Qualia Creatine+ Ingredients

Why did we create Qualia Creatine+? Almost thirty years ago I wrote a review article titled “Sports Nutrition: A Review of Selected Nutritional Supplements For Bodybuilders and Strength Athletes” for a journal called Alternative Medicine Review (1). The first ingredient I reviewed the research on, and the one with by far the most studies when I wrote this article in 1997 was creatine monohydrate. Science has learned a lot in the almost three decades since—creatine's benefits go far beyond the gym.*

Creatine’s story begins in the 19th century. In 1832, the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul first identified creatine in skeletal muscle, naming it after the Greek word for meat or flesh (kreas). This discovery would be confirmed by a German chemist, Justus von Liebig, who also observed that wild animals had higher concentrations of creatine in their muscles than captive animals. Do you think that might have to do with them using their muscles more?*

It would take almost 90 years, before two more scientific discoveries were made. One was that consuming creatine increased its content in muscles—the body stored extra creatine when it got more of it (2). The other was the identification of phosphocreatine (sometimes called creatine phosphate) in 1927 (3), which would help scientists understand why creatine was concentrating in muscles (and higher in wild than captive animals).*

Most of the body’s creatine and phosphocreatine is found in muscles, where these two molecules are converted back and forth, one into the other, as part of the creatine-phosphocreatine system. This system quickly replenishes ATP—the universal energy currency for cells—during periods of high metabolic demand. Being able to quickly replenish ATP is especially important in tissues that have high and fluctuating energy demands such as muscle and brain (4). Other tissues that contain creatine include the heart, liver, kidney, ovaries and testes: these are all tissues that have high and fluctuating needs for ATP, and are supported by creatine.*

Take a moment to imagine doing an intense set of a weight lifting exercise …or running at top speed for a sprint …or having your brain go from calm and relaxed to intense concentration or managing high stress. During situations like these, muscle and brain cells go through the available ATP very quickly, converting it into a “used-up” version called ADP. This is when the creatine-phosphocreatine system comes to the rescue.* 

The “P” in both ATP & ADP stands for phosphate, and the T and D for tri (three) and di (two), respectively, which refer to the number of phosphate groups bound to adenosine (the “A”). The number of phosphate groups determines whether it is ready to be used for energy or the “used-up version.” I mentioned a few paragraphs ago that phosphocreatine can also be called creatine phosphate—it is creatine with a phosphate group attached. This phosphate group is why the creatine-phosphocreatine system can quickly replenish ATP.*

During situations like weight training, sprinting, or high cognitive load, as examples, phosphocreatine "donates" its phosphate group to ADP, instantly turning it back into the full-power ATP molecule. In the process, phosphocreatine gets converted back to creatine. This bioenergetic system is critical for high performance when repeated bursts of energy are needed, especially when there are short recovery periods between them.*

Once energy demands have returned to a more normal level—a workout or intense thinking is over—the body's regular energy systems can keep up with ATP demands and use some of the available ATP to convert creatine back into phosphocreatine, which stands by for the next time we need an energy boost for intense, short-bursts of physical or mental activities.* 

Now that you understand creatine’s main function, fast-forward to the 1992 summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain. Several British Olympians, including the men’s gold medal winner at 100 meters (Linford Christie) and women’s gold medal winner in the 400-meter hurdles (Sally Gunnell) were reported to have been supplementing their diets with creatine. This was the tipping point for creatine—it ignited the interest in what had been a relatively forgotten nutrient.*

At the time of the Barcelona Olympics, creatine supplements were available in Britain, but not in the United States. In 1993 this changed; creatine monohydrate became available in the United States. It was immediately popular with body builders, weight lifters, professional athletes and sports teams. It also started the modern era of creatine research.*

Creatine research—almost entirely on creatine monohydrate—focused largely on its use in athletics through the rest of the 1990s. By the time I wrote my sports nutrition article in 1997, there was a substantial amount of scientific evidence that supplementing with creatine monohydrate could increase muscle creatine stores, improve muscle size and strength, and enhance high-intensity exercise performance.* 

