Pod Insights The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka 178. Max Lugavere: First Alzheimer’s Creatine Trial Shows Shocking Results! About this episode Attention: The first clinical trial testing creatine for Alzheimer’s just dropped, and the results are absolutely mind-blowing. In this episode, I’ve sat down with Max Lugavere at The White House to discuss the new research on creatine. This pilot study gave 20 Alzheimer’s patients 20 grams of creatine daily for 8 weeks. The results? Statistically significant improvements across nearly every cognitive measurement.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:30 Getting Back to the Basics
02:17 Clinical Trial on Creatine
05:57 Impact of Creatine on Health
11:26 Spreading Awareness on Positive Healthcare Choices
Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not provide medical advice. It is not intended for diagnosing or treating any health condition. Always consult a licensed healthcare professional before making health or wellness decisions.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 There's now a bounty of evidence that creatine actually also supports cognitive function.
0:04 Gary Brecka? I think creatine is something right now that's widely thought of as like the bodybuilding supplement.
0:09 Speaker 00 The Alzheimer's field has been rife with fraud. There have been other papers exploring how creatine might lay a therapeutic role for a patient with Alzheimer's disease, but the first clinical trial was just published and it's incredible.
0:20 Gary Brecka? I believe the pendulum is going to swing back into reasonable thought-based care that actually is sensical, just common sense.
0:27 Speaker 00 There are many industries, many individuals that stand to gain from gatekeeping knowledge. It's corrupt that people would want the public to be gate-kept from this kind of information.
0:37 Gary Brecka? You're not trying to say that there's corruption in our nutritional research, are you, Max? I think people feel a little out of control with their healthcare choices. We are a lot more in control of our destiny than we think we are.
0:49 Speaker 00 My whole purpose has been to, and which is, I think, part of why we've gathered here today for this event, is to...
1:07 Gary Brecka? Wow.
1:07 Speaker 00 Dude.
1:08 Gary Brecka? This is a surreal moment.
1:09 Speaker 00 This is crazy.
1:10 Gary Brecka? Can we just take this in for a second? That we're at the White House and the message is resonating. By the way, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist, Gary Brecka. This is Max Lugavere. He and I have had an incredible relationship that we've built over the last few years just being in the same space, listening to you message. And we just both sat down here and I think it hit us both at the same time, like, wow.
1:39 Speaker 00 We must be doing something right to have gotten this incredible opportunity to be here.
1:45 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
1:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, and I'm just, I'm so grateful. I mean, for me, you know, it's, it all goes back to my why. I think you always have to remind yourself in these moments.
1:53 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
1:53 Speaker 00 Why it is that you are doing what you do. And for me, you know, 12 years ago now, when my mom was first diagnosed with a neurodegenerative condition, I was completely in the dark, totally lost.
2:03 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
2:04 Speaker 00 And everything that has unfolded subsequently, all the knowledge that I've, you know, been humbled to have... accrued and all the experts that I've spoken to, it's, I guess, led to this moment.
2:14 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
2:14 Speaker 00 And, um, yeah, it's just wonderful.
2:16 Gary Brecka? Well, you know, I think that I, I just did a little post about this myself, and I know we're getting off topic, but, you know, my wife and I started on our mission 10 years ago in a strip mall in Naples, Florida. We took over a little bankrupt vitamin shop and grew it into a functional medicine business and then decided we wanted to get a message out to the masses. We started a media platform with a podcast and everything. We started interacting with amazing people like you. And the message was so unified, you know, and, and I think it was about just getting back to the basics. Uh, you know, huge report coming out today. You and I have not seen it, but we have an inkling of what's in it. Um, I think that it is going to potentially upend modern medicine in a way that will be catastrophic and, and catastrophic in a good way. Like just
3:00 Gary Brecka? getting back to the basic principles of whole food, movement, um, exercise, uh, you know, sleep, you know, supplementation for deficiency, that this pandemic of chronic disease was exacerbated by chemicals, synthetics and pharmaceuticals not solved by any of those things. And because we don't have access to that report yet, and I don't want to steal the thunder from today's announcement, I want to talk about a couple of other things that are really in the news that I know you're familiar with. You know, I've, I've, I've long since been a, a big fan of creatine. Um, and I think creatine is something right now that's widely thought of as like the bodybuilding supplement. And women in particular are afraid of creatine, uh, I think for the wrong reasons because my opinion, you know,
3:45 Gary Brecka? every woman over 40 years old should be on a minimum of five milligrams of creatine a day for cognitive function, hormone balance. It has so many other, uh, attributes in our, in our body. Can you talk a little bit about the study that just, just came out on creatine?
