Natural Foods Rich in Creatine for Muscle and Performance

When you started taking your mission to maximize your muscle growth seriously, it took you a little while to warm up to the idea of using supplements to increase your protein intake and creatine intake.

After a few months, you’re now operating like a true gym veteran, bringing your supplements to the gym with you, and carefully measuring out the required grams of creatine and high quality protein powder to meet your daily needs.

Of course, there’s always that person at the gym who sticks their nose into what you’re doing. Just as you finish scooping five grams of creatine monohydrate into your post-workout shake, your gym’s resident know-it-all spots you, and commences their usual routine of spouting criticism. “You don’t need to be taking creatine supplements; you’re wasting your money!” says this person whose volume of muscle mass is entirely too low to be saying anything at all. “Just get your creatine naturally like me! It works just as well!” As your gym nemesis turns and walks away, you stare at your stack of nutritional supplements as if you were seeing them again for the first time. You’d love to think that anything that guy says could be instantly discredited, but since you’ve never even thought about where creatine comes from before, you don’t know how to refute his statement. So are there foods high in creatine that you can use to boost your creatine intake? Also, can you get enough creatine from natural food sources that you can stop taking creatine supplements altogether? 

(Spoiler Alert: The answer is “No.”)

What is Creatine?

On a foundational level, creatine is a naturally occurring compound composed of three amino acids — glycine, arginine, and S-adenosyl methionine. When it enters your body, 95 percent of the creatine ends up stored in your skeletal muscle, while the remaining five percent is distributed in your blood and other tissues.

Creatine is not included on the list of essential nutrients, because it is not required for survival. Despite its amino acid composition, it is not composed of the amino acids needed to sustain life that can not be synthesized within the body, and must therefore be acquired from food.

Creatine is also not necessary on the same level as other essential nutrients, like the essential minerals, vitamins, fatty acids, and other nutrients required to maintain basic bodily processes like growth, regeneration, and reproduction.

Why is Creatine so Popular?

The broad popularity of creatine supplements — and creatine monohydrate in particular — is owed to the unmistakable benefits that creatine confers to overall health, and especially athletic performance. 

Creatine supplementation has been proven to accelerate muscle growth, accelerate muscle repair, ease recovery following intense exercise, and generally improve exercise performance regardless as to the type of exercise being performed.

Even if you don’t engage in creatine supplementation and rely solely on natural creatine sources, a certain minimum amount of creatine ingestion is advisable to maintain your muscles’ overall health. Otherwise, their functionality may be significantly compromised.

How Creatine Affects Muscle Function

Ingested creatine is stored in your muscle cells in the form of creatine phosphate, and it is directly connected to the creation of your adenosine triphosphate — or ATP — your body’s primary energy source for muscle activity, including muscle contraction and protein synthesis. During periods of intense exercise, your body burns through adenosine triphosphate very rapidly, and once its primary energy source is depleted, your body starts to search for other sources of energy. The first place your body turns in the phosphocreatine system, which is where it utilizes the creatine stored in your muscle cells to rapidly manufacture more energy. In this way, creatine acts as a buffer that eases the transition between your energy systems, and allows you to sustain intense exercise for longer durations.

How Creatine Helps Strength Training

One of creatine roles is to aid the contraction of muscles, and one of the times this is most evident is during strength training sessions. Studies indicate that creatine’s ability to deliver steady energy during muscle contractions enables people to lift greater amounts of weight for longer durations of time during resistance training workouts. In addition, creatine helps muscles to recover in the aftermath of workouts, enabling rapid recovery that prepares muscles for additional intense workouts more quickly.

How Creatine Helps Cardiovascular Performance

In instances where the quality of an athletic performance is in any way determined by cardiovascular health, creatine is able to extend the length of time during which the exertion feels relatively effortless. Creatine accomplishes this extension by delaying the transition from stored ATP and the phosphocreatine system to the aerobic system. Creatine has been proven in studies to be helpful in replenishing glycogen stores when taken along with carbohydrates, and accelerates the process of glycogen resynthesis. This helps to increase the time to exhaustion achieved by athletes during both high intensity exercise and endurance exercises. (1) Due to creatine’s ability to reduce the discomfort imposed on your body during cardiovascular activity — including aerobic activity that can last for hours at a time — this makes creatine an equally popular supplement for endurance athletes to utilize.

How Creatine Helps Brain Health

Creatine doesn’t only help with energy production in ways that can be physically observed. Studies indicate that creatine benefits extend to cognitive function as well. In multiple studies, creatine proved to be capable of improving the short-term memory and reasoning abilities of those who supplemented with it as opposed to those who didn’t. This indicates that sustaining adequate creatine intake can also play a major role in sustaining and improving your brain health.

