In this episode, Christine answers 2 questions coming from our listeners about Creatine and the research behind Micellar Casein, as well as Hydrolysed vs Isolate proteins.
Muscle Talk - Bodybuilding podcast by International Protein
If you want your own questions answered on our bodybuilding podcast, then join our private Facebook Group and share your ideas, https://www.facebook.com/groups/muscletalk
If you'd like to learn more about International Protein, visit https://www.international-protein.com/product/kre-alkalyn/
A Thinkroom production.
https://www.thinkroom.com/
In this episode, Christine answers 2 questions coming from our listeners about Creatine and the research behind Micellar Casein, as well as Hydrolysed vs Isolate proteins.
Muscle Talk - Bodybuilding podcast by International Protein
If you want your own questions answered on our bodybuilding podcast, then join our private Facebook Group and share your ideas, https://www.facebook.com/groups/muscletalk
If you'd like to learn more about International Protein, visit https://www.international-protein.com/product/kre-alkalyn/
A Thinkroom production.
https://www.thinkroom.com/
Ash Horton:
Our host, the world renowned Christine Envall and IFBB professional, three times world champion, a mentor, an icon and of course, a founding co-owner of the best supplement money can buy, International Protein. In this episode you'll learn if creatine actually works and how it works. We ask when to take it, and if you can take too much. We also compare research from 10 years ago, versus today's research on micellar caseins as well as hydrolyzed and isolate proteins.
Ash Horton:
Christine, look, one of our listeners posted a question on our Aussie Muscle Guru Facebook page, his name was Wim from Belgium, and he asks the question, does creatine work and what is creatine and how does it work?
Christine Envall:
Well the very simple answer, and you know that there's not going to be a simple answer to this is that yes, it does work. Creatine, in fact, is one of the most researched supplements. I did a little bit of extra research on this as well, and apparently, it's been used for over 200 years, believe it or not. I didn't know it was that long. I thought it was more about 50 years and it actually started off in the horse racing industry.
Christine Envall:
So just to give people a little bit of perspective, horse races are way more valuable than human beings, apparently, when it comes to their money-earning potential in athletics, I guess that is. So when it comes to making the most out of their performance, they actually look for supplements before we actually do. So, one of the sports supplements that we're using today, like beta-alanine and creatine actually kind of got discovered in the horse racing industry.
Christine Envall:
So creatine has been used for a very long time and there are over 500 studies have been done over the last 20 or 30 years.
Ash Horton:
Wow. That's serious.
Christine Envall:
That is a phenomenal amount of research that's gone into creatine. Now, 70% of those studies have given a positive result in terms of, yes, it does enhance performance. So whether that's what sort of spread onto them saying, oh, 30% of people are non-responders. So you might've heard that, that some people just don't respond to creatine. So I don't know if that's an actual research number or if it's just because in 30% of the studies they didn't, and that was kind of how they laid it out there.
Christine Envall:
So creatine, how does it work and what does it actually do, I guess, given that it is one of the most researched supplements around, so it's involved in the energy production. So taking a step backwards, weight training is an anaerobic activity. So what that means is it doesn't use oxygen. It's basically utilizing your ATP and your glycolytic phosphorylation system. So it's essentially taking the energy that's stored in your muscle. It's not using your fat stores.
Christine Envall:
So it has to be using either glycogen directly or the ATP stored in your muscle. So what creatine does is it converts the broken down ATP back into fresh ATP so you can keep on working and that's, what's used in that first 10 second explosive part. And that's really what a lot of weight training is.
Christine Envall:
So that's the role that creatine has is that it's stored in the muscle as creatine phosphate, and it's there so that when you break down the ATP, when you fire off those first reps, and then when you have your rest, it's rebuilding that ATP to give you the ability to go again and go again. So the more creatine that you have, the longer that you can do that for.
Christine Envall:
So what you might see is, people get failure after doing 12 sets on a body part, but now with the creatine, you can get 15 sets. It also is related to strength. So people actually get an increase in strength from doing that, from having that extra ability to keep on replenishing that ATP and increasing their anaerobic power, basically.
