Unlocking Cellular Power: Mark Faulkner Reveals the Untold Benefits of Creatine

WELCOME TO EPISODE 220

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Freddie Kimmel (00:00.068)
I should sit up straight. My mother would want me to do that. Mark, why are you slouching? Mark, welcome to the Beautifully Broken Podcast. How you doing? Thank you. I'm very pleased to be here. Thanks, Freddie. So we are in, we're in West Palm Beach, Florida. You can hear some background noise. You can hear some music. We're at this incredible event called eudaemonia. What does eudaemonia mean to you? I think of it as good life and that would encompass healthy life mainly first and foremost, because this

People say without your health, you don't have anything. So, good life, healthy life. Yeah. I would join with you there. I think that it's so easy, especially, you know, we talk about health and wellness, optimization, longevity, but we don't want to live for the sake of being healthy. We want to live to live, to reap the juices. And I think for me in community, meeting people like you at events, man, it's so much better than Zoom. Yeah, truly. So as I said on the start, I began my

wellness regime, there's very few supplements that have lasted from when I started to be interested in going to the gym and pushing weight. But one of those is creatine. And I walked over to you and I said, what have you got here? And basically you led into, I've got some updates on creatine, what it is and how we can optimize that as far as a longevity profile. So if we bumped into each other on the street, I start a lot of podcasts this way.

What would you tell me you do for a living? We synthesize in the United States the most important supplement people can take. And that's creatine. And there are a lot of good supplements. Vitamin D, protein, zinc, you know, all those. But none of them really matter if the cells don't have enough energy to use those nutrients. And the rate-limiting molecule on cellular energy is creatine. And it's an endogenous natural molecule in the body. So everyone needs creatine in order for their cells to function optimally.

That's the foundation. And that's what we spend our time doing in business and in life, making it and then educating people about it. Beautiful. And then how does the cell naturally create creatine within the body? Sure. Most creatine is synthesized in the liver, but the body creates about half of the creatine that it needs. And the other half is supposed to come from our diet. Unfortunately,

Freddie Kimmel (02:23.234)
many Americans, maybe most, but certainly many Americans don't have a creatine rich diet. So there are suboptimal levels of creatine for many people, which doesn't mean your cells don't function. They just don't function optimally. And that can be brain cells, immune cells, muscle cells, which is what creatine is most commonly associated with is muscle health and going to the gym. But really it is the cellular energy driver for every cell and every function of the body. Yeah.

love Peter Atiyah, I get a lot of information is is woo woo and outside the spectrum of wellness I will get once in a while I'll listen to Peter and he really grounds me down. You know, so his big question when he has an intake and a patient's paying him hundreds of thousands of dollars to do a blood workup, he'll say, what are you taking? And then he'll have a secondary box. It's like, why are you taking it? And what he reflects often is that most people cannot tell them why they are taking the supplements that are covered. But you know, they start to say,

what the marketing was on the campaign for that supplement. When I was young, creatine was one of the first things that I started taking. Now I'm 46. I was in high school till 1996. So creatine was kind of coming on the scene. I think more when I got into college and there was this big thing about loading, loading creatine in your system. And then you'd go to a maintenance store. is that loading phase, is that still valid as far as how the supplement is used today?

depends on the type of creatine that you're using. For some people, loading with creatine monohydrate can be applicable or valuable. And it's mainly related to the fact that very little of the creatine monohydrate actually gets into your system. It has poor bioavailability or absorption and uptake. So you have to kind of jumpstart the muscle saturation or the cell saturation by

taking a lot of creatine just to get some of it into your system so that the cells can start to use it and you can start to see some functioning. And then you move into a maintenance dose. The newer conjugations of creatine do not require a loading phase or anything other than small daily doses for optimal health or doses based on body weight for strenuous exercise. Yeah. And you know, the other thing, just thinking back when I did start that, I remember a lot of times that I was bloated.

Freddie Kimmel (04:45.358)
when I would start taking creatine. And I remember being very, very puffy, retaining a lot of water weight. So why is that? And was I taking creatine monohydrate when I started in 1996 or 1997? Yeah, creatine monohydrate was the type that was most prevalent back then. No doubt that's what you were using. And it was recommended for loading phases and then usually a five gram dose or five to 10 after that.

