals. [4]

McGwire’s simultaneous use of the steroid androstenedione alongside creatine resulted in suspicions that he could not have broken the record without relying out supplements and drugs, and further resulted in creatine being lumped in alongside steroids as a substance that could provide an undeserved advantage to athletes who hadn’t earned their strength and speed the right way.

These misguided attempts to tarnish creatine only caused its popularity to balloon. By August 1998 — in the middle of the home run chase — sales of creatine had doubled to $200 million. This was a doubling of the $100 million in creatine sales from 1997, and a nearly sevenfold increase from the $30 million worth of creatine sold in 1995.

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Creatine Expands

Still regarded as a supplement taken exclusively for brawn, creatine’s reputation and path to widespread acceptance would benefit from unexpected research indicating that creatine could be of equal value to the human brain.

In November 2000, Steve Bailey of the Associated Press reported that Dr. Stephen Scheff of the University of Kentucky discovered how studies of creatine in rodents indicated that creatine could mitigate the damage caused to the brain if creatine was already being consumed prior to the injury being inflicted.

“Scheff’s research team demonstrated that brain damage was reduced 21 percent when creatine was given to mice three days before the injury and 36 percent when given five days before the injury,” reported the AP. “It also showed that in rats fed a diet supplemented with creatine for up to four weeks before such an injury, brain damage was reduced 50 percent when compared to rats fed a regular diet.”

Later testing would prove the link between creatine levels and optimal brain function, including in the area of clinical depression, when it was noted that lower levels of brain creatine content were associated with higher rates of depression. [5] This finding explained the results of studies where creatine supplementation proved to be a positive intervention in combating the effects of diagnosed depression. [6]

Simultaneous to this, attempts to capitalize on the buzz surrounding creatine resulted in the rapid expansion of the number of available food options for acquiring creatine, even if they were relatively ineffective. 

For example, the first creatine chewing gum was manufactured by NuCare in 1997 under the brand name Chewtrition. The Fort Worth Star Telegram reported on the release of the gum and its dubious claims with careful wording, stating how “two pieces a day are said to pack the full dosage that bodybuilders normally get only by combining powders and liquids.”

Alongside creatine gum came creatine gummies. After EAS introduced the first creatine supplement in the U.S. under the trademarked name of Phosphagen, they expanded their product line with the release of “Phospha Gems” in 1998. 

The sugar-packed Phospha Gems were advertised to contain three 5-gram servings of creatine, paired with 35 grams of sugar per serving. In total, the caloric toll of these gummies was approximately 400 calories per day. 

The Phospha Gems brand and the version of Chewtiriton that proposed to administer creatine were short-lived, and contemporary findings about similar variations of creatine products have called into question how much creatine was likely to have remained in these products at the time of their consumption. Creatine was discovered to break down very quickly in liquid; it was revealed that most forms of liquid creatine and creatine gummies retained far less creatine than advertised at their moment of eventual consumption.

The Beginning of the Creatine Boom

The 1990s saw creatine transformed from an unknown and underutilized amino acid compound into a supplement that serious athletes and fitness enthusiasts couldn’t live without. As dramatic as this change in public perception and acceptance was, it was only the tip of the iceberg. In the coming decades, creatine would be reclassified as a nutrient that was as essential to holistic well being as a daily multivitamin, if not more so.

Sources

1. Wu SH, Chen KL, Hsu C, Chen HC, Chen JY, Yu SY, Shiu YJ. Creatine Supplementation for Muscle Growth: A Scoping Review of Randomized Clinical Trials from 2012 to 2021. Nutrients. 2022 Mar 16;14(6):1255. doi: 10.3390/nu14061255. PMID: 35334912; PMCID: PMC8949037.

2. Buford TW, Kreider RB, Stout JR, Greenwood M, Campbell B, Spano M, Ziegenfuss T, Lopez H, Landis J, Antonio J. International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: creatine supplementation and exercise. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2007 Aug 30;4:6. doi: 10.1186/1550-2783-4-6. PMID: 17908288; PMCID: PMC2048496.

3. Kreider, R. B., Kalman, D. S., Antonio, J., Ziegenfuss, T. N., Wildman, R., Collins, R., … Lopez, H. L. (2017). International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: safety and efficacy of creatine supplementation in exercise, sport, and medicine. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 14(1).

4. Antonio J, Candow DG, Forbes SC, Gualano B, Jagim AR, Kreider RB, Rawson ES, Smith-Ryan AE, VanDusseldorp TA, Willoughby DS, Ziegenfuss TN. Common questions and misconceptions about creatine supplementation: what does the scientific evidence really show? J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2021 Feb 8;18(1):13. doi: 10.1186/s12970-021-00412-w. PMID: 33557850; PMCID: PMC7871530.

5. Faulkner P, Paioni SL, Kozhuharova P, Orlov N, Lythgoe DJ, Daniju Y, Morgenroth E, Barker H, Allen P. Relationship between depression, prefrontal creatine and grey matter volume. J Psychopharmacol. 2021 Dec;35(12):1464-1472. doi: 10.1177/02698811211050550. Epub 2021 Oct 26. PMID: 34697970; PMCID: PMC8652356.

6. Lyoo IK, Yoon S, Kim TS, Hwang J, Kim JE, Won W, Bae S, Renshaw PF. A randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trial of oral creatine monohydrate augmentation for enhanced response to a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor in women with major depressive disorder. Am J Psychiatry. 2012 Sep;169(9):937-945. doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2012.12010009. PMID: 22864465; PMCID: PMC4624319.