Christine Envall:
So, that's how it works. Obviously building up your scores off it has a massive impact on being able to keep going for longer. And it also, when people are playing football or basketball or those kinds of activities where they have kind of an aerobic phase and then they have a sprint phase and they have to go from zero to a hundred and keep being able to pull out that repeated performance of high-intensity work, that's where also the creatine has a very important role.
Christine Envall:
So it's not just purely in weight training activities, it's in your aerobic, anaerobic type activities where you have to keep on being able to come up and have a real blast of explosive energy. So, that's pretty much how it works. It is present in food. So, that's present in the meat. Meat has a certain content, particularly red meat, a little bit less in chicken and stuff, but you'd have to eat a kilo of meat to get about five grams or not quite five grams of creatine.
Christine Envall:
So obviously supplementation is really important because you get that amount that you need relatively quickly. It does store in the muscle, but I what I've got here, and I went to the International Society of Sports Nutrition because, obviously I kind of have the opinion that anything to do with, whether it be the Institute of Sport or anything like that they have a very anti-supplement kind of philosophy.
Christine Envall:
They believe that food is it. So to have something from the International Society of Sports Nutrition that actually endorses creatine as an effective supplement, and there were nine points that they put down and just to kind of capture a couple of them, they say creatine monohydrate is the most effective ergogenic nutritional supplement currently available to athletes in terms of increasing high-intensity energy capacity and lean body mass during training. So to me, that kind of says it all.
Ash Horton:
It's quite the endorsement.
Christine Envall:
It is, it's quite the endorsement. It's not only safe but possibly beneficial in regards to preventing injury and or management of select medical conditions when taken within recommended guidelines. There's no scientific evidence that short or long-term use of creatine monohydrate has any detrimental effects on otherwise healthy individuals.
Christine Envall:
Now, I'm going to stop there for a minute because it talks about creatine monohydrate. Most people are probably aware that now there's a lot of different forms of creatine on the market. There's creatine HCL, creatine AKG, basically, that's the creatine molecule, but it's bound with another chemical molecule in the attempt to get a better uptake of the creatine.
Christine Envall:
So, one thing that we do know about creatine is that it breaks down very rapidly into a couple of byproducts, which are actually quite toxic to the body, creatinine being one of those. So I'm going to, I guess, talk about International Protein here because we have a creatine product called Kre-Alkalyn, which is actually still a creatine monohydrate. So it is actually the monohydrate form, which all the research has been done on, but it has been treated in a way to change the pH of the molecule so that when you take it in, by the time it processes through your body, it doesn't get down below the pH seven, which is where the creatine starts to break down.
Christine Envall:
So what that means is that what goes in, so you take three grams, you get closer to that three grams going all the way through to get absorbed into your system. If you just take regular, run of the mill creatine monohydrate, that three grams, they believe that about one gram is actually what still remains as creatine and doesn't get broken down into those toxic byproducts. So when I say toxic byproducts, a lot of people associate creatine with diarrhoea and stomach cramps and things like that because it's basically pulling all the water in to try to dilute it. So-
Ash Horton:
No, this is a story, the listeners are going to love this. I was 15, I was taking creatine because I don't know, I'd seen something that advertised it or whatever. And I remember, it just made me fat, it made me fat really badly, to the point where I remember I was sitting in science class and I actually got ordered out of the class, literally, I was farting up the front of the class. No, sorry, it was the accounting class and they thought it was the science lab downstairs. So, it definitely has an effect on the body. It's not ideal, probably too young to be taking it in the first place.
Christine Envall:
Not for everybody in that situation. But I think if you had had that Kre-Alkalyn, you may not have had that problem because a lot of people do associate creatine with puffiness and bloating because obviously, it does pull water into the body. And there was a lot of the time people thought, oh, the weight gain's only due to the actual water gain, but that's actually not the case. There is actually actual muscle synthesis happening. It is a much longer-term thing. So over a six month period of use, you do actually gain more lean muscle.