The bloating comes about because of its bioavailability concerns, which I mentioned earlier. Good studies in peer-reviewed published journals now demonstrate quite well that of those doses, only about 15 % is making it into your bloodstream, and the other 85-ish percent is just wasted or excreted. And the body actually struggles a little bit to get rid of it. And what you end up having, because of that absorption

problem or dynamic is what is referred to as extracellular fluid redistribution and the body's trying to flush it out. Some people have GI distress because of that. And with the fluid coming outside of cells, you get that puffiness, know, bloat, water retention and things that not everyone experiences, but enough people do that it's a concern. We just finished a study with Princeton Clinical and

we showed that of the women, particularly that were in the study taking creatine monohydrate, over 70, I think it was like 76 % of them experience mild to severe bloat puffiness, water retention on the older form of creatine. So it is a real dynamic. This I think is the first study that actually documented it though. So interesting. I want to just ask in a challenging way, you know, we're at a wellness festival.

There's so many people set up with supplement tents. I think if you asked every single booth, they would say, we're paramount to cellular energy. That's a common conversation. Maybe it's people that are working with NAD. Maybe it's people that are working with methylene blue. You know, I could go on and on B vitamins. Why is creatine different? You made this statement. said creatine is the supplement most important for cellular energy. Yeah.

Freddie Kimmel (07:10.222)
Great question, it has to do with, if you go back to high school biology, the Krebs cycle or the citric acid cycle and the generation of ATP. And when ATP, which is the universal fuel cell for any cell in the body or the molecule for fuel, when it is burned or used by the cell, it degrades, so to speak, into ADP, adenosine diphosphate plus a loose phosphate.

And it cannot do anything from a fuel cell energy standpoint until uniquely and specifically creatine comes along, picks up the phosphate, the loose phosphate, sticks it back on the ADP and it becomes ATP adenosine triphosphate again. And then that molecule has been successfully recycled for rapid recovery of cellular energy sources. Beautiful. So I want to be clear for everybody listening to this at home.

that that process happens intracellular. That's correct. So what we need is we need the creatine not floating around in the extracellular matrix. Right. We need it to cross the cell membrane. That's right. You have our system thankfully has really good creatine transporter systems, creatine receptors. So what we need it in the blood, not in the GI tract being excreted.

So really the key thing and some great research out of the University of Nebraska and University of Manitoba demonstrated that the creatine hydrochloride, a newer molecule, has far superior plasma uptake. So if you can get the creatine, whether it's monohydrate, HCl, creatine, malate, citrate, any of them, if you can get them into the blood, then the body does a very efficient job of getting the creatine molecule from the blood into the cells. But getting it into the blood compartment or in the

in the plasma is the key and that is all dependent upon the conjugation of the creatine that someone is using. So you've mentioned this a couple times, creatine HCl. How is that different from creatine monohydrate? It's simply the conjugating molecule. have a creatine monohydrate is a creatine plus a water molecule and water sounds wonderful and know part of the body and everything but unfortunately it's not

Freddie Kimmel (09:34.49)
prone to helping with the efficiency of that molecule get into the bloodstream. So instead of creatine monohydrate, this is a creatine hydrochloride, creatine HCl conjugation, and that happens to be very symbiotic with the gastric juices and the GI tract. Your gastric juices are hydrochloric acid. So the creatine HCl, creatine hydrochloride, simply has far superior absorption into the body through the GI tract.

That makes a lot of sense to me. So what are the, if we look at this, taking the supplement, we get it in the body, it's in the blood. What are some of the benefits that are different that you've seen either through studies or subjective experience with creatine HDL? Certainly. First of all, people ask, how long will it take for me to feel it or to experience some benefits? And I tell folks,

If you're taking it for exercise purposes, just take a dose about an hour before you work out and then do a workout that you know will make you hurt. And see if the next day or two, the DOMs, the delayed onset muscle soreness, see if you don't either not hurt at all or you hurt less. And that will be an immediate function or benefit from having taken that highly absorbed form of creatine. Additionally, and the way the creatine market is growing right now, it's growing for reasons other than

muscle strength and muscle development. Since creatine is the rate-limiting molecule for all cellular energy, it is very important for the neurons, for the brain, for the heart, for the immune system. Dr. Lily Yang out of UCLA did some beautiful work on showing how the T cells in our body to keep us healthy from cancer, coronavirus, bacteria, whatever, those T cells absolutely depend on creatine in order to do their function properly and keep us healthy.