In the 2000s, the scope of creatine research would expand well beyond athletics. Scientists would discover that creatine also plays a vital role in the brain, supporting aspects of cognitive performance, resilience under stress, and a healthy mood. Today, creatine is recognized not only as a staple for athletes and fitness enthusiasts, but also as a nutrient with broad applications for muscle and brain performance.*

Muscle and brain function are strongly impacted by aging—creatine supplementation supports both. It's not a surprise then that researchers would also eventually study it for healthy aging. Evidence suggests creatine may help older adults maintain strength, mobility, and independence, while also supporting memory and mental clarity. In combination with resistance exercise, creatine supplementation helps preserve lean body mass and functional performance in older adults (5). Creatine has also supported some bone structural properties during aging (6).*

Studies are showing that creatine may be a valuable supplement for women across the entire lifespan. Beyond helping maintain lean muscle and strength in women, creatine supports cognitive function, mood, and a pro-energetic environment in the brain. It may help support reproductive health and fertility (7, 8). Creatine supplementation may alleviate fatigue-related symptoms associated with the menstrual cycle (9). And, creatine has supported sleep duration on resistance training days in menstruating females (10).*

Creatine is a conditionally essential nutrient (11). What does this mean? If the body can’t make a nutrient at all, and we are 100% reliant on getting it from the diet, it's classified as an essential nutrient. A conditionally essential nutrient can be made in the body. But, and this can be an important but, there may be circumstances where the body’s ability to make the nutrient is unable to keep up with the demand for it. Under these circumstances, the gap must be filled by what we consume in the diet or as a supplement—the nutrient has become essential under these conditions.*

Are there circumstances where the body can’t make sufficient creatine to meet all its needs? To answer this, let's start by getting a better understanding of creatine metabolism and intake. On average, the body eliminates about 2 grams of creatine daily, so would need to make 2 grams each day to stay in balance. The question is, can it? The consensus answer is no. About 1 gram of creatine is made in the liver and kidneys per day. The other 1 gram must be ingested to stay in balance and more than 40% of adults get below this amount in their diet (12).* [Note: Think of these amounts as rough estimates, with factors like sex, age, muscle mass, amount of exercise, diet, and other things creating the potential for quite a bit of individual variation in how much creatine we eliminate, make, and need from the diet.]*

As mentioned the “crea” in creatine is from a Greek word meaning meat, because it was originally discovered in skeletal muscle. Those scientists picked a great name because it turns out that meat, fish, and poultry are the best food sources of creatine. How big a serving of these foods would you need to eat to ingest a 1 gram amount of creatine? For red meat it varies by the cut, and would be between 4–9 oz. It would be about 8 oz. of salmon or 9-12 oz. of chicken to get 1 gram of creatine.*

What about other animal foods? Eggs (mostly in the yolks) and dairy have trace amounts of creatine, but it is such a small amount they contribute almost nothing towards total dietary intake. I’ve seen varying estimates for eggs and dairy, but it would be expected to be in the range of 60-100+ large eggs or many gallons of milk to get 1 gram of creatine. They can contribute something, but not much.*  

What about plant sources? If you ask an AI or Google, you’ll sometimes see plant sources of protein—beans, lentils, nuts, seeds—listed as having some creatine. If this was correct, you’d still need to eat unrealistically large amounts of them to get 1 gram of creatine. But it is not correct. Plants can’t make creatine; they do not have any. The idea that some plants contain creatine stems from misinterpretations of earlier analytical studies (13).*  

Because plant foods don’t have creatine (and eggs and dairy are poor sources), persons following a vegan or vegetarian diet have lower tissue levels of creatine (14). When studies have measured what happens to creatine levels when a person switches to a vegetarian diet, it has gone down …quickly. Just 21 days of switching from an omnivorous to a lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet was enough to produce a decrease in tissue creatine levels in active men (15). In a 6 month study, women who switched from an omnivorous to a lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet experienced a significant decrease in muscle creatine, which was corrected by supplementing creatine monohydrate (16).* 