3:59 Speaker 00 Yeah. So the first ever, uh, clinical trial testing creatine in the setting of Alzheimer's disease was just published. There have been other papers, um, mechanistically exploring how creatine might play a therapeutic role. For a patient with Alzheimer's disease, but the first clinical trial was just published. And it's incredible. Now, there are some important caveats. It was a small trial, about 20 patients. It was a single arm, so there was no placebo group. But as a pilot trial to test the feasibility, to test the safety, the results were pretty impressive. So basically took 20 patients with Alzheimer's disease and put them on a 20 gram dose of creatine every day.
4:41 Gary Brecka? Wow.
4:42 Speaker 00 That's a big dose.
4:43 Gary Brecka? So it's about four times what they would recommend. Some proponents of creatine would recommend creatine loading. So like 30 days of high dose and then backing down to five milligrams. So this is 20 milligrams a day.
4:55 Speaker 00 Right, so the thinking is that over a certain period of time, you know, muscles will saturate with creatine. If you're taking three to five grams a day, it takes about 28 days. If you choose not to do the loading period, for your muscles to fully saturate with creatine for ergogenic benefit or performance boosting benefit. But there's now a bounty of evidence mounting showing us that creatine actually also supports cognitive function, mental health.
5:23 Gary Brecka? Right.
5:24 Speaker 00 But it's unclear at this point how much creatine one needs to take in order for that creatine to be pushed to the brain.
5:32 Gary Brecka? Right.
5:33 Speaker 00 Because at the dietary levels, meet the muscle saturation needs. So it's actually been shown that vegans and omnivores don't differ in terms of their brain creatine saturation.
5:45 Gary Brecka? Oh, wow.
5:45 Speaker 00 So the dietary levels don't seem to modulate brain levels.
5:48 Gary Brecka? Wow, I would have thought the opposite, actually.
5:50 Speaker 00 That's what I think a lot of people thought.
5:52 Gary Brecka? Yeah, I would have thought the meat eaters would have, you know, adequate levels of creatine.
5:55 Speaker 00 Right, because meat eaters ingest it through their diets, right? And vegans obviously don't because creatine is a carnit nutrient. It's found exclusively in animal source foods. Meat and beef, red meat and fish specifically.
6:08 Speaker 00 But now we're starting to understand that actually it takes a much higher dose to actually push creatine to the brain. It seems to be preferentially sucked up by the muscles. But if you take a high enough dose, a supplementary dose, then it seems to get pushed up to the brain. And we kind of had an inkling of this when there was that study published about a year ago.
6:26 Gary Brecka? Yeah, we talked heavily about that.
6:28 Speaker 00 Sleep deprivation, yeah, when you would take like a really high dose of creatine, it seemed to have an acute beneficial effect on cognitive function for someone who was sleep deprived.
6:36 Gary Brecka? Right.
6:37 Speaker 00 But now, thanks to this new trial that was published, we've seen that when patients, again, it was a short-term study, lasted about 20 weeks, or I'm sorry, eight weeks.
6:50 Gary Brecka? Okay, eight weeks, okay.
6:52 Speaker 00 20 patients, eight weeks, so again, small, 20 grams a day, they saw a statistically significant improvement across pretty much every cognitive score.
7:03 Gary Brecka? Wow.
7:03 Speaker 00 Yeah.