Ash Horton:
So on that water thing, I don't know that much about it, but does it sort of help you store more water in the muscle?
Christine Envall:
Yes, in the muscle because that's where the creatine's stored, it's actually as that creatine phosphate inside the actual muscle. Basically, I think more than 90% of it's stored in that place in your body. There's obviously some floating around your bloodstream and probably a little bit in your liver, but the majority of it is actually in the muscle and hence why it draws the water into the muscle, but it also does leave it subcutaneous as well.
Christine Envall:
So it's outside of the muscle, under the skin and that's where that kind of puffiness comes from. And I think that that's what they say with the Kre-Alkalyn is it doesn't give you that side effect. So I think a lot of it is not actually the creatine, it's the breakdown products of creatine that are causing that water retention external to the muscle. You get better quality creatine is basically what that's kind of saying if you're suffering from that puffiness.
Ash Horton:
And you talked about it being sort of almost injury preventing, right? So is that related to the water absorption or just-
Christine Envall:
I hadn't read a lot on that because I know that there was a period of time when creatine was associated with injury, as in people were tearing muscles and things and they were blaming the creatine for that. I would say it probably is the protective effect of having more water in the muscle because a lot of the time when you are too dry and you're very dehydrated, that is when a lot of the time injury occurs.
Christine Envall:
So water actually creates stability around the muscle and particularly water in the right places in the joint, like when it's inside of the little fluid sacks, not out, like when you've got a swollen joint, that's when the fluid's outside of where it's supposed to be and it's causing swelling. But when it's in the protective, you know the little water bags inside of your body and so if that's all fully hydrated, then that's definitely going to help with the injury prevention.
Christine Envall:
But I would say it's also all to do with the fact that you've got the ... You know when you fatigue and you're struggling to do something, but you're still doing it and you're doing it with weight? That's often when an injury occurs is because you don't have the strength to really control the weight. So I think having that strength and that ability to actually execute the rep properly will also have a lot to do with why the injury prevention is there because you actually have the strength to control it because as I said, a lot of the time injury happens when you're working outside of your natural, I guess your natural strength range of pushing you try to get the gains and that's how you do that.
Christine Envall:
And if you are fatigued, and you kind of accidentally go slightly out of alignment with the rep, then that's when the injury tends to happen. I will just say a couple more points off of this, where they said that the addition of carbohydrates and protein to a creatine supplement appears to increase the muscular retention. Although, the effect on performance measures may not be greater than taking the creatine alone.
Christine Envall:
So, that to me was really interesting because again, way, way back when creatine first hit the market, there were some really popular products where they loaded it up with 90 grams of sugars because there was a lot of studies around saying, it stores more creatine if you take it with all this sugar and some people kind of bought into that. And then other people were like, oh my God, that's a lot of sugar.
Christine Envall:
So it appears there that the creatine itself is all you need, which is great news for people who are trying to diet or, watch their calories and want to gain lean muscle mass, that they don't need to take a whole pile of sugar in with the creatine to still get the same effect of the actual creatine there.
Christine Envall:
Again, they talk about the loading because that was another popular thing of having to sort of load the creatine over a five to 10 day period and then get your muscle basically saturated with it and then kind of go from there. But something like Kre-Alkalyn, they say, we don't need to load that particular material. You do get the effects straight away. And I definitely find that.
Christine Envall:
And when we talk about that non-responder thing, I know I, myself again, when creatine first came out, I didn't get a lot out of it, just the basic creatine monohydrate. But when I do use the Kre-Alkalyn, I definitely feel an impact on my strength more than anything. And that ability to sort of do a few more reps on an actual set, that's the impact that I really noticed.
Ash Horton:
So how do you use it? Do you use it all the time or a period on a period off and when do you take it? And tell us more about that.
