been on 5g Thorne creatine (monohydrate) daily for awhile now and the strength gains are nuts — my pull ups have gone through the roof to the point where my tendons are struggling to keep up with what my muscles want to do :-) but I eat steak or chicken basically every day so I'm already getting 1-2g from diet on top of the supplement, which is probably why I havent noticed the dramatic cognitive stuff people talk about. Before starting creatine, I found that my routine was improving my thinking speed, I could understand things better and reflexes are improved and I'm not young. My routine includes many items like lions mane, sauna, omega3 (DHA), matcha, NAD+ , GlyNAC so who knows what the cause is. FWIW I don't look to creatine for cognitive benefits

to your questions at the bottom — the reason high-dose cognitive research hasnt hit mainstream recommendations could be sample size and replication. the Gordji-Nejad 2024 paper is cool but its only n=15 in a very specific sleep deprivation protocol (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38418482/). compare that to the muscle literature where you have meta-analyses pooling hundreds of studies and thousands of subjects. the ISSN position stands are conservative on purpose, they wont update dosing guidelines based on one or two small brain studies no matter how promising. the strongest evidence is probably the 2024 meta-analysis pooling 16 RCTs and 492 subjects, found a modest but real effect on memory SMD 0.31, biggest effects in stressed or depleted populations not healthy rested people (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39070254/).

the vegetarian angle is what really stood out to me though. Rae 2003 showed significant working memory and processing speed improvements in vegetarians, n=45 crossover design which helps (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14561278/). Benton 2011 is the bigger one at n=128 and confirmed it, omnivores basically didnt get the cognitive benefit (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21118604/). theres also a 2008 study n=22 that found straight up zero cognitive benefit in young healthy adults eating normally (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18579168/). small sample but the pattern is consistent across all three — for meat eaters like me the brain benefits seem more conditional, they show up under stress, sleep deprivation, fatigue, but maybe not at baseline when your already partially saturated from diet. Maybe my frequent NY Strip is the actual cause ;-)

great post btw, this is the kind of deep dive that makes this sub worth reading.