Creatine Science and Marketing: Children, Gummies, and Reproductive Health

In the final segment of this interview, Susan Kleiner, PhD, RD, FACN, CNS-E, FISSN, Founder of High-Performance Nutrition LLC, contrasts the robust evidence base for creatine monohydrate with the lack of clinically superior outcomes for newer creatine forms, challenging common marketing claims.

Dr. Kleiner raises concerns about gummy-based delivery, addresses research in children and active youth, and highlights emerging data on creatine’s role in fertility, pregnancy, labor, and neonatal development, emphasizing the need for better-designed, industry-supported studies to address these critical reproductive health gaps.

Partial transcript:

Sebastian Krawiec: Looking ahead, what priorities do you think researchers should set in terms of the populations they study, and the particular outcomes they explore in those studies?

Susan Kleiner: There's a lot of gap when it comes to studies on children where it's really hard to study children because parents don't want their kids to be guinea pigs, but I can tell you it is probably, as a sports nutritionist, right now it's the number one question, Should I be giving my kids creatine? And that's talking about active children. Should we be giving it to all children? Our diets are no, meat is getting very expensive, animal protein is getting very expensive. We're being led into in, very beneficially, a much more plant-based diet, but it means that creatine levels go down the less meat or or animal protein that you consume. And so that's a big area.

I would like better delivery systems. I get it that people want gummies, but I thought we've been trying to get people away from eating so much sweet stuff, and especially geared toward young people and children. I would love to have something that didn't so much resemble candy, even though I know candyceuticals is the big thing. If we want people to be using these every single day, what's happening is they're not just taking, oh, I use my creatine gummies, and then I take X, Y, and Z as a regular supplement, or I put it in my smoothie, or I take a capsule. They're taking five different gummy brands, and so they're just eating sweet stuff all day long. Well, maybe it doesn't have sugar, but it doesn't mean that it is good for behavior modification away from this high desire for extremely sweet foods all the time. So speaking as a dietitian, I like all the innovation into different delivery systems away from gummies.