Why Creatine Is The Next Arrow in Our Quiver
Spoiler: it’s not just for gym-bros anymore.
Back in my hockey playing and strength training days, I was big into creatine. (About 10 years ago). One of my profs at UBC studied Creatine Monohydrate in their PhD and shared a lot of the emerging performance research at the time. But what wasn't clear was the brain and bone health benefits. Not to mention creatine's effect on helping with stress and sleep deprivation.
Enter Dr. Rhonda
I had taken a 10 year break from Creatine. Since retiring from professional hockey, I didn't feel that I needed the performance boost anymore. Then I listened to this podcast:
What shocked me was the massive health benefits for my female family members and friends. It seems a shame that a supplement with such wide ranging health benefits is being shunned by the very people who could benefit from it the most.
Even though creatine is still stigmatized as a supplement for weight lifting, male athletes, we believe that the tide is shifting. We believe that the trends will catch up to the science. And that's why we chose Creatine Monohydrate as our second product.
The Arrow Quiver
Our goal is that when you hear Arrow Supplements, you think trust. We aim to earn that trust with transparency - but also with choosing only science-backed supplements for our Quiver. Arrow does not seek to be every supplement. Curious about the latest TikTok fad in supplements? Well, you won't find that with us. The Arrow "Quiver" will only be science-backed and transparent.
Arrow Creatine
Creatine purity is just as opaque as Magnesium Bisglycinate. Let's try to peer through the muck.
Generic creatine monohydrates have no 3rd party lab results or testing. They just say "Clean" or "Pure" on the label with nothing to back it up. Even the ones that masquerade as transparent show the heavy metal report for the "3rd party lab" tests...which has zero indication of the actual purity of the powder you're putting into your body. Once again, you need to blindly trust these companies.
German Creatine Monohydrate (Creapure & Ultrapure) seems like they might be more pure. When I was in Germany, I tested some Ultrapure, and it tasted more pure. But once again, I wasn't able to find the lab results that verified this. I just had to blindly trust.
Creapure has built a bit of a brand around its "name" Similar to a Bordeaux wine, only creatine monohydrate that comes from the town of Trostberg Germany may be called Creapure. They supposedly have the best manufacturing and do third party tests to verify its purity. While I do believe them, I've yet to see the actual tests.
Other types of creatine, as mentioned in the YouTube video/podcast above, are likely just expensive pee. Why use them if the one type (creatine monohydrate) has been shown to have such an excellent effect with a strong safety profile.
Are you getting the theme? If you're tired of blind trust, we're here to change that.
How far are we away from an Arrow Creatine?
We are currently evaluating suppliers for creatine monohydrate. Our goal is to balance quality with cost and proper testing. We found with magnesium bisglycinate, the most expensive raw material isn't always the highest purity. We're evaluating the certificates of analysis that suppliers are providing us and if they have already done some of the purity tests.
The gold standard of testing is the USP or United States Pharmacopeia. This is a standardized set of tests that allows us to determine if a supplement truly is what it says it is. And since different labs have different manufacturing processes, standards, and machinery, having a standard is useful.
(This is notably absent for Magnesium bisglycinate - so we did our best).
That said, we're evaluating how much of the USP testing we should actually do - this will depend on the tests and COAs we see from our suppliers. Of course, we'll share our decision of what tests to pursue and why.
We're still learning how to estimate our timelines. But I would say we are 2-3 months away from our first batch of Creatine Monohydrate being ready for a shipment to your door.
If you'd like to be notified when we launch our creatine monohydrate, please email me at jason@arrowsupplements.com and I'll let you know.
-Jason Yee