Christine Envall:
Well, any type of product, say particularly the Kre-Alkalyn, the recommendation is to take it 45 minutes before your training session. The reason being is that because it is that pH buffer, it does take a little bit longer to then get back down into the intestine and broken down. So it's passed through the stomach, but it hasn't been destroyed, but it does take a little bit longer because of that pH buffering.
Christine Envall:
With the regular creatine, it's about a half an hour before training. So before training, if you want that immediate impact on your training, if you're looking for muscle growth from it, most people would put it in their post-workout shake and have a serving of it after they've trained. And that's, as I said, that's kind of the longer-term muscle building impact of it, but the actual effects before training or before a match, have it in that specific timeframe.
Christine Envall:
Some people maybe still do load, but you only need to do that once. And then once you're up and running, then you just take it pre-workout. So I would recommend that having it on your training days, either pre and post or just pre, depending on what you were trying to do. You'll still get the muscle-building effect if you use it pre, but if you want to have the full effect of it, have it pre and post, particularly females who aren't eating a lot of red meat really should be looking at supplementing with creatine if they're trying to grow muscle.
Christine Envall:
It's not something that is related to sport, but there's a lot more research to be done still. It actually has promise in increasing the cognitive function of older people. So, improving Alzheimer's and just basically improving, that I guess, hand-eye coordination and that kind of thing in people as they age. So definitely a supplement to keep on taking for the over 40 crowd, going into the over 60s and over 70s, or even looking at getting your parents on it.
Christine Envall:
Not from the point of view of them going out and doing a massive workout, but just in terms of maintaining their brain function, also the ability to recall things, fill out forms, how people kind of get a little bit confused as they get older is meant to help with that kind of thing.
Ash Horton:
Interesting.
Christine Envall:
So again, not sport-related, but definitely has other health implications and benefits. There's still more research to be done.
Ash Horton:
Interesting. So is there a point where you can have too much?
Christine Envall:
I think it's one of those things where the too much, you're just going to end up excreting it. I haven't read a lot, but I'm sure that there's, you'll probably get a fishy smell or you'll start to kind of get an unusual odour about yourself if you're having too much. I don't think it's going to impact your kidneys. They've done so much research that I know they would have checked if there was any kind of toxicity level, which of course there would be.
Christine Envall:
But, there comes a point where you probably wouldn't be able to afford the amount that you would need to cause yourself any damage, but just do keep in mind though, that if you are taking more, that you will need to drink more. So there would be a problem if you were taking a lot of creatine and not having the right amount of fluid intake. So if you're taking only a litre of water a day but having five, 10 grams of creatine, you're definitely going to be putting a lot of stress onto your kidneys.
Ash Horton:
And you mentioned in another podcast, how much water do you have a day?
Christine Envall:
I actually don't count, but I would be aiming for probably about four to five litters. I've had times in competitions where I've gotten at a centre point of too low a sodium and the water would literally go in and come straight through, but you'd be thirsty and I'd be up around 11 or 12 litres. So if anyone's up around that level, that's not good.
Ash Horton:
It's too much.
Christine Envall:
I think that four to five-litre mark is really good. Too, if you're training, if you're living in Queensland is definitely way too low. I would say the colder it is, the less that you sweat. So the less that you tend to need to drink, but I would say that two would be an absolute bare minimum. For someone who's training, I would say probably three litres is more your bottom mark and six litres being your top mark.
Christine Envall:
Really, depending on how much you're taking when you train, because some people can drink a lot when they train, I can't. Maybe if I go through a litre while I'm training, I'm doing well, but I know some guys can go through the four litres just in a training session. So and again, that is related to your body mass. So, there might be some bigger guys who do need to drink up around that eight-litre mark, but just the average person, it's probably about four to five.
Ash Horton:
Interesting stuff. This was a really interesting podcast. Look, let's move on to another question. We've had Piero Gorna, A.K.A. Pete. So we call him Pete. He's on our Aussie Muscle Guru Facebook page as well. And he is saying, what's the current research on the different types of proteins? So 10 years ago when he was competing, micellar casein was the best before bed protein. So what is it now? How about the hydrolyzed versus the isolate?
