I am delighted to have Scott Emmens and Kara Lazauskas joining me on the podcast today! Scott is the President of MD Logic, and Kara is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist with a graduate degree in Molecular Muscle Exercise Physiology and a background in Sports Medicine.
Scott’s fascination with fitness began when he was sixteen. He had asthma, and it confused him to see kids more out of shape than he was performing better than him. So he started working out. When he went to college, he developed an obsession with how the human body worked and became an amateur bodybuilder.
Kara is a total badass! Even though she lost her left lung to a benign tumor when she was just three-and-a-half years old, she became a Titan Games competitor. She is also an MMA fighter.
In this episode, Kara, Scott, and I dive into supplements in the sports and performance fields, the rigors of the FDA GMP (Good Manufacturing Process), and the need for quality supplementation. We discuss the value of Creatine Monohydrate, its benefits, some common misconceptions, and age-related changes that impact metabolic health. We discuss how brain metabolism can be supported with Creatine, gender-related differences, how estrogen influences Creatine, and how Creatine can be helpful in reducing the risk of depression and influencing BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor). We also get into the unmatched safety and security standards of MD Logic, my reasons for aligning with them in creating Creatine Monohydrate, and some upcoming discounts for Creatine and melatonin during the holidays.
I sincerely hope you will enjoy listening to today's conversation as much as I did recording it!
IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:
How Kara got to where she is today.
How Scott got into using Creatine to biohack his fitness and health and started MD Logic.
Scott shares some of his concerns about the supplement industry.
Why is Creatine Monohydrate such an important supplement for muscle and brain health?
The benefits of taking a daily dose of Creatine Monohydrate.
How Creatine helps us have better quality sleep and perform better on lower energy.
Why do we need to actively support our musculature throughout our lifetime?
How Creatine helps to prevent sarcopenia and dementia as we age.
How not supplementing with Creatine can impact mood disorders in women.
How Creatine assists in reducing the risk of depression and influencing BDNF.
How being physically active improves brain health and insulin sensitivity and contributes to metabolic health.
What makes the Creatine Monohydrate created through MD Logic different and unique?
"A brain is a powerful tool and the placebo effect is really real."
-Kara Lazauskas
Connect with Cynthia Thurlow
Connect with Scott Emmens on LinkedIn
Connect with Kara Lazauskas on LinkedIn
Transcript:
Cynthia Thurlow: Welcome to Everyday Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, Nurse Practitioner Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower, and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent are to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives.
Today is a very special podcast. I am joined by Scott Emmens who is the President of MD Logic and also Kara Lazauskas. She is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist and has a graduate degree in Molecular Muscle Exercise Physiology with a background in sports medicine. Today, we dove deep into information surrounding supplements in the sports and performance fields. We talked about the rigors of the FDA, GMP, and the need for quality when we're looking at supplementation. We spoke at great length about the value of creatine monohydrate, the benefits, common misconceptions, and age-related changes that impact metabolic health, specifically skeletal muscle, and the "Metabolic sink."
We reviewed how brain metabolism can be supported with the utilization of creatine, especially in stages of sleep impacting memory, cognition, and attention as well as the synthesis of neurotransmitters. We spoke about gender-related differences, specifically about women in their menstrual cycle, perimenopause, and menopause, and how estrogen influences creatine and creatine kinase. The impact of depression rates which are higher in women and how creatine can beneficial in reducing our risk for depression as well as influencing BDNF which is brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is essentially fertilizer for neurons in our brains. We spoke about dosing, the reasons why I decided to align with MD Logic in creating creatine monohydrate, and how their safety and security standards are unmatched.
We also spoke about some upcoming discounts on creatine, holiday dates including creatine monohydrate going on sale for 20% off from December 22 to January 5 and also upcoming discounts on melatonin, which is my favorite form of melatonin that MD Logic makes. I hope you will enjoy this conversation as much as I did recording it. I facilitated a lot of the questions that I've been receiving across social media, and if you like and enjoy this podcast, please help me obtain more reviews. These really do help exposing the podcast to more people. Nearly every single day across social media I have people reaching out, telling me how much this podcast has helped them, help their loved ones, their friends, their family. Please leave a rating and review on iTunes. If you're able to do so, I will endeavor to be so very grateful. Enjoy the podcast.
