Should I take creatine after menopause?

Three answers with three different kinds of reasoning behind them, aimed at overlapping but different readers. Sims writes for women who already train deliberately, and her strongest evidence is for strength and lean mass in people doing resistance work, which is a claim Gunter does not contest.

Gunter writes for the general menopausal population reading a supplement recommendation, and her objection is scoped to the two endpoints that market uses to sell it: bone density and cognition. Haver arrives differently again, listing the dose in a stack without naming a study for it, which puts her close to Sims on the answer and apart from both on the reasoning, and she is the only one of the three who sells creatine.

The live disagreement is not whether creatine works for strength in people who train. It is whether that is enough to make it a default recommendation for every woman in menopause.

All three hold that resistance training is the intervention that matters and that creatine is at most an addition to it; Haver says in the same post that supplements do not replace behaviour.

None of them disputes that creatine monohydrate is cheap, safe for most people, and supported for strength in trained populations. Sims and Gunter both tell readers to buy only third-party tested product and name overlapping certification marks: Sims names CreaPure, NSF and Informed Sport, Gunter names NSF, USP, Informed Choice and the Banned Substances Control Group. Neither Sims nor Gunter has a disclosed financial relationship with a creatine brand.

A trial in postmenopausal women powered for bone density and for a defined cognitive endpoint, with resistance training controlled rather than optional, running long enough to see bone remodelling. Gunter already rests on two-year data with those endpoints, so a positive result would move her further than a mechanistic finding would.

Sims's cognitive extension rests on shorter studies with softer endpoints and would move first. Haver would move fastest of the three, because her position rests on practice pattern rather than on a reading of the evidence, and a clear null would leave it with nothing to stand on.