And she did say though that unfortunately her studies with creatine monohydrate would not be replicable in humans because of the bioavailability problem. You couldn't get enough into the system for those T cells to be properly saturated. We have also seen really significant benefits in cognitive function or particularly in neurodegenerative diseases, anything that involves the brain. There are...

Freddie Kimmel (11:59.982)
doctors right now that are using creatine HCL in particular because of its absorption and its ability to get creatine to the brain, which is unlike monohydrate. It doesn't get to the brain very effectively. But they're using it for treatment of Huntington's disease and other dreaded neurodegenerative diseases and having really good outcomes. There's also, there's a study right now that just began on TBI and concussions.

with creatine hydrochloride in order to try to demonstrate the therapeutic events of hopefully either preventing or lessening concussions or having a faster recovery from those because we've demonstrated that the HCl molecule can be delivered effectively to the neurons and therefore increase resilience or repair. what I'm hearing you say is cellular energy

better cellular repair, regardless of the disease, the malady, whatever the hit the body's taking. That's right. Could be a hit in an NFL game. Yeah. Could be a hit from a metabolic dysfunction. Yeah. That we want more cellular energy. This is certainly a message, you know, this carries through so many different conversations we've had. And what is very, the thing that sparked my interest yesterday when you said T cell activity, our T cells part of the immune system, they're born in the lymph nodes.

They go off to further develop in the thymus. And so I just, this will come out after we've just talked about the fact that many immunotherapies are dependent. So an immunocancer therapy is dependent on T cell activity, specifically the microbiomes influence on T cells. have these, all these queso strains that are acromancia. what's the other acromancia and bacterioresis fragilis.

which are taking the break. So they're stopping T cells from slowing down and they're letting them activate. So talk to me about T cells and what is that research if we go another layer deeper? Sure. I like to think of creatine as something that will become standard of care for immunotherapy conditions, really also in even chemotherapy regimens of treatment because of just what you said. If, and we referred to it earlier, if you give T cells enough creatine,

Freddie Kimmel (14:23.992)
they really do their job. function effectively, which is keeping us healthy. That's against blast cells, carcinoma cells, viruses or whatever. We did some neat work and have got intellectual property that was awarded around just this topic on T cells. And it is a case where if you have chemotherapy, and I'm gonna come back to the immunotherapy, but if you have chemotherapy that's going on, it...

there are certainly very effective chemotherapies that kill the cancer. Unfortunately, they're very toxic and they ravage the healthy cells as well. And so you have to create more resilience in the healthy cells so that the patient can endure the chemo and that the doctors can treat enough and more and more without having that patient decline or have their health erode from the effects of the chemo on the healthy cells. So we've shown

in a number of case studies where creatine supplementation with chemotherapy and aggressive chemotherapy can help the patient endure it better without the chemo fatigue, the toxic crash days, and the things that oftentimes belabor somebody terribly when they're going through chemo. With immunotherapy, as you said, rather than having a chemo kill the cancer, you're boosting the T cells in order to get the T cells to do their job, which is to kill the cancer.

Dr. Mary Phillip out of Vanderbilt did some beautiful work that demonstrated how fatigued the T cells get when fighting cancer, whether stimulated on their own by the body's natural response against the cancer or through immunotherapy. And the key ingredient of their fight, their key fuel is creatine, as I referenced before.

the T cells depend on creatine. And so it's great to stimulate them. That's terrific. But you've got to give them the fuel with which to go do their job. It would be like, you know, sending more soldiers to the battlefield or giving them a great pep talk, but not giving them more bullets. You know, if they're going to go fight and win, they've got to have weapons and ammo. And so the T cells absolutely in order to be able to function.

