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Creatine Ingredients
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What are the Ingredients in Creatine?
It seems that over the last many years Creatine Monohydrate has become the gold standard that is generally accepted as the minimum requirement when starting on creatine supplements. Creatine is made from the following three amino acids: methionine, glycine and arginine. However there are some incredible inventions that have altered the creatine molecule to make it more absorbable directly into the blood stream.
Having said that no matter what creatine product you land up buying there is a very good chance that you will not be getting 100% pure creatine only and nothing else. The reason is that there have been quite a few isolates that have been identified that can make an improvement to the rate at which the creatine that you take gets absorbed.
Listed below you will see a brief explanation of the various products that will more than likely be added to your creatine that you purchase to enable better absorbability. The first of these is Waxy Maize Starch which is something that can add a lot of volume to the creatine that you take and also speed up the absorbsion of creatine into the muscles.
The next is Glycocyamine which is a precursor for creatine but actually does not do any real good and seems to increase your homocystine levels and at the same time reduce your ROS (Reactive Oxygen Species). This could be a good or a bad thing depending on your own specific genetics that you have.
Guanidino Propionic Acid (GPA) has a way of increasing insulin sensitivity and also provides some ergogenic benefits of its own. GPA is also able to reduce cellular energy output which is the exact opposite of what creatine does. But this makes it pretty useful for weight-loss but is, logically, counter-productive with creatine.
Alpha Lipoic Acid (ALA) helps increase insulin sensitivity and together with sugar helps to bring creatine into the cell. It is a good ingredient that has a good place in those products that contain a lot of sugar. The next is 4-Hydroxy-Isoleucine which is a insulin mimetic that helps bring sugar and creatine into the muscle and actually shuts the sugar into the muscle glycogen stores.
Momordica is an extract of bitter melon is another insulin mimetic that helps to shove more nutrients into the muscle. It is a little better than the others out there since it shuttles both amino acids and sugars into the muscle. The other products just shuttle sugar into the muscle, so this has a big advantage.
Caffeine is another ingredient often added to creatine which has shown in certain studies to be able to help increase the uptake of creatine into your bloodstream. D-Pinnitol is another insulin mimetic product that can increase the loading phase of creatine and act like insulin.
There are a number of other additional additives that are often added to creatine products to enable better absorption but the lsit is basically endless so we will just list the most common ones seen above. Additional will be things like Cinnamon Extraction (Cinnulin PF (TM)), Peak ATP (TM), all Liquid Serums and IP6 – Inositol Hexaphospate as well as Amino Acids like Leucine Taurinate that are added to the ingredients of creatine.