Welcome, Kara. Welcome, Scott. It's so good to have you on the podcast today.
Scott Emmens: Thank you. My pleasure to be here.
Kara Lazauskas: Thank you.
Cynthia Thurlow: Absolutely. Let's start the conversation. Obviously, in the podcast intro, I provided listeners with a little bit of perspective about your backgrounds. Kara, why don't you start just explaining your experience in metabolic health, muscle physiology, physical training and for full transparency, Kara is a complete badass. She is a former Titan Games competitor. She's an MMA fighter. I've met her in person. She is the real deal. I'd love for you to share a bit about your background and then we'll kind of introduce Scott.
Kara Lazauskas: Of course. Really how it started was I always say I was probably meant to be in the sports performance beside of scientific medicine or sports medicine, and just the difference between clientele athletes, practitioner, and scientist, researcher and kind of melding those together. Because at the age of 3.5, I lost my left lung to a benign, but to a tumor that covered 75% of my left lung. At a very young age, I was always very into the why. Why did this mass grow? Why did I have five knee surgeries that kind of took away my basketball career in early age and what happened and progressed from there is then going to grad school under Dr. Andy Galpin and doing muscle biopsy research where he performed one of the first studies on male and female athletes looking through HIIT exercise and nutrient signaling throughout the course of core biopsies and proceeded to get my master's in molecular muscle exercise physiology. From there, it started off with selfish reasons as, "Why are these things happening to my body? Why am I not getting to the next level in sports?", to this huge interest of, "Well, now how can I serve others? How can we take science to another level? How can we take the human experience to another level?"
Cynthia Thurlow: Well, and I think it's really emerging research. I think there's now a great amount of technology that allows us to better understand the human body, better understanding differences between men and women, et cetera. We also have Scott on board and Scott is the COO of MD Logic. I decided to work directly with Scott and his team to help formulate my creatine supplement. So welcome, Scott. I would love for you to talk a little bit about your background as well.
Scott Emmens: Thank you, Cynthia. Kara, pleasure to meet you here on the podcast today. My fascination with fitness started probably when I was 16. I couldn't understand. I had asthma as a kid. I still have asthma, but I would call it under control. I'd see these other kids more out of shape than me, always able to perform. I was confusing. I started kind of working out around that age, which most boys trying to get into manhood, they start working out and hitting the gym and I did okay. Things went well, went to college, and that's when I became obsessed with biology and physiology, became a major in biology, and really started to understand how the human body worked and became an amateur bodybuilder in college. That was my first exposure to creatine amongst many other supplements that came and went. Some are no longer even available on the market.
As a bodybuilder in the natural world, I was competing against folks that were doing performance-enhancing drugs, which is pretty tough to compete against. I really had to work on "What is the way that I can recover faster, what is the way that I can do exercises better, what are the nutrients I can take that will at least give me a shot?" That was my first sort of biohacking. That was before biohacking was a thing, but that was my biohacking into how to become fit and really healthy. I started also applying that to my overall health and my friend's health, and it just kept progressing. When I graduated from college, I had this biology degree, I was into this natural world, and I stumbled into pharmaceutical sales and just worked my way up based on my passion for science, passion for helping people, and ultimately became an executive in a number of biotech companies, then created my own biotech company, and then in 2020 decided I really want to get back to my roots, which is wellness and health. I thought, if I can bring the pharmaceutical rigor of, quality products with education to the public that's the passion and that's why I started MD Logic.
Cynthia Thurlow: Yeah, I'm so very grateful that our paths crossed. Maybe for the benefits of listeners who may not be familiarized with kind of the standard process with supplements. They're not regulated by any agencies. Ergogenic aids, which are supplements are not regulated. What are some of the concerns that you saw about the supplement industry, vis-à-vis your own experiences within the pharmaceutical agency as a prior bodybuilder and then as the head of MD Logic.
