Creatine

Not essential, but vegans start lower — and respond more when they take it.

• Supplement: rarely needed
• Last checked: Oct 2026

Creatine is different from the other nutrients here: you don’t need to think about it. But it is worth knowing about, because vegans may be the people it helps most.

What it is

Creatine helps your muscles and your brain store energy they can use quickly — for a sprint, a heavy lift, or hard thinking. It isn’t a vitamin: your body makes it itself, mainly in the liver and kidneys, from three amino acids (arginine, glycine and methionine).

Do vegans need it?

Not strictly. An adult needs about 2 g of creatine a day. A diet with meat or fish can provide up to half of that; the body makes the rest. Creatine is only found in animal foods, so vegans get none from food and make all of it themselves — and healthy people can make enough for normal function.

What does change is the level you run at: creatine in the blood and muscles is usually somewhat lower in vegetarians than in meat-eaters.

Why some vegans take it anyway

Because levels start lower, vegetarians tend to get more out of creatine than meat-eaters do.

• Training: in an 8-week weight-training study, vegetarians who took creatine gained more muscle creatine, more lean tissue and more total work capacity than meat-eaters who took it.
• Thinking: a review of six trials (281 people) found that creatine may improve short-term memory and reasoning, and that vegetarians responded better than meat-eaters in memory tasks. The evidence is still small, so treat this as promising, not proven.

Is it safe?

For healthy people, yes: short- and long-term use has been found safe and well tolerated, in studies up to years long. If you have kidney disease, talk to your doctor before taking it.

If you want to take it

• Form: creatine monohydrate — the most studied and most effective form.
• Dose: about 3–5 g a day keeps your stores topped up.
• Check the label: powder is simplest; some capsules are made of gelatin.

If you don’t train hard and aren’t curious about it, you can skip creatine entirely. Nothing goes wrong without it.

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