253,000 Women a Month Search for Creatine. Nobody is Funding the Science
The demand arrived without the evidence. Nobody selling has a reason to fund the trial, and nobody who could fund it has anything to sell.
Across 544 ingredients tracked in the women's supplement market, only two draw more than 100,000 monthly US searches. One is D-mannose. The other is creatine.
Creatine pulls 253,000 monthly searches and is growing 155.5% year over year while collagen, magnesium and maca contract. The figures come from CPG Radar, a market intelligence firm that sells category analysis to supplement brands, in a guest column published by NutraIngredients on May 26. Creatine is one of seven ingredients in the dataset growing faster than 100%, and the only one of those seven selling at commercial scale.
Search volume is a soft measure, and CPG Radar has not published its method. The retail data points the same way. SPINS recorded 71.9% growth for creatine in the mainstream multioutlet performance category over the 52 weeks ending November 30, 2025, after 46.5% the year before. GNC, which runs more than 4,000 US locations, told Bloomberg last September that women now make up 30% of its creatine purchases, up from 18% in 2020. The average buyer aged from 30 to 35.
You would think that means women are taking up more strength training. The commentary data says otherwise. CPG Radar found 76% of relevant female creatine discussion surfaces in menopause and perimenopause conversations. The firm has not published how it built that figure, and no one else has published an analysis of this buyer at all.
The buyer is between 40 and 65. Asked in her own words what she wants from it, she names brain function first, then whether it works at all, then sleep and energy. Strength ranks seventh. Muscle ranks eighth.
She is a femtech buyer, and she is spending her money somewhere else.
Create Wellness, founded 2022, closed a $20M Series B in March led by Alliance Consumer Growth with Unilever Ventures participating, on $27.3M raised to date. MOSH, the brain health brand Maria Shriver co-founded with her son Patrick Schwarzenegger, raised $13M in May and put a bar carrying 20 grams of protein and creatine into more than 2,000 Target stores. Season34, founded by a gynecologist and her daughter, launched nine stage-specific perimenopause formulations in early 2026 and stacked creatine monohydrate into its brain-health SKU. Thorne and Løuco are in too.
Whether any of these count as femtech depends on where the line falls. They sell supplements, not care. The companies that sell care are not in the category. They built telehealth and prescription platforms, and Hims & Hers launched a menopause specialty this year against a $1B revenue target on that same model. A prescription platform does not capture a supplement dollar. It was never built to.
The standard 3-to-5 gram daily creatine dose was established largely in male subjects. Whether it holds across the peri-to-post transition is unresolved. The interaction between creatine, estrogen decline and hormone therapy is, by Ghannoum's reading of the literature, largely unstudied. Three quarters of the demand is coming out of menopause communities, which means the safety and efficacy profiles for the actual buyer may not resemble the general-population data the category runs on.
Brain effects appear to require roughly double the intake that saturates muscle, and optimal cognitive dosing in healthy people remains unresolved, according to Nutritional Outlook's review of the meta-analytic data this month. Brain function is what she says she is buying. The number on the label is the muscle number. The MOSH bar carries three grams.
CONCRET-MENOPA (NCT06660004), published in the Journal of the American Nutrition Association, randomized 36 women of mean age 50.1 across four arms over eight weeks and found improvement in cognitive outcomes and brain creatine concentration. It tested creatine hydrochloride at 750 to 1,500 mg per day. The market sells monohydrate at 3 to 5 grams. The trial that fits the buyer does not fit the product on her shelf.
Brain clarity is her first expected outcome, and the culture is telling her with confidence that creatine delivers it. In 2025 alone, 469 podcast episodes took up creatine, more than the previous decade combined, and brain-specific framing in episode titles nearly doubled between 2024 and 2026. One in six titles tells her she should or must be taking it. The education ran ahead of the evidence, and neither the industry nor the clinical field was in the room for it.
Practitioners are now recommending creatine alongside GLP-1 medications for women, citing muscle preservation. The registered trials on preserving lean mass during GLP-1 therapy test protein and resistance exercise instead. LEAN-PREP (NCT06885736), a four-arm randomized trial whose protocol published in BMJ Open in April, puts patients on semaglutide or tirzepatide into resistance training, higher protein, both, or neither. A search of ClinicalTrials.gov returns no trial testing creatine in that population. The named-authority endorsement pattern is already forming.
The evidence is not.
No one selling creatine has a reason to fund the dosing question. A trial is expensive, and the results are free to every competitor the day they publish. MOSH funds Alzheimer's research and has put more than $400,000 toward the problem of women being underrepresented in it. It has not funded a creatine dosing trial. The femtech companies with the clinical infrastructure to run one have nothing to sell when it ends.
That leaves the supplier. AlzChem, a specialty chemicals company in Trostberg, Bavaria, says it is the only creatine producer outside Asia. It sells the raw material and holds the patents, so it is the only company that makes money from proving this works in women.
AlzChem sells monohydrate. That is what will get tested.