Persons following a vegan or vegetarian diet will be consuming somewhere between none to trace amounts of creatine from food. They are much more reliant on their body being able to make all the creatine they need. The results (at least based on scientific studies) is that they run a creatine balance in the red. The good news is that persons following vegan or vegetarian diets may be more likely to be super responders when it comes to supplementing with creatine. Some studies have reported vegetarians experiencing greater exercise and cognitive benefits than non-vegetarians with creatine supplementation (17–19).*

Many adults and adolescents aren’t getting enough creatine in the foods they eat to even get 1 gram of creatine a day from the diet (12). Meanwhile, studies on supplementing creatine in efforts to improve muscle and brain function routinely supplement 5 grams and sometimes more (20 grams has been used in some recent cognition studies). To get the 5 grams routinely used in human studies of creatine, it isn’t feasible to get it all from food—supplementation is required. This is why we created Qualia Creatine+.*

Qualia Creatine+ was formulated to elevate the creatine experience by combining two advanced forms of creatine with key electrolyte support to fuel both your body and brain for high performance.*

This formula contains three precisely chosen ingredients:

1. OptiCreatine™ Creatine Monohydrate – 4500 mg

2. Creatine MagnaPower® (Magnesium Creatine Chelate) – 500 mg (supplying ~40 mg magnesium)

3. Sea Salt – 250 mg

Whether your goal is to lift heavier, think sharper, recover faster, or age with strength and clarity, Qualia Creatine+ was created with you in mind.*

A Few Notable Studies

Don’t just take our word for it. These are a few publications from journals highlighting some of the scientific rationale for supplementing the diet with the types of creatine found in Qualia Creatine+. I’ll go into more detail about each of them below.

The International Society of Sports Nutrition concluded "...significant health benefits may be provided by ensuring habitual low dietary creatine ingestion (e.g., 3 g/day) throughout the lifespan."* (Pubmed 28615996)

After reviewing scientific studies in older adults related to muscle quantity, exercise performance, bone health, and cognitive function, it was concluded that creatine monohydrate “...has multiple benefits in older adults…”* (Pubmed 40673730)

Researchers looked at studies related to women and concluded that “Creatine supplementation presents a promising strategy for enhancing various aspects of women's health across the lifespan.”* (Pubmed 4037184)

Supplementation with creatine monohydrate helped mitigate some of the detrimental effects sleep deprivation had on cognitive performance and mood.* (Pubmed 16416332)

Six weeks of creatine monohydrate supplementation had a significant impact on tests of intelligence and working memory in young adult vegetarians.* (Pubmed 14561278)

Creatine MagnaPower® (Magnesium Creatine Chelate) supported cellular hydration and muscle performance.* (Pubmed 14506619)

Qualia Creatine+ Ingredients

OptiCreatine™ Creatine Monohydrate

Creatine monohydrate is by far the most studied and proven form of creatine for supporting health and performance benefits in muscles and the brain. A 2025 article published in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition reported that more than 680 peer-reviewed clinical trials had been conducted on creatine supplementation and that 95% of them used creatine monohydrate (20). Whether its sports performance, cognition, healthy aging, women’s health, or some other area, when creatine is mentioned as having been studied for something, it almost always refers to creatine monohydrate: it is the gold-standard form of creatine.*

Supplementation with creatine monohydrate helps increase intramuscular creatine and phosphocreatine stores, which in turn support muscle strength, power, and high-intensity exercise performance. Beyond athletics, creatine monohydrate supports cognitive function, memory, and resilience under stress by enhancing brain energy metabolism. Creatine supports healthy aging by helping maintain muscle mass, bone resilience properties, and neuroprotective functions. With decades of consistent scientific evidence, creatine monohydrate is recognized as a safe and effective nutrient for supporting energy, performance, and overall well-being.*

OptiCreatine™ takes this gold-standard nutrient and improves on it by creating a micronized creatine monohydrate optimized (hence the “Opti” in the name) to overcome issues with solubility and grittiness. We put it to the test ourselves. What did we find? OptiCreatine™ dissolved easily in water and avoided the grittiness and sedimentation common with standard creatine powders, creating a smoother experience. Put simply, it did what it was designed to do. We included 4500 mg of OptiCreatine™ in Qualia Creatine+ and added another 500 mg of Creatine MagnaPower® (see further below for why) to supply 5 grams from two sources of creatine. 