Scott Emmens: So, early in life as we all are, I was a little naive, so I assumed it was on the market and on the shelf, it was safe, it was tested, it was clean, it was pure and it was safe. Well, that's not necessarily true and that applies to pharmaceuticals as well. Pharmaceutical companies are also under what's called GMP. I do want to dispel the myth that supplements are not regulated by anybody. Actually, they're regulated by two bodies. They're regulated by the FDA in terms of quality and GMP which stands for Good Manufacturing Process. They're also regulated by the FTC, which is more about the marketing aspect, how people market their products. Oftentimes people get in trouble for, like, miracle cure, cures this. You can't make any claim at all about the prevention or curing of any kind of disease. So that's where people get in trouble. Where I really started to see this delineation as I dug deeper, even in pharma, you'll get what's called-- I want to say it's a 43 or 403, if I'm getting that number wrong, forgive me, but that's a warning letter that they come into your factory as the pharmaceutical industry and they'll say, we found this excrement in your product, or this didn't meet specs, or your people are not trained on the standard operating procedure for how to navigate this particular issue. You failed in these three areas and the plan won't necessarily be closed unless it's an egregious issue.
They'll give you 15 days to answer and then a certain number of days to respond and correct that. That applies both in the pharmaceutical world and in the GMP supplement world. If you're a GMP facility, you are held standard to the FDA, to the same standard that the pharmaceutical companies are. The problem is that these minimum standards sometimes don't really allow to ensure that the product that they say you're getting ends up being correct. Let me give you a quick example if I may. For example, one of the sort of, I will call it a loophole, for lack of a better word and it might not be the best word, but I'm going to read directly from FDA's site. Here's what they define as a quality GMP supplement and that is "The SGMP rule defines quality to mean that the dietary supplement consistently meets and establishes specifications for identity, purity, strength and composition and limits on contaminants, and has been manufactured, packaged, labeled, and held under conditions to prevent alteration under Federal Sections 402(a) 1, 2, 3, and a4 yada yada."
What that's basically saying is you got to have those four things tested on the final product, not the ingredient beforehand, but the final product. It has to be manufactured and packaged and labeled under conditions that prevent adulteration. That's where you can get into trouble because you can label and package it and then stash it. It's not off the ground. It's supposed to be elevated off the ground so that if water seeps in, it doesn't get infected, rodents can't eat a little hole in your package and leave excrement which does happen. There are warning letters you can look up online. Those are the kinds of things that it can occur. Also, if you have skipped that step that I had mentioned earlier, I hope I'm not coming off if I'm going too long here, Cynthia.
Also, the thing that there is another loophole that I discovered is if you decide and this is what it says directly from the FDA, if I rely on the certificate of analysis, which is basically you're certifying that this product meets the identity and the identity only for the ingredient, not the other things I mentioned. If you're relying on that identity certification from the supplier, what do you need to do? It says basically, " establish reliability with a certificate, make sure it complies with the FDA etc., etc." However, let's say that a year ago that certificate on the identity. If you as the manufacturer haven't tested that product for identity, you've now put an ingredient into your product that you haven't personally tested. The other thing is does that qualify as third party? Because you see a lot of this third-party lab testing. Well, if you're using a certificate of analysis from the company that sent the ingredient, some people could say, well, is that third party? All these words get massaged into the lingo and that's where I found these loopholes and I thought we can do a lot better than hence why we started MD Logic.
Cynthia Thurlow: It makes a lot of sense for people to understand that this is why it's important to buy high-quality supplements. I typically recommend that people not buy all of their supplements off of Amazon. A lot of pharmaceutical grade companies don't allow their products to be a third-party source, meaning they don't allow their products to be sold on websites like that. That's not to suggest that one or two of your supplements if they come off of Amazon, they may indeed be fine. Really understanding that the buyer beware that doing your due diligence really makes a big difference. This degree of clarity and purpose is one of the reasons why I decided to work directly with you all. I think many of my listeners know I've had supplements that have been white labeled, meaning another company produced the supplement and I just put my personal labeling on it and I wanted to pivot and move in a direction where I could create exactly what I wanted, the way I wanted. Let's start talking about working together, talking about creatine and that's actually why we also have Kara is our creatine expert that's on the call, but talking about creatine and why it's so important and why this is not the creatine that maybe you heard about back in the 1970s and the 1980s where people were using massive amounts of creatine in conjunction with anabolic steroids. This is actually a very safe supplement. It's a very well-researched supplement, and it's the first supplement I decided to go with because there's such solid research in terms of looking at muscle and brain health in particular.