7:04 Gary Brecka? You know, so this is something for the elderly, you know, I was actually talking to Bobby Kennedy about this a few months ago, and we were talking about supplementation, modalities, treatments, care options, functional medicine alternatives that provide a benefit, but have very little chance of harm, or no downside consequence. And he was saying how the lanes should be more open to things that may or may not work, but actually don't cause harm. Because there's a lot of pharmaceutical options that may or may not work, but then there's a permanent or semi-permanent detriment. You know, you have a tachypneic response,
7:46 Gary Brecka? you build desensitization, you build a dependency or a reliance. And those kinds of consequences are the kinds of consequences that really need to be measured. But creatine seems to be one of those that falls into the category of there is... Indirect and direct anecdotal, objective and subjective evidence that says this is beneficial for men and women, and certainly in older ages, seems to be more beneficial because of the depletion and the lack of absorption. And so now we have a trial that says, hey, across nearly every, excuse me, cognitive measurement, this is having an acute, you know, positive effect.
8:29 Speaker 00 Yeah. Now, it would be amazing to have had a placebo group. It would be amazing to see if it, if we see significant cognition improvements at lower doses, because 20 grams, again, is a high dose. Anybody who's ever had to suck down, you know, 20 grams of creatine sand.
8:45 Gary Brecka? It is a sand, you know.
8:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, exactly. But you're 1,000% correct in that, first of all, I mean, my work has been, and we talked about this on the last time I was on your show, there's been, the Alzheimer's field has been rife with fraud.
9:00 Gary Brecka? Yes.
9:01 Speaker 00 And
9:01 Gary Brecka? It really has.
9:02 Speaker 00 Yes.
9:02 Gary Brecka? And it's also rife with taking the same objectives, the same sort of, you know, clinical narrative, and trying to, over and over and over again, trying to prove this clinical narrative of the amyloid plaques and the neurofibrillary tangles, which we know now are consequences of, not the genesis of, because those are really drug centric, right? Because they want to provide a solution to manage that condition, or to manage those symptoms, not really get what you're talking about to the root cause. What is the genesis of it? And if we know what the genesis is, how can we reverse it? And for people that find themselves afflicted by it, is there a chance to slow stop or even reverse that?
9:45 Speaker 00 Yeah. And creatine mechanistically, it's, it's literally getting to the, one of the root causes of the condition, which we believe to be an inability of the brain to properly generate energy. So creatine is, it helps the brain, it's involved in neuroenergetics.
10:04 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
10:05 Speaker 00 The brain's ability to generate ATP, which is its, which is its energetic currency. And in Alzheimer's disease, there's an inability, a stark inability for the brain to properly generate ATP from its primary fuel substrate, which is glucose. So with creatine, the thinking is, you're actually getting to the root cause, as opposed to these
10:25 Speaker 00 You know, these anti amyloid drugs like lecanumab and edgicanumab, which are just attacking this sort of downstream, you know, phenomena, this amyloid plaque buildup.
10:35 Gary Brecka? Right.
10:35 Speaker 00 Which, which do not, which is not a free ride. I mean, they, the risks, the risks are significant. Brain swelling, brain bleeds, and even death in some of these trials.
10:48 Gary Brecka? Yeah, this is exactly what Bobby was talking about is those are, those kinds of consequences for the potential of doing something good.
10:56 Gary Brecka? That may or may not work, but have the potential of causing permanent irreversible damage, neuroplasticity changes, other things. I think what's so exciting now for folks like you and I is that I feel the, the cover lifting for us. I feel the lanes beginning to widen for things like supplementation, peptides, functional medicine alternatives, lifestyle changes, interventional changes that are largely in control of the patient or the client that wants, that wants to go on this journey and not so much being practiced upon. You know, and, and, and that's, I mean, that's really exciting for, for, for guys like you and I, and especially given your background and the history with your mother.
11:41 Gary Brecka? And you're, you know, you talked about this in your documentary. You know, had some options like this been available, maybe there would have been a different course.
11:51 Speaker 00 A thousand percent, yeah. I mean, I would have, I would have loved to have explored creatine as a, as an option.