OptiCreatine™ is exclusively available from TSI Group Co., Ltd.

Creatine MagnaPower® (Magnesium Creatine Chelate)

Creatine MagnaPower® supplies creatine and magnesium bound together (i.e., chelated). Think of the creatine acting a bit like a "claw" or a protective shell that holds onto the magnesium and helps the body absorb it more easily. This magnesium creatine chelate has been used in both animal (21) and human studies (22–25), with the results suggesting there may be some additive benefits of supplying both nutrients together in a chelated form.*

But why would magnesium and creatine be given together? Creatine is “activated” to phosphocreatine in cells. This activation requires borrowing a phosphate group from ATP (creatine + ATP → phosphocreatine + ADP). When muscles or the brain are working hard, ATP gets converted into its “used-up” version (ADP). Phosphocreatine returns the phosphate group to ADP to replenish ATP (phosphocreatine + ADP → creatine + ATP). Put simply, the primary function of creatine is inextricably linked to the transfer of phosphate groups and ATP. Do you know what other nutrient is inextricably linked? The answer is magnesium: it is intimately involved in creatine metabolism (26).*

Magnesium is required for over 600 enzyme reactions in cells, and is an activator for another 200 enzymes (26). Some of these enzymes are needed to convert the potential energy stored in foods we eat into cellular energy (i.e., ATP). This means that without magnesium mitochondria can’t make ATP. In addition to being an essential nutrient for making ATP, magnesium is also an “activator” of ATP. When a phosphate group is transferred from one molecule to another—creatine becoming phosphocreatine or phosphocreatine donating a phosphate to ADP to create ATP as examples—magnesium is involved as an ATP activator (26). Put simply, magnesium is indispensable for creatine's function. We wanted to include some magnesium to support its essential functional role in the creatine-phosphocreatine system (27, 28). We think supplying the magnesium chelated to creatine was a great way to do that in this formula, so included 500 mg of Creatine MagnaPower®.*

Creatine MagnaPower® is a registered trademark of Balchem Corp. or its subsidiaries.

Sea Salt

Because they are highly motivated to take their performance to the next level, body builders and athletes are often ahead of the masses when it comes to figuring out what might work. They were the original adapters of creatine. They’ve also been interested in whether there are ways to support creatine absorption and uptake by muscles. What have some of them been doing? Adding a pinch of salt.* Let’s discuss when this started and why.

The earliest online comments (at least that I know of) about salt and creatine appeared at the end of 2001 and early 2002, with questions asking whether salt might help with creatine absorption or muscle uptake. During the next 20 years, this idea simmered in niche forums, but in general, the online world was fairly quiet about the combination of salt and creatine. This topic began to come up more frequently around 2015 and much more frequently the past few years.* But why? 

Creatine is absorbed in the intestines, and gets into muscle, brain and other cells using specialized creatine transporters. By the end of the 1990s, multiple studies had found that creatine transporters required the help of sodium (29–33). Chloride is also needed (34, 35). The sodium and chloride electrolyte ions act as co-transporters, powering creatine uptake through its transporters in the intestine, muscles, and brain. Sea salt contains sodium and chloride. Supporting the function of creatine transporters is why we add 250 mg of sea salt to a serving of Qualia Creatine+.*

* These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The products and information on this website are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. The information on this site is for educational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. Please speak with an appropriate healthcare professional when evaluating any wellness related therapy. Please read the full medical disclaimer before taking any of the products offered on this site.

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