Scott Emmens: Well, Cynthia, I would first say let's be specific about the form of creatine. We specifically chose creatine monohydrate, the reason we specifically chose that form. Now you'll see a number of different forms of creatine and the jury is out there, maybe some of those creatines may have some validity in the marketplace, but all of the research that you're talking about that's happened since the 80's to know 90% of that research may be higher than that is on creatine monohydrate. We attribute these benefits or these ways that it supports the body's strength and cognition and muscle endurance and other things that it does, it is from the studies on creatine monohydrate. I wanted to emphasize that first because that is important. Choosing creatine monohydrate as the first is fantastic. I have direct experience with the creatine world of the past and it was like 20 g a day for the first 15 days.
I can tell you that 20 g a day is not an easy amount to digest. I was 190-pound 22-year-old weightlifting fiend at that point and it was still tough to suck down 20 g of creatine, which they call a loading dose. Well, subsequent research and a few decades later we've discovered you don't need to do that massive loading dose. You can get a lot of the benefits of creatine by gradually increasing your stores, which we know, I think it's 66% of all creatine is stored in your muscle and so you don't need to do that. The other issue is the negative ones and I'm sure Kara can speak to this as well. There were a lot of people doing either steroids or Ephedra, which is a stimulant, which was all like on a label at the time, other stimulants and other things that could harm your kidneys, along with these massive doses of protein and massive doses of creatine.
Creatine kind of got lumped into this category of, "Oh, it might be bad for your kidneys," but it's not. All of the data reveals that if you use creatine in moderation, which we think is somewhere between, let's call it 3 and I would give them say 10 g a day based on the literature I've read, is relatively safe. If you're talking about 10 g every day and then you're adding other things to it, well, then you have to be cautious. Really, I think a lot of the negative publicity that came out of creatine was because people were using it in these massive doses with other massive doses of protein and other substances. I'll pass the baton to Kara to get her perspective on that.
Kara Lazauskas: Also, one thing to clarify is why were people feeling or lumping creatine monohydrate with the steroid use, with the protein usage and getting these effects that they were alluding to the creatine monohydrate? Well, let's break down the word monohydrate. It's a hydrate. You're going to hold water, so you exceed these doses, which we know 2 to 3 g a day even, [unintelligible [00:17:06] health benefits alone is worth it because we're going to be losing these stores anyway. We have to constantly build them back up in a daily fashion. Even if it's as low as a dose as 2 to 3 g a day, you're still going to see that benefit over time. It takes about 30 days over, then a couple of months over a few years, you're now going to not only have the muscle benefit, but then your brain tissue is now going to be at a better level than everyone else's.
It doesn't have to be this loading phase for that week because you are going to get that water bloat, you are going to get that water retention and you're not going to feel so hot. Which is where some of the negative connotations started with creatine monohydrates. They're forgetting it is still a hydrate. You're still going to hold water if you're going to load in that high of a dosage, which, like Scott was saying back in the day, everyone was doing the 20 g. Everyone was saying, "Oh, you have to load, oh, you have to take and then you dial back down to 5 to 7 g. We know we don't have to be anywhere near that to get the same benefits. As long as you're consistent in habit of that almost a micro dose daily, which is a whole other hot topic word is the micro-dosing. You can also do that with creatine in a very safe manner, especially because it is like we've been saying, the safest, the number one supplement even in the exercise physiology community and the most studied out there. Any scientist, any researcher in exercise physiology, in muscle physiology, and sports performance ask any of them what are three supplements every athlete should take, the first thing they always say is creatine monohydrate.