Freddie Kimmel (16:44.6)
the way that they need to be successful in killing a cancer in an immunotherapy situation largely depends on creatine. That's why I think it should be a good co-regimen for future treatments. Yeah. mean, that aside, so there's like one silo of we got T-cell activity. And the other thing is that like maintaining muscle mass throughout your therapy is something that, you know, I have this great subjective experience. When I went through chemo, remember my initial surgery, it was an orcheectomy. So they take out my left testicle.

Hi guys, I lost a testicle. And my doctor had commented at the time, he's like, man, he's like, we cut through your stomach. He was like, you have no body fat. I had like a 12 pack. I was performing in a show where I had a very scantily clad costume at the time. And then when I had finished all my rounds of etampaside and cisplatin, the same surgeon said, my God, Freddie, it's so interesting. He's like, we cut through,

a couple inches of visceral belly fat because my body was really struggling to make muscle during that time. So maintaining muscle mass during treatment would be another thing that I'd say is a potential use case within a lifestyle therapeutic. I think sometimes we focus so hard on the cancer treatment and the regime of the treatment, and we don't look at the internal milieu, the terrain, and muscle is energy.

So our muscle cells, it's the powerhouse of the body, right? Yeah, it ends up being really the currency of our health. If you have healthy muscle, you're going to have a healthy metabolism. You're going to be, whether it's a cancer patient trying to maintain muscle or an older adult, you're going to be less of a fall risk if you've got good muscle mass. For people who are trying to lose weight, they need to maintain muscle mass or they end up skinny fat. You know, they end up still with a messed up BMI. So

Exercise, creatine, protein are very key in any of those circumstances to being able to maintain muscle. And it's very difficult to maintain muscle or build muscle if you don't have creatine and protein helping those cells to be able to be as effective in recovering and repairing and building as possible. Yeah. And then also talk to me about, so you have a supplement that is creatine, HCL. Talk to me a little bit about the brand and the formulation.

Freddie Kimmel (19:09.754)
The brand is Concrete. Concrete is concentrated creatine. And that's because when I was sitting in my office back in 2004, 20 years ago, looking at this molecule that we had basically synthesized by accident. We were playing with some other molecules and this crystal formed and thought it looks interesting, don't know what it is. And when we analyzed it, it was creatine hydrochloride. And we started studying its properties of stability, solubility,

uptake, absorption and things, it was remarkable. In fact, I shared the data kind of confidentially with some sports medicine executives or sports fitness executives. And they looked at me somewhat incredulously and said, if what you say is true with this data, it will revolutionize the creatine market. And I said, Yeah, I think it will. And because I knew what the other conjugations were like, and what their limitations were. And so we started

synthesizing creatine, HCl, creatine hydrochloride. And it was a number of years later. We mainly did the initial synthesis just to do more research on it. We eventually about five or six years later brought it to market under the brand of concrete or concentrated creatine. And then the goal was always to develop a domestic manufacturing plant for it. We could make it on smaller scale, but most of the creatine in the world comes from China.

Some from Germany, most of that is all creatine monohydrate. A little bit of creatine HCl comes from China, but otherwise we ended up, while other people were sitting at home during the pandemic, we broke ground on a plant and built the only domestic creatine plant outside of Omaha, Nebraska. So we're the only American made creatine. We're proud of that. it's, you know, an FDA inspected and audited GMP SQF HACCP

NSF certified facility and so the brand is one that is based in science, well researched and we don't have as much research in terms of a body of research as creatine monohydrate but that's because monohydrate's been around for about 40 years and we haven't been around that long but we'll catch up and you know the rotary phone's been around longer than the digital smartphone but you know not too many of us are.

