May Hotline
Grape-Nuts vindication, seed oil myth-busting, and a creatine reality check
Hi readers! We put out a call for Hotline questions last week, and boy did you deliver — we got way more good ones than we can fit in a single newsletter. So we're going to take them in batches. In today's installment: a reader wants to know why the cereal aisle is still a nutritional wasteland, another asks whether seed oils truly cause inflammation (and what inflammation even…is?), and a third wonders whether it matters which brand of creatine you buy.
As a refresher, Hotline is a perk for paid subscribers. Got a question for us? Park it in the comments below, DM us on Substack, or send an email to consumednewsletter@gmail.com.
Here we go!
Creatine is a hot topic now, but it has been touted in fitness communities for decades. Is there a notable difference between quality/effectiveness by brands on the market, or are most of the price differences (for the actual product) just marketing at this point?
-Margaret
Many of you know at this point that I am not a Supplements Guy, but creatine is one of very few that I believe is probably worth adding to your diet. It’s one of the most studied supplements in existence, and the research is unusually clear: 3 to 5 grams a day improves strength, muscle performance, and possibly cognitive function. But which of the many, many products out there should you buy? Creatine monohydrate is a single molecule, and your muscles don’t care about the label on the tub. No fancy formulation has ever been shown to work better.
Where brand does matter a little bit is purity. The concern isn’t that someone’s cutting the product with filler — creatine is cheap to produce, so there’s not much incentive for that. The issue is that creatine synthesis generates byproducts, and cheaper manufacturing processes don’t always purify them out. The premium benchmark is a German-made ingredient called Creapure, which is produced under pharmaceutical-grade standards and rigorously tested. If you don’t want to pay the Creapure premium, just look for a brand with third-party testing certification — NSF Certified for Sport or Informed Sport — which verifies purity and potency.
Aside from the purity question, everything else that raises the price (gummy versions, “micronized” and “buffered” variants, influencer partnerships) is, indeed, marketing.
Why aren’t there more healthy cereals available? Almost all cereals are high in sugar, processed and low fiber. Why aren’t there better options?
-A reader