They'll go down the line and some people vary with fish oils or vitamin Cs. The first thing down the line with some of the best researchers in the world, it's always creatine monohydrate, the first thing they say. The formula used to be and it still is true to this day, where kind of the 20 g came into play is what used to be said and still some athletes will do this is 0.3 g/kg of body weight daily. If I'm a 180-pound female, which I'm about 150, but I'm going to say 180 pounds, that's 25 g a day I'm taking the creatine. That's a lot for anybody to handle without having a nice amount of water retention. Just be aware that you don't have to go with that 0.3 g/kg of body weight daily as long as you're taking those 2 to 3 g daily and doing it consistently over time, you're going to have the same benefits you're going to have without the water retention.
Cynthia Thurlow: I think for many women the water retention is a particularly unappealing side effect, especially for women that are still cycling and maybe as they're heading into their luteal phase, they're having more bloating, they're having more water retention even as an aside. It's so interesting to me that this has been a supplement that's been so well embraced in the performance and muscle health industry. Yet, as a licensed healthcare provider, I feel like, in many ways, it's like a whole new world for me because I had these prejudicial perspectives because of what I had heard from colleagues of mine from years ago. It's really not rooted in science. The science suggests otherwise. Maybe we can start the conversation talking about some of the benefits of creatine. Obviously, with my product, the two that were most important to me, at least initially, were muscle health and also brain and cognition. I think many individuals irrespective of where they are in their life stage, maybe they're thinking more about their muscles when they're younger. We should all be thinking about our muscle and brain health throughout our lifetime, not just when we hit middle age and all of a sudden, we're like, oh, the issues surrounding sarcopenia become a larger problem.
Kara Lazauskas: And also, another great benefit of creatine, which a lot of people always are surprised and tend to forget, is sleep deprivation. If you're having a daily dose in those, we just alluded to prior. If you have one of those nights, say you're studying up all night or when you have one of those nights if you're taking a daily dose, it helps actually with sleep deprivation. It helps keep your brain at a healthy level when you're at an unhealthy level of sleep. As long as we're taking it daily, just like anything, just like any vitamin or supplement, if it's the right one and it's produced and manufactured the right way, as were speaking to earlier, it's going to be the benefits almost tenfold. The fact that you can go on 5 hours of sleep and then take some-- I mean, it's pretty crazy to think something so safe and so fairly inexpensive can have that wide spectrum of benefits.
Cynthia Thurlow: Well, and it's interesting that one of the first testimonials that we received was a woman who's been struggling, a middle-aged woman struggling with sleep. She said within two days of taking our creatine monohydrate, she slept through the night without any other changes. She said, I just kind of went into this blindly thinking, great, it'll be better for my brain and muscle health. I had no idea that the sleep would improve substantially. For anyone who's out there who's north of like 35 or 40, you have a good night of sleep. That means a whole lot. That's a huge metric to have met. To me, that was incredibly gratifying. We've got a lot of other feedback. Scott, what are your thoughts on the use of creatine for sleep support? Have you seen any good research that has swayed you in that direction as well?
Scott Emmens: There are two points. First of all, yes, I have seen some significant research on sleep and I can tell you I've been taking between 3 and 6 g a day and sometimes I'll take more because I'm 185-pound man. I think for women that's what makes your creatine so great is does flexibility where you can get 3 g a day, which is like just what you need to keep yourself constantly kind of either growing a little bit or if you have a deficit. But yes, so sleep, I think is important, but what Kara mentioned I think is equally as important. Let's say for whatever reason you still don't get that great night of sleep. You got a huge presentation in the morning and you're nervous and you're anxious and I know what that's like as a busy executive on the run, I had been doing dozens of things. I'm sure Cynthia, you know what it's like and Kara, I'm sure you know what that's like. You wake up at 3:00 AM, you fall asleep and you've got to be up at 6 00 AM and you're like "Oh my God, now I have to go to a presentation in front of a thousand people," and your brain isn't quite there. Creatine has and I just recently noticed this because I had stopped taking it for a long time. My brain can function on 6 hours of sleep, whereas before no way. I think that's in large part due and Kara, correct me if you think something different, but in large part due to the fact that creatine gives your brain the ATP it needs and kind of gives it the resuscitation to say "Hey, we can power through this. I know you're a little tired today, but you can power through this." Not only does creatine help you have better quality of sleep, it also, if you don't, allows you to perform better on lower energy. One of the things I think the verbiage in the literature I read was something focused under sleep deprivation or something to that effect. That was really surprising to me because there are not many supplements that can do that and even caffeine can just make you a little bit jittery, but not necessarily on your game. Whereas I found creatine puts me on my game mentally.