How Creatine Helps Bone Health

There was once a widely held belief that taking creatine alone played a direct role in improving bone health much like it improves the health and productivity of muscle tissue; studies have since disproven this. (2) However, due to creatine’s ability to improve muscle output and recovery in relation to the intensity and volume of resistance training, studies have shown that taking creatine in tandem with strength training even in aging populations. (3)

Top Foods High in Creatine

If you don’t want to rely solely on creatine supplementation to reach your advisable creatine levels, there are several food sources — mostly animal based foods — that you can use to acquire natural creatine. By attempting to ingest creatine through natural sources, you can potentially chip away at the amount of creatine you would usually acquire through a creatine supplement, like creatine monohydrate or creatine ethyl ester.

Beef

If you’re hoping to achieve the best bang for your buck without relying on a creatine supplement, the first place you should turn is probably beef. On average, beef contains between 1.0 and 2.0 grams of creatine per pound. This makes beef the most abundant source of natural creatine that is both relatively inexpensive, and also widely available in the Western world.

Pork

If you have an aversion to red meat, pork is probably your next best bet if you’re hoping to acquire natural creatine from a farm-raised animal. Like beef, pork also contains 1.0 to 2.0 grams of creatine per pound, although it tends to skew lower than beef. On a per 100-gram basis, pork contains 0.7 grams of creatine per 100 grams, in comparison to beef’s 0.9 grams of creatine per 100 grams.

Chicken

While chicken may not be able to compete with beef and pork in a competition between quantities of natural creatine sourced from mammals, it is still superior to most other forms of food in terms of the level of creatine it confers upon its consumers. Most parts of a chicken will contain about 0.5 grams of creatine per pound. Combined with the other health benefits of chicken — like its relative inexpensiveness, and its high level of lean protein per serving — this can make chicken a valuable one-stop shop for finding natural forms of the supplements people frequently take to help increase lean muscle mass.

Fish (Salmon, Herring, Tuna)

If you’re a pescatarian, or you just have a fondness for fish, there are several fish sources that contain high levels of creatine. Salmon and herring both possess 0.9 grams of creatine per 100 grams, whereas tuna contains 0.4 grams of creatine per 100 grams. This ultimately means that you can consume quantities of creatine equivalent to those contained within beef, pork, and chicken solely through fish-based food sources.

Can I Get Natural Creatine From Vegan Food Sources?

While creatine is not available in high levels from plant-based foods or vegan foods vegan foods, it is possible to recreate natural creatine in a roundabout way by separately seeking out the individual amino acids required to synthesize creatine. The process of acquiring the specific amino acids to reconstitute creatine within your body can require you to seek out vegan food sources with high amino acid content, like nuts, seeds, and tofu.

How to Incorporate Creatine-Rich Foods Into Your Diet

The easiest way to incorporate creatine-rich foods in your diet is to spread them out over the course of your day, amongst a variety of meals and snacks. This can mean going out of your way to include meat sources in your three largest meals. What should not be overlooked, even amongst people who can consume meat, is the value of initiating creatine synthesis by consuming the right combination of amino acids. Creatine synthesis is the process by which your body creates creatine. Several foods contain the amino acids required for your body to generate creatine on its own, making it possible for you to take a roundabout approach to elevating your creatine levels through non-animal food sources.

Benefits of Getting Natural Creatine from Food

There are several benefits to getting natural creatine through food, beginning with the fact that focusing on food intake helps you to focus on the general healthfulness of your food choices. This includes paying attention to other aspects of overall dietary health, like making sure you’re getting adequate dietary fiber, along with lean protein sources, healthy fats, and complex carbohydrates. There is a chance that engaging in a healthy diet will mean that you don’t need to focus specifically on how much creatine you are ingesting from moment to moment for the sake of muscle health. Your strategy to consume a wide variety of healthy foods can enable you to sustain your creatine at normal healthy levels, albeit at a lower level than those attainable through supplementation.

Creatine Supplements vs. Natural Foods

There are several challenges involved with getting creatine solely through food sources without at least partially relying on dietary supplements, and one of those challenges is a matter of quantity. A single boneless chicken breast weighs one-third of a pound, which would mean that a person pursuing creatine ingestion exclusively through chicken meat would need to eat three chicken breasts each day to get within hailing distance of a single gram of natural creatine. Also, even when consuming 1.0 to 2.0 grams of natural creatine per day, the body’s creatine stores will typically achieve a peak level of 80 percent. Therefore, chasing maximum creatine levels without resorting to creatine supplementation can require you to eat constantly. Another downside to attempting to solely consume creatine through natural food sources is the amount of red meat required to achieve a supplemental number of grams of protein per day naturally. Red meat has been linked to diminished kidney function, kidney disease, elevated cancer risk, and a host of other problems. Broadly speaking, if you hope to maintain optimal kidney health, keeping your consumption of red meat within advisable levels is a requirement. This alone makes the pursuit of achieving a maintenance-dose level of grams of creatine per day very risky. In the long run, it can offset whatever health benefits are achieved by consuming large quantities of natural creatine sources for the sake of enhancing muscle growth.

