Inexpensive, High-Quality CreaPure Creatine - Beware Commodity Creatine
This product uses CreaPure creatine as its raw material, a branded raw material manufactured by Degussa AG Trostberg (formerly SKW) in Germany and licensed as a pharmaceutical would be there. Optimum Nutrition is one of only a few brands in North America that use only CreaPure raw material, and like [[ASIN:B000GONXVI Universal Micronized Creatine Monohydrate, 1000-Gram Tub]] is an exceptionally good value for this expensive raw material in a supplement market dominated by cheap Chinese and other amateur manufacturers. I began looking into the question of creatine purity after having bought some creatine from a company that I generally consider to be quite reputable and from whom I often buy commodity-item supplements, and was disturbed by its very bitter and (surprisingly) soapy taste. The company insisted that the lot number was fine, but my subsequent research suggests it was not. The important issues are nicely laid out in two very good articles by Will Brink and readily available on the internet: "What's in your Creatine?" and "What's Really in Your Supplements? - An Update on Creatine". I proceeded to order some CreaPure-sourced creatine and was surprised that, for the very first time, the stuff had absolutely no bitter taste to it: the suspicious supplement had been the only one with the weird soapy taste, but *every* other creatine I had purchased had a mild bitterness to it, which I'd just assumed to be intrinsic to creatine itself, rather than a sign of impurity. Subsequently, I've bought several of the few products that use exclusively CreaPure, and found them to be similarly free of these widespread off-flavors. There is still no proof that the common creatine contaminants responsible for these flavors (dicyandiamide or dihydrotriazine) are harmful -- but why anyone (let alone a life extensionist!) would knowingly put high (relative to likely dietary intakes) levels of organoleptically-detectable impurities of unknown toxicity into hir body is beyond me, especially with a CreaPure product as inexpensive as this one available.
Rating: 5 stars