Freddie Kimmel (21:36.506)
carrying a rotary phone around. Yeah, we haven't held on to that one. So you must have some experience with people switching over, albeit professional sports players, possibly people. Have you had anybody in the bodybuilding industry switch over and say, this is a game changer for us? Actually, that was the reason why we ended up on the map is just exactly that dynamic. In the bodybuilding world or the elite fitness world,

We had presented data before a bunch of doctors and researchers at the ISSN International Society of Sports Nutrition, their global meeting back a number of years ago, and in the audience happened to be a PhD nutritionist who was counseling or advising someone whose name you'll recognize. so when this individual called out that concrete is their creatine of choice,

because of what a difference it makes in terms of their fitness regimen, the brand got on the market. That individual was Dwayne The Rock Johnson. yeah, so it was, we were grateful that he said something nice about it and that really helped to catapult us. So since then, yes, elite athletes, Major League Baseball, NFL, hockey, and in the fitness bodybuilding world.

powerlifting world. It's been the number one specialty creatine for a while now. it's just recently over the past few years kind of broken beyond those ranks and into the general public as people are realizing creatine can be so good for other optimal health. It's very interesting that while it previously was looked at as a male weightlifting supplement, now about seven out of every 10 new creatine consumers are women.

So, interesting. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. It is. It is. there's, there's no biohack like holding or adding 10 to 15 pounds of muscle on your body. just, I mean, I can say I moved to Austin, Texas three years ago and I had, I had, I had done a good job at not, you know, letting my fitness go. but I look back at pictures three years ago and I was, I was about 165 pounds. I'm 180 now, and I just feel so much. just feel.

Freddie Kimmel (23:58.744)
my posture, the way I move through space, the way I hold space. Simple life things, right? I can take every single grocery bag in the car into the house in one care. can still get the 20 bags in my hands. Yeah. So it's simple stuff like that. that's significant considering also that you started from a deficit recovering from cancer. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So it's that quality of life. And it's so interesting if you

If you would have told me creatine would be the supplement that has stayed with me for almost 25 years, I would have said never ever. But it continues to make its round. I will say the one other thing I'm going to comment on is when I don't have a good night of sleep, I have found that creatine, especially if I split dose it a little bit in the morning, two to three grams, two to three grams at night, it can help my brain feel like I did not go out drinking all night. It really has that. I'm like, okay, I hurt.

but it's a little bit easier if I get a little bit of creatine in there. Yeah. And that is because you're probably getting, you're definitely getting creatine and it's definitely benefiting you when you do that. So that, and especially sleep is, you know, our body's very busy during sleep as it's repairing and recovering. Well, you're giving it what it needs to help those cells repair and recover the energy and the fuel they need to repair and recover. So it's natural or it makes good sense and it's logical that you would wake up.

feeling more recovered and repaired in the wake of having taken some creatine. It's when you take two to three grams and you split dose like that, that's a monohydrate. You're probably, as I mentioned earlier, you get about 15, even if I go on the higher side, 20 % of that. So say a three gram dose, you're getting about 600 milligrams or so into your system. But that's even enough for you to have.

the benefits or some of feel the benefits of it. That's what creatine hydrochloride dosing is 750 milligrams a day or with strenuous exercise, 750 per 100 pounds of body weight. And that's compared to those, you know, four to six grams a day dosing that the former, the older molecule has. So what does dosing look like with concrete or creatine HCl? yeah. And I would say there's three different dosing

Freddie Kimmel (26:20.474)
kind of categories that I usually see people using or that I recommend. One is just for optimal health and that's 750 milligrams a day. And that just helps to keep your cells flush with creatine, your T cells, your neurons, everything. If you're gonna be engaged in strenuous activity, then it's, and you can take that 750 any time of the day, it doesn't really matter. But with strenuous exercise,

taking 750 per hundred pounds of body weight about an hour before you work out. Creatine usually peaks in the blood about an hour after you've taken it, roughly one to two hours. So if you're going to work out, you're gonna have creatine peaking in the bloodstream, which means it's gonna be feeding the cells, feeding particularly the muscle cells while you're working out to help support strength, endurance and recovery. And then the third category is for those who are having some significant either

medical indication, disease state, insult of some type, where their body is under duress. And that could be somebody having cancer, somebody with a neurodegenerative condition. And those would be higher doses. Those are doses of in the six to nine grams, which would be equivalent to 40 to 50 grams of creatine monohydrate, but four to six grams of creatine hydrochloride,

What we have demonstrated, there's a doctor out of Australia that's using it for his Huntington's patients. And when they're diagnosed with Huntington's, absolutely genetically allele pair verified patients, they've been put on a dose of about six grams a day. like they'll take two grams with each meal and usually Huntington's kills in four, well, three to five.