Christine Envall:
Cool. So fortunately with the research from 10 years ago was they got it right. So it's not like anything's really changed in terms of, all of a sudden now it's quicker acting or it is quicker to break down than what we thought. So micellar casein and calcium caseinate are both what we call slow release proteins. So hence why the, before bed.
Christine Envall:
I personally don't believe that you should be taking just that type of protein before bed, because what do you do for the eight hours until it really hits your system? To me, something like our Synergy, which has a mixture of fast, medium, slow-release is much better because you're starting to get it from pretty much when you go to sleep all throughout the night and then also in the morning when you wake up. Whereas if something's very slow, you're pretty much taking it before you go to bed, but just sleeping all night with it not really getting into your system.
Christine Envall:
So that's just my thoughts on protein timing and that type of thing. But we now obviously have more focus on hydrolyzed protein. So now with hydrolyzed, again, that's just basically an enzyme goes into the mixture of all the protein and it basically cleaves the natural bonds, which that enzyme is designed to cleave. So it doesn't leave every single bond, it leaves specific ones.
Christine Envall:
So they obviously select the enzyme for the protein type to do what they need it to do. But you can do that to any protein type. So, you can do that to a casein and you can make it very quickly absorbed. So casein point, obviously International Protein's amino recovery has a hydrolyzed casein as its main ingredient. So about six grams of the protein in that is all coming from hydrolyzed casein.
Christine Envall:
So it's taken the amino acid profile of existing casein, which is actually really great for recovery, which is why it was always such a shame that it was in a slow-release protein because it has a really great arginine content, it has a really great glutamine content, but they weren't accessible by the body rapidly when they were needed straight after training. And that's why the hydrolyzed casein is such a wonderful product for recovery is because it's got a great amino acid profile for that. But now it gets in really quickly.
Christine Envall:
It gets in virtually, instantly because of the degree of hydrolysis, so how much of that casein's being hydrolyzed is also very high. It's over about 60%. Now, people will hear some things are 100% hydrolyzed and think, oh my God, that means the whole thing is hydrolyzed. What that actually means is that, you know how I talked about the enzyme is designed to cleave specific bonds?
Ash Horton:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Christine Envall:
It means that that enzyme has cleaved all of the bonds that it could leave, but it doesn't mean to say that, that's 100% of the protein, so you can still have a 5% hydrolyzed product, but that 5% is a 100% of what that enzyme was designed to hydrolyze.
Ash Horton:
So, its marketing again.
Christine Envall:
It's marketing again, 100% because if anyone has ever tried 100%, something which is very high degree of hydrolysis is so bitter, it's no better it's palatable and people generally can't take those kinds of products. So, obviously, it's a compromise between functionality and accessibility, palatability.
Christine Envall:
So something like the hydrolyzed casein, which is a very high degree of hydrolysis, so 60% of that protein literally, physically 60% of it has been broken up into di and tripeptides. So it's very rapidly absorbed, probably more than any other hydrolyzed protein on the market that I've come across. Most of them sit around that sort of five, maybe up to about 25% in actual physical, by weight how much is being hydrolyzed, even if it says 100% on the thing.
Christine Envall:
So we now have a situation where you can have hydrolyzed whey protein isolate and a hydrolyzed casein. So both are now very rapidly absorbed because that's basically anything that's hydrolyzed is rapidly absorbed. And I'm not sure if we mentioned it before, but also now there's hydrolyze plant proteins, which is awesome because plant proteins are what we call a medium digestion protein.
Christine Envall:
So where the casein's very slow, it's funneling in a way, because of the structure and casein very different, the whey naturally being very quickly absorbed and the casein very slow, it seems like most of the plant proteins and mediums, whether it's pea, whether it's soy, whether it's rice, whether it's coming from what's some of the new ones that are coming out, some of the bean type products that are coming out, hemp, all that, all very much a four hour digestion time.
