What The Number Of Calories In Creatine Tells You

Creatine does have calories, though the number of calories in creatine varies and you need to know why, and, what this means for your diet plan.

Standard, pure creatine monohydrate has 20 calories per 5g serving. Sometimes this is declared on the label and other times it’s labeled as 0 calories. This is because the calories in creatine aren’t calories in the ‘food’ sense. They don’t behave the same way as protein, carbs and fats in giving the body actual energy to maintain or build new muscle and/or store fat. An excess of these nutritional calories will cause a body mass gain (muscle or fat or both) but an excess of creatine calories will cause them to be excreted from the body.

(Also, the amount of creatine you should be taking each day is so small the calories in pure creatine would be totally negligible even if they were the same as protein, carb or fat calories. They’re not, however.)

When using pure creatine supplements, you therefore have no reason to factor these calories into your diet plan whether you’re aiming to gain muscle or lose fat.

Now, some creatine products have more calories than this per 5g serving because they contain other ingredients. This is something you will have to check out for yourself.

Some nutritional supplements (protein supplements, carb supplements, etc.) contain creatine in each serving but aren’t actually classed as creatine supplements. In this case, these nutritional supplements will contain far more calories and be far larger servings than the typical 5g serving, though it’s unlikely they will contain 5g of creatine per serving given nutritional supplements are normally to be used serveral times a day, so post-workout recovery nutritional supplements often contain an amount of creatine as they are typically only used once per day.

If you’re using a nutritional supplement which just so happens to contain creatine, or, a creatine supplement which contains other nutrients (whichever way you choose to look at it) then you can call each single gram of creatine 4 calories, deduct this from the total calories per serving of your supplement, and factor the remaining calories into your diet plan because they are nutritional calories and those calories will have an effect on your body mass (make you gain muscle or fat or both).