The study, "Dietary Creatine Intake and Measures of Oral Microbiota Diversity," was carried out by Bogdan Andjelic and Sergej M. Ostojic in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Probiotics.
A large national survey of U.S. adults found no meaningful link between the amount of creatine people eat and the variety or makeup of bacteria in their mouths. The small differences that showed up at first faded once the researchers accounted for age, background, and the rest of people's diets, which suggests that creatine intake is mainly a marker of how people eat overall and not a direct influence on oral bacteria.
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Why Look at Creatine and the Mouth
Creatine is a compound found mostly in meat, fish, and other animal foods, so how much of it a person eats tends to track a wider pattern of eating. Diet is known to shape the community of bacteria that live in the mouth, but whether dietary creatine plays any role has been unclear. The question matters because the oral microbiota is tied to both dental and general health, and researchers want to know which parts of the diet really make a difference and which only travel alongside other habits. This study set out to test creatine directly in a large, nationally representative group.
What the Researchers Found
The team analysed data from 3,816 adults in the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) for 2009 to 2012, a period in which oral microbiota samples were collected alongside dietary information. Creatine intake was estimated from 24-hour dietary recalls. The researchers then compared it with three things: how varied the bacteria were within each person's mouth (alpha diversity, including richness, evenness, and phylogenetic diversity), how bacterial communities differed from person to person (beta diversity), and the abundance of individual bacterial genera. They used statistical models that account for the survey's design and adjust for demographic and dietary factors. Creatine intake was not independently linked to any measure of alpha diversity, and no individual genus was associated with it once the analysis was corrected for multiple testing. Beta diversity showed a statistically detectable association, but a tiny one, explaining only about 0.16 percent of the variation between people (pseudo-R² = 0.0016). The modest associations seen before adjustment weakened after accounting for other factors.
What It Means
The authors conclude that dietary creatine does not meaningfully influence oral microbiota diversity or composition in U.S. adults and that it appears to reflect broader dietary patterns and not an independent effect on oral bacteria. For researchers, this means that apparent diet and microbiome links involving creatine-rich foods may come from the wider diet, and that studies should adjust carefully for other dietary factors before reading too much into a single nutrient. The findings concern creatine eaten in food, as estimated from recalls, in U.S. adults. The research was led by corresponding author Dr. Sergej M. Ostojic of the Department of Nutritional Sciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA, with co-author Bogdan Andjelic.
Read the published article here: https://bit.ly/4eonye3
Article title: Dietary Creatine Intake and Measures of Oral Microbiota Diversity
DOI: 10.2174/0130513170498848260908100357
http://dx.doi.org/10.2174/0130513170498848260908100357