FAQ About Foods High in Natural Creatine

According to the “International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: creatine supplementation and exercise,” creatine supplementation is capable of effectuating a wide range of physical benefits. (4) When it comes to the role of non-supplemental, natural creatine, the lines can become blurred with respect to the capability of that creatine to replicate what is possible through foods high in natural creatine as opposed to creatine in supplement form. As such, here is a brief FAQ that helps to provide a simple explanation for foods that are high in natural creatine and what they can potentially do for you.

How much natural creatine is in beef or fish?

The amount of natural creatine contained in beef or fish can vary by the type of fish or the cut of beef. However, at their peak, the amount of creatine available in both beef and fish can reach 2.0 grams of creatine per pound.

Can vegetarians get enough creatine from their diets?

It is possible for vegetarians to get enough creatine in their diets, but they need to adopt an approach that capitalizes on their body’s ability to synthesize protein out of amino acids that have been consumed from other foods. Specifically, vegetarians should consume foods that contain healthy quantities of glycine, arginine, and S-adenosyl methionine. That way, their bodies can create sufficient amounts of creatine from foods like peanuts, sunflower seeds, and almonds, which also double as sources of healthy fats.

Do I still need creatine supplements if I eat foods high in natural creatine?

This can be a tricky question to answer, but it can be simplified by your own answer to one question: What are your goals? Your  intention may be to ensure that your body has adequate creatine to maintain your creatine levels within a healthy range and guarantee that your overall health does not suffer due to an absence of creatine. If so, it is entirely possible for healthy adults to accomplish this through consuming natural creatine. On the other hand, if your objective is to increase muscle creatine stores to the utmost extent so that you can maximize muscle growth, optimize energy production, and boost your athletic performance to the greatest extent possible through non-controversial means, this is almost impossible to accomplish if you only consume creatine naturally.

Why would someone choose creatine supplements over creatine-rich foods?

The primary reason someone would choose creatine supplements over foods containing natural creatine is because creatine supplementation is the only way to guarantee that you receive the number of grams of protein per day necessary to saturate your skeletal muscles with ample creatine, and to preserve the elevated creatinine levels of your body. Again, because it is functionally impossible to complete a creatine loading phase through natural creatine alone, and still very difficult to ensure adequate creatine intake to a degree that it can consistently satisfy the daily maintenance requirement, many people only track their creatine supplementation for the sake of ensuring these needs are met.

Natural Creatine for Natural Creatine Levels

Let’s start with the bad news: You will not be able to achieve the same results solely through eating foods high in natural creatine that you can through creatine supplementation.  In terms of the dietary precision — and in several cases the expense of the food itself — consistent acquisition of large creatine doses through natural food consumption is simply not a practical solution to implement safely, and sustainably. However, there is value to maintaining the level of creatine in your skeletal muscle in the highest possible range even if you are not relying on supplements. It can also be useful to take a just-in-case approach during your maintenance phase, and try to ensure that you’re also getting creatine from food sources in addition to supplements.

References

1. Casey A, Greenhaff PL. Does dietary creatine supplementation play a role in skeletal muscle metabolism and performance? Am J Clin Nutr. 2000 Aug;72(2 Suppl):607S-17S. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/72.2.607S. PMID: 10919967.

2. Sales LP, Pinto AJ, Rodrigues SF, Alvarenga JC, Gonçalves N, Sampaio-Barros MM, Benatti FB, Gualano B, Rodrigues Pereira RM. Creatine Supplementation (3 g/d) and Bone Health in Older Women: A 2-Year, Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Trial. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2020 Apr 17;75(5):931-938. doi: 10.1093/gerona/glz162. PMID: 31257405.

3. Candow DG, Chilibeck PD, Gordon JJ, Kontulainen S. Efficacy of Creatine Supplementation and Resistance Training on Area and Density of Bone and Muscle in Older Adults. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2021 Nov 1;53(11):2388-2395. doi: 10.1249/MSS.0000000000002722. PMID: 34107512.

4. Buford TW, Kreider RB, Stout JR, Greenwood M, Campbell B, Spano M, Ziegenfuss T, Lopez H, Landis J, Antonio J. International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: creatine supplementation and exercise. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2007 Aug 30;4:6. doi: 10.1186/1550-2783-4-6. PMID: 17908288; PMCID: PMC2048496.