four or five years. It's a very dreaded disease. It's like Alzheimer's on steroids. But 10 to 12 years out, these patients are showing no signs of disease progression or symptomology onset. So that resilience that those higher doses are providing to the neurons, and that particularly that HCl molecule that does get to the brain is helping to defend the brain against the otherwise

Freddie Kimmel (28:46.104)
degradation that those diseases cause. We have the same sort of case studies with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's as well. I haven't had much case studies yet or work done in ALS, but definitely in multiple sclerosis. There's some tremendous work that's been done on lifestyle, exercise, clean eating, and taking creatine HCL to really beat MS without drugs.

Yeah. So there's those are the dosing regimens. 750 daily for optimal health, 750 per hundred pounds of body weight for strenuous exercise or higher doses for medical challenges. That's great. And then where can people go to find some of the research if they want to do some reading on their own or where can they go to learn more about concrete? Sure. We have a few studies on our website and we were encouraged

to put all of them up on our website. So we will do that. It may take us a couple of weeks to get them all up there, but you can go to either concrete.com, C-O-N-C-R-E-T.com, or the Vireo website, V-I-R-E-O, Vireo is a Latin word for health. That's the parent company of the Concrete brand. Or there's another kind of more independent website called creatinehcl.com. And we will make sure we feed the studies. I don't know.

remember how many they have on there, but we'll make sure we feed those studies to that website as well. So those are at least a few different options of where people can find some of this work. That's such good information. I'm so excited. Most of all, I'm excited to do a little experimentation. If you told me, Freddy, here's what I'd like you to do over the next two months. Is there a protocol dosing? You know, I pretty much work out four to five times a week. Yeah. Try to walk 10 to 15,000 steps a day. Yeah. That's, kind of the flow. Yeah. So I would say on the days that you don't work out,

take that 750 milligrams and then when you do workout, take as I kind of referenced earlier, take the 750 per hundred pounds of body weight and do a workout that will make you hurt. And you do that and challenge yourself and see what kind of PRs you start hitting. Usually within two to three weeks, somebody is noticing marked notable

Freddie Kimmel (31:12.026)
increases in strength. We've had power lifters that were just stunned, where power lifting federations saw how much in a short period of time they started lifting over and above what they knew that athlete normally lifted and thought they were on steroids. But it's because that when you feed the muscles, you feed the cells optimally and well, they really do respond and they can kind of be happily blown away by what they're capable of. So I would say, yeah,

Do that for two or three months and then you tell me how many PRs you've broken. I love it. I love it. So I'll go at that. Is there anybody that creatine HDL is not good for? there any counter indications? There have been millions and millions of doses taken over the past 20 years. you know, it's only been on the market, not that long, because we did a bunch of research initially, as I indicated. We've not had any contraindications, any drug interactions, any adverse events that have been reported at all during the

that period of time. It's because it's an endogenous natural molecule, the body knows what to do with it and it plays nice with everything else. So yeah, we haven't seen anyone. I mean, probably not going to give it to young kids, but and the lawyers make us say not for, you know, pregnant or nursing women or people under age 18, but frankly creatine and protein are the main things I would give to somebody who's a young athlete under the age of 18.

Yeah, same, same, same. Totally agree. that makes a lot of sense to me. The guidelines make a lot of sense. mean, it's pretty rare that you have anything with no bad side effects. I certainly think if you're somebody that's hearing this and you're working on improvement, longevity, adding a little bit of muscle, it's certainly worth a try.

So good to meet you here. pleasure. enjoyed it. Thanks for having me on. I'm glad we ran into each other yesterday. I know. And I love we get to do it live. So good. Team. So we're here at eudaemonia. We're in West Palm beach. Please like, share, comment on this episode. Let me know if you're going to try it or if you've had an experiment previously with monohydrate. I would love people in the comments to tell me when you hear this episode, Freddie.

Freddie Kimmel (33:28.174)
two, three weeks in, I do feel a benefit. We'd love to hear the feedback and appreciate you listening. Big love. Thanks. Thank you.