11:58 Gary Brecka? Right.
11:59 Speaker 00 With my mom. We obviously didn't have this, this data back when she was alive. And it's unfortunate, the drugs that she were prescribed, I mean, were little more than biochemical Band-Aids. And I don't think that they helped her at all. In fact, I think they probably contributed to her, her net decline. Over time, but you know, these drugs, I mean, these creatine is, you know, it's not a cure. My whole purpose has been to, and which is, I think, part of why we've gathered here today for this event is to really shift the spotlight to prevention. Which I think is.
12:33 Gary Brecka? And awareness too, right? Because I, I think. We are a lot more in control of our destiny than we think we are. I think as humanity. And sadly, folks like you and I are somewhat in a little bit of an echo chamber because the people that are listening to us and are in our peer groups are becoming more and more aware and we're accepting of this. But my message has always been to try to get this to the masses, to really push this down into humanity so that at a basic level, people can get a fundamental understanding of what they can do. So I think people feel a little out of control with their healthcare choices. Like, it's actually not their choice. They don't have any governance over it.
13:17 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, there are many industries, many individuals that stand to gain from gatekeeping knowledge, gatekeeping scientific literacy.
13:27 Gary Brecka? You're not trying to say that there's corruption in our nutritional research, are you, Max?
13:30 Speaker 00 It's not just corruption. I mean, it's corrupt that people would want the public to be gate-kept from this kind of information. But we live in an incredible time. I mean, if you're not optimistic today, you're just not paying attention.
13:44 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
13:45 Speaker 00 We have all of the world's knowledge at our fingertips 24 hours a day. We have access to PubMed.
13:49 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
13:49 Speaker 00 We have access to AI. I mean, my own scientific literacy and health has improved thanks to my access to these large language models. It's incredible.
13:58 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
13:58 Speaker 00 And so I think it's such an auspicious time to be alive and to really seize the reins of your health. And that's why I think everything converged to allow a day like today to happen.
14:09 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
14:10 Speaker 00 There are so many aspects of, whether it's technological advancement, our collective optimism, our collective desire to shake up the status quo.
14:19 Gary Brecka? Yep.
14:20 Speaker 00 That's paved the way for a day like today, and it's momentous.
14:23 Gary Brecka? Yeah, and definitely a parabolic rise in awareness. And for folks like you and I to potentially be a small part of affecting public policy, I mean, we're talking about generational changes. You know, our children's children, our children's grandchildren that will benefit from it. And it's sad that the pendulum had to swing so far that it just got, it went from the sublime to the ridiculous to the totally absurd. And now I believe the pendulum's going to swing back into the middle, into reasonable, thought-based care that actually is sensical, just common sense.
14:56 Speaker 00 Common sense.
14:57 Gary Brecka? You know, it's astounding to me, when I travel the world, how People don't believe that just getting back to the simple basics of your habitual patterns during the day can have just this dramatic effect on the long-term trajectory of your health. Man, I wish we had more time.
15:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, brother.
15:13 Gary Brecka? Dude, but sharing this moment with you, you know, you and I have been on this journey. You're a pioneer in the industry. I quote you all the time on a lot of my podcasts and I wish you the best in your journey.
15:25 Speaker 00 Likewise, thank you, brother.
15:26 Gary Brecka? Yeah, thanks for being a...
15:27 Speaker 00 Yeah, proud to be a foot soldier on the ground with you and everybody involved. You know, this is not a... There's one of my favorite lines from David Mitchell, who is the author of Cloud Atlas. "I am but one drop in an endless ocean, yet what does any ocean but a multitude of drops?"
15:43 Gary Brecka? Wow.
15:44 Speaker 00 Yeah, and so I'm just proud to be here and to have a voice and yeah, good things ahead.
15:50 Gary Brecka? Proud to be on the stage with you too, brother. All right, good luck.
15:53 Speaker 00 Thank you.
15:54 Gary Brecka? Until next time, guys, that's your sign.
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