Christine Envall:
So to be able to hydrolyze those and give you the great benefits of a plant protein, but in a hydrolyzed form is pretty exciting. So that's in the plant power, International Protein plant power that should be out by end of July id not before.
Ash Horton:
And you actually recommended that as a really good bedtime project, correct? Evening protein?
Christine Envall:
Yeah, well, something which has got a blend of fast, medium, and slow. So something like that would be fine. Also, our Synergy would be fine because we built that in, in terms of putting hydrolyzed whey, whey isolate, whey concentrate, egg albumin, which also falls into the medium. So egg and plant proteins are roughly about the same in terms of digestion.
Christine Envall:
People think egg white is really quick to digest because of how it kind of doesn't really make you ... It makes you hungry really quickly if you're just eating egg white, for some reason. I think because it has nothing else with it, there are no carbs really to speak of, there's no fats or anything like that. And it just seems to vanish from your stomach, but it actually is still quite slow to break down through the digestive system, which is quite interesting.
Christine Envall:
So, we built a product that naturally had that stream of all the different breakdown speeds of proteins. So not only did you have the different amino acid profiles from each product. So some have got, as I said, higher arginine, glutamine, in other ones, a higher branch chain. So you've got a whole range of different amino acid profiles coming in to compliment each other. And then you also have a whole range of different speeds of digestion.
Christine Envall:
So, you constantly have that influx of amino acids coming into the bloodstream to keep you in a positive nitrogen balance, which is very important for muscle growth. In summing it up, we have the quick-acting, so hydrolyzed proteins are pretty much digested straight away, they were pre-digested basically, that's what hydrolyzed means. So they absorb literally within that one to five minutes through the 15-minute mark, they're pretty much where they're supposed to be up and into your bloodstream.
Christine Envall:
Then you have your isolate, which is about that 10, 15 minutes to half an hour. And then you have your whey protein concentrates, which are about half an hour to two hours. And then you have all your plant proteins and your egg albumin, which is about up to your four hours. And then you have your caseins and whether it be calcium caseinate or micellar casein, so while my micellar is still in a natty form and calcium caseinate has been chemically modified and bonded with calcium, it also can be bonded with sodium or potassium, but they're not ... Well, sorry, the sodium version is commonly used in beverage whitener.
Christine Envall:
So when people see a non-dairy creamer, it's actually on sodium caseinate normally. So it is on dairy, but it's not coming from dairy fat if that makes sense. Another marketing point. It might be vegetable oil with sodium caseinate, but that basically has a certain property. And that's why that sodium caseinate's used. Whereas in nutritional supplements, it's generally not used because of the sodium content is very high and the calcium is way more desirable and the texture that it has in products.
Christine Envall:
So either of those two products is about an up to eight hour breakdown period. There is no difference. I actually had the question come up years ago. So I actually emailed one of the dairy companies in France that specialized in caseins and asked them that question. And they said, "No, they had done research in house and that they were actually the same digestion rate.”
Christine Envall:
So as I said, nothing's really changed over the last 10 years in the fact that they haven't suddenly discovered that they were wrong and they digest at different rates, that all still holds true, but there's now more access to hydrolyzed forms of protein. So you get that really rapid uptake with a variety of the different amino acid profiles. So, that's essentially that, Pete.
Ash Horton:
Well, I just want to say thank you to our listeners Wym and Pete for asking those questions on our Aussie Muscle Guru Facebook page. So if anybody else wants to get involved, feel free, jump on and join the group and fire away your questions. We do give random giveaways to people that are asking these questions as well. So Christine, thank you very much.
Christine Envall:
Thanks Ash.
Ash Horton:
Words of wisdom. If you like, what you've heard recognize that these tips are free. So show your support by becoming a loyal International Protein customer by jumping online, hunt our product down and hit that buy now button. So once again, like, share and subscribe to our podcast so we can continue to bring you these episodes from our one and only Aussie muscle guru, three times world champion, Christine Envall.
for the best creatine available - visit
https://www.international-protein.com/product/kre-alkalyn/