Cynthia Thurlow: I think it's really important. It's interesting. On Tuesday evening I participated in the Influencer's Dinner at John Levy's house which was a wonderful experience and I was up late, I had to take a 05:00 AM cab to get to Newark to get on an airplane to come home. I had a total of 4 hours of sleep and I functioned really well all day until I went to bed. And so, I credit the creatine piece. What's interesting was when I was looking at the research, we know that creatine helps support stages of sleep and greater neuronal ATP resynthesis. It impacts memory and cognition and also attention and it's also involved in neurotransmitters. Sometimes when I'm sleep deprived prior to taking creatine, I would sometimes almost get this anxious feeling and it was because my body was feeling overly tired much like kids do when they're overly tired. It's interesting there's a positive relationship between creatine levels and cerebral spinal fluid in the brain and dopamine and serotonin metabolites. It's certainly very consistent with not just cognition but also with energy. Lastly with the impact on neurotransmitter production which I think is really significant.
Kara Lazauskas: One of my favorite analogies is I like to think of creatine monohydrate as the vitamin IV or the NAD that no one's purchasing and no one's taking. Everyone wants to spend the $500 on vitamin IV at the local health injection or wellness center when you spend the 15, 20 bucks on creatine and you're going to get the same benefits, but everyone's just sweeping it under the rug because of the fancy store down the street with the IVs.
Scott Emmens: I think that's a great point, Kara. I think if we boil this down to a couple of things. Really everything that requires energy, everything. Your muscles require energy, your immune system requires energy, even the creation of your neurotransmitters requires energy. If you don't have enough ATP to create that energy, you're going to have all these deficiencies across everything that requires energy. I mean life boils down to energy. I can't remember which podcast I was listening to, but it had some really remarkable data in it. I think the title or the gist of it was it's not just muscle endurance energy support, it's a brain and cognition endurance supplement. That kind of hit me like wow and it all comes down to mitochondria and energy. You got a lot of mitochondria in your brain, you got a lot of mitochondria in other parts of your body, your heart, your brain, your muscles, obviously.
I do think that this is something that I really underestimated and I'm pretty excited about that because I feel like as you hit this age point, I'm 52, you do start drinking three cups of coffee a day. And I don't want to drink three cups of coffee a day. I'm down to one cup of coffee a day as long as it's got my creative monohydrate in it.
Cynthia Thurlow: That's a wonderful testimony to the net impact. Let's pivot a little bit and talk about metabolic health. I know this is an interest of Kara's and yours as well. What are some of the changes, Kara, that start happening in our muscles as we are getting older? I really want to dive into sarcopenia because I don't think I appreciated/valued the fact that I was hitting peak bone and muscle mass in my 20's and 30's until I got into my 40's and I learned otherwise about why I should have known even as a clinician we were not taught that, and now why I try so hard to make sure others understand the value of supporting muscle-protein synthesis, supporting musculature throughout our lifetime, and not just worrying about it because you're 45 and you realize all of a sudden your metabolic health is in the toilet.
Kara Lazauskas: Scale to muscle is a very amazing and vast metabolic sink. If we are not utilizing it in the right ways and utilizing it or we essentially stop training or stop supplementing with things like creatine. There is a situation where if you don't use it, you can lose it. It's going to be one heck of a ride trying to develop that back. There is a point in which as you age and as this sink essentially starts to get little bit smaller because we're not utilizing it, we're not supplementing it, our skeletal muscle essentially says, "Okay, you're not giving me anything to work with, you're not giving me anything to resist against. So, you know what? You're not going to give me something, I'm going to do nothing and if I have nothing to resist against, I have nothing to work against. I'm essentially going to be everything." Which is what we see in muscle fiber types at Cal State Fullerton, where we did the muscle biopsy research with Andy, that was one of the craziest things we saw with renal failure patients out of Stanford is to see their skeletal muscle after being bedridden and they're on their deathbed, they're in the last stages of their life, to see what happened to their muscle tissue, to see essentially their fiber type all over the place. It was everything. You can literally see into the gels what happens towards the end of like what happens when you do not actually supplement appropriately and give resistance to the muscle is it essentially just gives up completely and turns into almost a mush of everything. One of my favorite topics of conversation is "You have to go towards resistance or your body is going to resist you."
