Halle Berry says creatine cleared her menopausal brain fog. Women now account for 30 percent of GNC’s creatine sales, up from 18 percent in 2020, and the researchers driving the boom want everyone to read the evidence more carefully.
Halle Berry turns 60 next month, lifts heavier than she ever has, and has rebuilt most of her routine around a transition she says blindsided her in her early fifties. She has stopped doing cardio in favor of strength training. She wears an Oura ring. She sleeps seven or eight hours a night now, up from three. She has abandoned the strict keto regimen she once kept. “I’ve upped my meditation, I’ve changed the way I eat. I used to be very keto. I didn’t have carbs, no pasta, no rice. I’ve realised that down this path of life, I need some carbs,” she told hosts Chloe Malle and Chioma Nnadi on a recent episode of the Run Through with Vogue podcast.
And she takes creatine, which she had spent years refusing. “I thought I would never take creatine – (I thought) that’s going to blow me up – but no… girl needs that,” she said. It helps, she explained, with brain fog.
That fear is valid; it sums up the entire commercial history of creatine in about a dozen words. Creatine was discovered and isolated in 1832. It entered public consciousness during the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, when British athletes including the 100-meter gold medalist Linford Christie used it, and it acquired its lasting reputation during Major League Baseball’s steroid era. “Turns out that everyone in the MLB that was taking steroids was also taking creatine and so in the hearts and minds of the American consumer creatine was, therefore, a steroid,” Dan McCormick, co-founder and chief executive of the creatine gummy company Create Wellness, told Bloomberg. Berry’s instinct that it would blow her up is the residue of that association.
Why women over 40 are driving the creatine boom
The stigma has now collapsed with remarkable speed. GNC, which operates more than 4,000 locations across the United States, has seen creatine sales rise 75 percent since 2020. “Creatine is now in more baskets than almost any other supplement we carry,” Mark Butera, the retailer’s vice president of merchandising, told Bloomberg. The demographic shift is sharper than the sales figure. Women now account for 30 percent of all creatine purchases at GNC, up from 18 percent in 2020, and the average buyer’s age has risen from 30 to 35.
The wider market moved with it. Retail data from SPINS put creatine’s growth at 71.9 percent in the mainstream multioutlet performance category over the 52 weeks ending November 30, 2025, following 46.5 percent growth the year prior. “So, it’s new demographics, that’s the biggest one; both age brackets, as well as women getting involved in it really expanded the pool,” said Scott Dicker, senior director of market insights at SPINS. “There are also new use cases… It’s not just for young men in the gym anymore.” Amazon’s creatine category is projected to grow 13 percent to more than $400 million this year, according to Jungle Scout data reported by Bloomberg, with June sales alone jumping 31 percent to $41 million. Grand View Research expects the global market to quadruple from 2024 levels to $4.2 billion by 2030, an annual growth rate of 25 percent against 6.4 percent for the supplement market overall.
Money follows. Create Wellness, McCormick’s company, raised $20 million in March in a round led by Alliance Consumer Growth with participation from Unilever Ventures, bringing its total to $27.3 million, Forbes reported. AlzChem Group, the most prominent creatine producer outside China, doubled its production capacity in 2022 and told Bloomberg it funds the work of more than 30 scientists studying female health, longevity, and cognitive performance.
Creatine and menopause brain fog
“I love that every woman is talking about creatine right now,” Abbie Smith-Ryan, a professor of exercise and sports science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill told NPR. On the muscle question, the evidence is solid and the stakes are real: “Two pounds of muscle for me as a middle-aged woman is actually really valuable versus a young person.” She has described the perimenopausal window as the underexamined one, telling NutraIngredients that “there’s a lot of good data on creatine after menopause, but it’s really that transition to menopause when women begin to struggle with sleep, bone health, muscle loss, joint pain, fatigue, brain fog and even inflammation.”
On cognition, which is the specific claim Berry makes, Smith-Ryan says more data is needed. “Creatine is not going to be the magic bullet, but I do think that it’s a low-hanging fruit that has minimal side effects that has potential benefit that could be helpful.”
Scott Forbes, an associate professor at Brandon University who studies creatine’s effects on athletic performance and brain health, holds both positions at once. “Creatine is both underrated because there’s a lot of people that are still kind of fearful of creatine and there’s so many benefits to it, but I also think it’s one of the most overrated supplements as well,” he told Bloomberg. He points to promising work at the far edge of the field: “One study on Alzheimer’s disease that showed that if they supplement with creatine they can actually increase the creatine stores within the brain and they also improved cognitive function.” Darren Candow, a professor at the University of Regina focused on exercise physiology, nutrition, and aging, offers the widest framing available. “It’s something to consider for likely anybody on the planet in some way or another.”
None of it works in isolation. Jose Antonio, who teaches exercise and sports science at Nova Southeastern University, told NPR that creatine’s benefit “is always coupled to exercise,” which is what makes Berry’s account internally coherent. She is in the gym lifting weights. The dietary alternative is not practical. “We’re talking, like, two pounds of raw beef every day, and not many people are willing to do that,” Antonio said.
The category’s growth has outrun its quality control. When NOW Foods tested 12 creatine gummy products in March 2024, half failed to meet their label claims, and the failures showed creatinine, the degradation product of creatine. SuppCo testing published in June 2025 found powders stable and reliable while gummies were not. Pieter Cohen, the Harvard Medical School physician recommends creatine monohydrate as the sole ingredient, third-party certified.
Berry has no creatine brand and no creatine deal. She refused the supplement for years and now takes it daily, one piece of a regimen she rebuilt through Respin, the menopause platform she founded. “There are so many new things I’ve been learning,” she said, of a life in which “everything has changed.”
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