By Dennis Dodd
CBS SportsLine Senior Writer
July 21, 1998
Mark McGwire uses it. Sprinter Michael Johnson uses it. Nebraska's beefy linemen use it. Check the weight room at your local high school -- Johnny might not be able to read, but he probably uses it, too.
The
IF YOU FOLLOW college sports and haven't heard of it, feel free to extract your head out of the sand. For the past five years or so, only Keith Jackson is more well known in locker rooms.
Creatine is produced naturally by the body and contained in meat, fish and milk. In its synthesized form, it is believed to help muscles recover quicker and thus allow an athlete to build mass.
Depending on dosage, strength gains have ranged from five to 15 percent. There is also a weight gain that might be from water retention or muscle mass.
So what's the big deal? If the little provided by Mother Nature is good, a lot more produced artificially in a lab is better.
Not exactly.
So far, it works. So far, it's totally legal. But its long-term effects are largely an unknown. Because creatine has been around such a relatively short period of time, there hasn't been enough time for viable studies.
"A great analogy is smoking," said Chuck Yesalis, a noted epidemiologist at Penn State. "You can smoke for six months. Well, you're not going to have a heart attack over that. No lung tumors are going to develop. There's a latency period for many diseases as we all know."
BUT IN THE SAME BREATH, Yesalis sounded as if he has been caught up in the craze himself, "My gut instinct. If I were a collegiate athlete, I'd be clearly using creatine."
It's that good to its legions of users. In college athletics, it is the latest "magic bullet" used to get bigger, stronger and faster. Most of the similar substances are on the NCAA's and International Olympic Committee's banned list. Creatine has been red-flagged by the NCAA but is still legal.
"I don't know if magic bullet is the term," said Dennis Murphy, entering his 19th year as Montana's head trainer. "It's the current trendy thing. I don't know what the side effects are going to be. Everything has a side effect."
Compared to the effects of steroids, creatine seems to be a minor player at first glance. Yesalis rates creatine at "15 or 20" as a performance enhancer on a scale where steroids are 100.
"It's safe, but just because we don't know any long-term problems doesn't mean there aren't any," Yesalis said. " ... It's a crapshoot. If you talk to anybody who says they know it's safe, you're talking to a fool."
EXPERTS ARE CONCERNED ABOUT creatine's specific effect on the body. Over the years, steroids became illegal because of their long-term damage to the liver, kidneys and heart. Because of recent government regulations, creatine is somewhat of a loose cannon. It is advertised in magazines and is freely available in nutritional supplement stores and over the Internet.
The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 required ingredient and nutrition labeling of dietary supplements. But, experts warn, the act also means products are not subject to safety evaluations required of other new food products before they hit the market. Manufacturers no longer have the burden of proof of proving safety and effectiveness before marketing such a supplement.
Thus, drug expert Craig Kammerer speculated that the impurities in a batch of creatine might be unregulated. The Food and Drug Administration allows a maximum of .01 percent impurities in products such as creatine. "In large doses (of creatine)," Kammerer said, "you could be doing yourself harm."
"Creatine has become the poster child for a war that has developed," said Dave Ellis, Nebraska's coordinator of performance nutrition. "The conservative party line recognizes the supplement industry as unregulated. You don't know what you're buying. The other side of the fence is free enterprise fighting for the ability to sell food the way food is sold in a grocery store."
ELLIS HAS BEEN A CREATINE disciple since 1992 when he was at Wisconsin. A player brought him a body-building newspaper advertising the substance.
"It had some guy who was a known steroid peddler in jail with his picture behind bars saying, 'This is the next best thing. Get it before it's the next banned substance,' Ellis said. "As ridiculous an advertisement as that was ...it started to make more and more sense."
Ellis tried creatine and was convinced. When he moved to Nebraska in 1994 it was part of his basic program. Nebraska's already state-of-the-art weight-training complex had another weapon. Whether there is a relation or not, Nebraska has won three of the last four national championships since Ellis' arrival.
Much of the information both pro and con on creatine is still anecdotal. Some of the side effects attributed to creatine are dehydration, cramping, diarrhea and muscle pulls and strains. Ellis warned that if creatine is not mixed properly in liquid, it can be like drinking "ashtray sand" and act as a " ... bowel vacuant. ...There's definitely potential for problems for someone who stays on such a haphazard course."
Missouri's football team had an inordinate amount of muscle cramps during games at the beginning of the 1994 season. The cramps were traced to dehydration caused by creatine. Trainer Dave Toub has since all but eliminated its use.
"We had suspicions," Toub said. "We stopped taking it. We're getting big and strong without it. ... High school coaches call me all the time. I tell them you should be worried about it."
CREATINE MADE NATIONAL NEWS in late May when all eight coaches involved in the College World Series said at least some members of their teams use it to some extent. One player from national champion USC estimated 15 to 18 players on the 40-man roster tried creatine when it was offered.
College baseball has been shattering all kinds of offensive records in recent years. In addition to aluminum bats that have been around for 25 years, weight training and supplements are two of the biggest factors. In this year of the great home-run chase, the Cardinals' McGwire has gone public as one of creatine's biggest boosters. He has been using the substance for three years.
But
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Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire uses creatine to build his strength. (AP)
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"These are the people that ought to be the healthiest and happiest, not the most drugged," said Dr. John Renner, president of the National Council for Reliable Health Information. "It's been unstudied. If half the country were 97-pound weaklings having sand kicked in their face, then we might have a reason to administer those things, but that's not the way it works."
Ellis said English and Eastern bloc Olympic teams have used creatine for at least the past decade. There's a burgeoning use in this country at the high school level because of its relatively easy availability. The price for a month's supply has dropped to the $30-$70 range.
BUT SUPPLEMENT USE -- PARTICULARLY creatine -- is on the NCAA's radar as a bogey to track. There are still legal supplements that are made up of banned NCAA substances such as steroids. The NCAA warns the buyer to beware. A positive test means an automatic one-year ban from competition.
"I would be worried most about supplement use," said Cindy Thomas, assistant director of sports sciences for the NCAA. "It's something that's just out of control. I think it (creatine) will continue to be overused until we find out more. We don't know the potential side effects."
Until those side effects are tracked, the magic bullet remains in the chamber, ready for another blast to an athlete's system.
Dennis Dodd is a senior writer in CBS SportsLine's Kansas City bureau..