Cynthia Thurlow: It's an excellent point and it's interesting. In 2019, I was in the hospital for 13 days and I lost 15 pounds. My muscles were just catabolized. I left the hospital 15 pounds lighter because I was in bed for 13 days. I remember explaining to someone to lose that much muscle and my body did it because I was needing to lose that much muscle has taken years to get back to a point where I'm building muscle again. It's devastating to our bodies metabolically and otherwise. You lose insulin sensitivity when you are losing muscle mass. For many people they're like I don't understand why running, doing all these endurance sports as a 40 or 50 or 60-year-old person is no longer serving your metabolic needs. Like really making sure that you are doing some degree of strength training every week in the gym and eating enough protein and utilizing things like creatine. We had an amazing testimonial from Dr. Sandy. Dr. Sandy is not only a good friend, she's a clinical psychologist. She's 70 years old and she has been using creatine and loves this product. And she was leg pressing 300 pounds. Sandy is 90 pounds. She's this tiny itty-bitty person. It just goes to show you this is not just a product for younger people. This is a product that can be utilized throughout your lifetime with significant benefits.
Kara Lazauskas: I always think, ask anybody as they age, what's the one thing you're most nervous about besides losing muscle mass or getting fatter? Everyone says, just don't let me lose my mind. Just dementia is everyone's worst fear. How do you help prevent that? Creatine is actually one of the major ways besides resistance training and exercise for preventing that end-stage life, cognition loss.
Scott Emmens: Muscle is expensive. The body abuses muscle as an expensive asset to have to maintain. If you're not using it and you're not feeding it, what's the first thing your body is going to catabolize. It's going to eat your muscles, right, even before your fat because it saves the fat because that's cheap you already got it. Keeping this muscle is expensive for us, so let's eat that and that's why you lost so much weight Cynthia, your body said, well, she's not eating, she's not exercising. This is an expensive commodity. To your second point, Kara and I know you can relate to this as an avid bodybuilder in my 20s, if I took a month off, I'd lose 10 pounds then it would take me three months. It was like the law of one to three, three months to get it back, one month to lose it, and it was tough.
I had a personal experience with this. My dad was about 74. I had taken him to Lake George, put him on my uncle's boat, and were going out for boat rides, and he went to get out of the boat and onto the dock, and he literally couldn't get himself up out of the boat. I sat down with him, and I had a really heart-to-heart conversation explaining to dad, this is step one of you ending up in the nursing home. You can't step up and get out of this boat and onto the dock on your own with your leg quad and these are his quads. These are some of the strongest muscles in your body. You're a couple of years away from being in a nursing home and I know you don't want that. Well, he took that to heart and I sent him a bunch of supplements and he started taking them, hit the StairMaster in the gym, and started doing some light, nothing crazy. Now he's walking 5 miles a day. He looks fantastic. He can get up and move. He's 78, so he's four years older, and he looks ten years younger than he did when he was 74. It's really been a transformation. I had a personal experience of that. I don't think people realize just how serious sarcopenia is. When you're losing your muscle and your strength that is one of the first determinations that your longevity and health span is waning. There's a multitude of studies on grip strength and quad strength that prove that out.
Cynthia Thurlow: It's interesting how many patients I took care of in the hospital when I would round and they would be 50 years old and they could not get from their bed to the bedside commode and get off the commode because their quadricep muscles were so weak. And we would be rounding quickly. I would always identify these are the types of patients I'm most concerned about because if you can't get off the toilet at 50, that is not setting you up well for longevity. The other thing that I think is really interesting is that now that I fully understand and appreciate the progression of sarcopenia that really accelerates after the age of 40, unless you're working against it, is how many women in particular I see that are just skinny, but they're so sarcopenic like, they have no musculature. They're just so thin and a lot of that is a byproduct of the fact that they've lost all this muscle. I always use the example because I love analogies that young muscle is a filet, it's mostly muscle. You look at a ribeye, although delicious, we don't want to become the ribeye. That is when we have all this marbling and this adipose tissue, which is highly inflammatory and full of cytokines, and just really understanding that is what happens as a byproduct of aging if you don't work against it. Kara, I'm sure for you in the lab you probably were seeing examples of this every day.
