Should women take creatine?

Yes — but not for the reasons the marketing gives you, and the "especially for women over 40" pitch does not hold up.

Creatine is one of the best-supported supplements in existence, and none of that support disappears because you are a woman. Take it. What follows is where the women-specific claims outrun the evidence.

"It'll make you bloated"

Mostly no. The water creatine pulls in is largely inside the muscle cell, not under the skin, and a safety meta-analysis covering 951 women found no significant difference in body mass and no excess of gastrointestinal complaints.

Being straight about the exception: one well-run trial found that during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, creatine loading did raise extracellular fluid — the one result that gives the bloating belief any real foothold. Even there, body mass did not move. Expect the scale to shift maybe half a kilo to a kilo. Expect not to look puffy.

"It's especially good for women over 40"

This is where the marketing is furthest ahead of the data.

• Lean mass: a meta-analysis of 35 RCTs found men gained 1.46 kg of lean mass on creatine while women gained a non-significant 0.29 kg — and age was not a moderator. There is no age-specific signal here at all.
• Bone: the 12-month study everyone cites shows creatine slowed bone loss, not built bone. The same research group's larger, longer trial — two years, 237 women — found no effect on bone density whatsoever, and a meta-analysis found nothing at any skeletal site. The longer and bigger the trial, the more the bone benefit evaporates.
• Cognition and mood: the weakest of the three. The pooled memory benefit is driven by people aged 66-76, and the female-only subgroup was not statistically significant.

One detail worth knowing before you buy anything marketed on this research: the dose actually recommended in the postmenopausal literature is around 0.3 g/kg/day — roughly five times the 3-5 g being sold on the strength of it.

So what should you do

Take creatine, 3-5 g a day, because it reliably helps strength and training performance — the same reason men take it. Do it alongside resistance training, which is the thing doing the heavy lifting in every one of these studies. Just don't buy it expecting it to save your bones.