Your Meat Consumption is Probably Not the Reason You're a Creatine Non-Responder: 5% Faster 50m-Sprint Time in 6 Days W/ 20g/day of Creatine for Vegetarians & Omnivores

It's hard to be a non-responder andno way to change it.
In some people the ingestion of creatine appears to be ineffective. Aside from minor diarrhea, when they increase the dosage to the 20g+ range per day in a desperate effort to reap the benefits of one of the, if not the only tried and proven natural ergogenic with significant (real world!) effects, these creatine non-responders don't get any results from either creatine monohydrate or any of the fancier, but mostly inferior "advanced creatines" you can buy at you local, national and international supplement vendor.

One of the commonest and eventually most reasonable explanation for "non-responding", I've heard is the hypothesis that non-responders have a high enough creatine intake from meat that would reduce any additional benefit from supplemental creatine to unmeasurable levels.
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And in fact, with beef and co being your best dietary creatine sources, it seems legit that meat-eaters would benefit less from supplemental creatine than vegetarians whose plant-based diets are more or less devoid of creatine.

By now you should yet be used to the fact that there are billions of things in the realm of nutrition, health and fitness that make perfect sense and still don't exist... and yes, the aforementioned hypothesis that omnivores won't benefit from creatine is one of them.
Figure 1: Higher increase in the previously low creatinine levels, but identical increase in 50m spring performance in vegetarians ans omnivores in response to 6 days on 20g of creatine (Seyedjalali. 2014)
If you take a look at the data in Figure 1, data from a recent study from the Chandrashekar Agashe  College  of  Physical Education in India, you will see that the omnivores had higher blood creatine (=used creatine) levels, but an identical increases in 50m sprinting performance.

The study at hand does therefore the findings of this study support the usefulness of short-term creatine supplementation at 20 grams  per  day  for  6  days, but it does not support the hypothesis that the corresponding increases in 4x 50 m dash run performance would be more pronounced in the vegetarian subjects, whose baseline creatine intake borders zero.
Are you like one of three subjects in Greenhaff's 1994 study?
Bottom line: If you belong to the small group of creatine non-responders you will obviously have to wait until someone identifies another hopefully non-genetic determinant of your non-existing response to the provision of creatine monohydrate or any other form of creatine. Until then, a highly efficient creatine recycling / endogenous production and / or the inability to use exogenous creatine remain the most likely and eventually the only realistic explanation for a phenomenon of which only the second one, i.e. the inability to use supplemental creatine as a means to increase muscular the creatine stores has scientific backup from one of the early studies on creatine (Greenhaff. 1994)
Reference:
  • Greenhaff, P. L., et al. "Effect of oral creatine supplementation on skeletal muscle phosphocreatine resynthesis." American Journal of Physiology-Endocrinology and Metabolism 29.5 (1994): E725.
  • Nimkar, Nayana, and Ph D. Physical Education. "Comparative Effect of Creatine Supplementation Blood Lactate and Intermittent Running Performance on Vegetarian and Non-Vegetarian Active Males." Heg©< e Òeew {veeieefjkeÀeb® ³ee jkeÌleoeye Je ceOegcesneJej efveJe [keÀ ÒeeCee³eece Je Deemeveeb® ee nesCeeN³ee HeefjCeeceeb® es DeO³e³eve-mebefoHejepe Me. Deewlee [s: 30.
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