Kara Lazauskas: That was always the most interesting thing is the skinniest people we would do, the skinniest subjects we had are individuals or participants sometimes had the worst and the most unhealthy skeletal muscle and the most unhealthy tissue. Essentially, it's been shown time and time again in the research. We know we can't say anything as fact, but we know as well as we can that the longer you keep your two-way muscle fiber type or our fast twitch or our resistance training fiber, as I like to call it, we know the longer you live, it's just a fact. It's also the first thing to go when we become sedentary. It's the longer you keep it, the longer you're going to live. However, a lot of individuals and I always think about this when it comes to especially women, they get so nervous about getting bulky and this kind of ties both resistance training, skeletal health, and creatine. All of these things have been avoided over the last couple of decades particularly with women. Why? Because they are all associated with being bulky and not healthy, and not longevity, and not keeping you out of the hospital. It was flipped into the script of no, you'll look like a man, or all or no, which we know could not be farther from the truth. That myth is still-- Client the other day said that to me. Oh, isn't creatine a steroid?
Cynthia Thurlow: No, no.
[laughter]
Kara Lazauskas: I mean the fact that is still a topic of conversation and also that resistance training can make you bulky and flipping, changing the narrative to, hey, actually this is what keeps us out of the hospital. Actually, providing these things to your body is what helps the skeletal muscle, helps us metabolic sink operate and function at a high level. That's what it's all about.
Scott Emmens: I'm so shocked that there's still that.
Cynthia Thurlow: Yeah.
Scott Emmens: It could go as far as creatine a steroid, and even the hydration part, I mean, again, to your point, the bulk, if you're doing normal reasonable resistance training, I can assure you're not getting bulky. It takes an insane amount of really tough effort to put on a quarter of an inch on your bicep. So, let's put that in perspective. And I'm a guy, I've got a lot more testosterone than a woman, so I'm going to put on muscle mass easier. And that's hard for me, the other thing is, Kara, I wanted your perspective on, because earlier you mentioned and I just want to go back to this, the hydration and Cynthia, you mentioned a lot of women get concerned about bloat, but let's say even 3 to 5 g, I'm imagining most of the hydration is intercellular. It's not like you're hydrating and bloating, it's inside the muscle cell. So, you're not going to see that. It's actually just going to make you feel more fit in tone. Is that an accurate statement?
Kara Lazauskas: Oh, of course. That's where the big myth comes into play, is I think the mind is a very powerful tool, correct, a lot of us-- The placebo effect is quite real. When a lot of people, even though the dose they're taking is intracellular and it's 3 to 5 g because they've been told, because they've had these myths fed to them for so many years or either have not done the research or lack of education or they've been told X, Y, Z things from someone else. The mind tells them, oh, something is happening more. The body kind of follows through a little bit. It always interests me when I have participants or clients or athletes or I'm like, no, your dose isn't even high enough for any of that to occur. A brain is a powerful tool and the placebo effect is really real. If you think that's happening, I'm telling you, it's not the creatine, it's not the resistance training. It's your mind that we need to focus on now. It's the myth in the lies you've been told, essentially. It's just rewording and getting the education, the information out there, the right information for people to understand what is actually happening in the human body and what is actually happening when we provide our body these things and not this woo-woo stuff that I still hear and still see in the magazines. I've still seen on blogs posted in 2022, women should just go for runs or they shouldn't resistance train. Or also the huge myth that women cannot gain the same skeletal muscle mass to men. In absolute terms, yes.
Scott Emmens: Relativity, right.
Kara Lazauskas: Yeah, we just start with less muscle mass. We only have two-thirds of the muscle mass in the upper body as men. Of course, relatively we have less to begin with though. Absolutely we can gain the same health benefits.