"Foods high in creatine" is a short list, because creatine is an animal-tissue compound: it is how muscle stores quick energy, so the foods that contain it are muscle. What makes the question worth a page is not the list but the numbers behind it — how few of them trace to an actual measurement, how far apart they sit, and how much food it takes to match one scoop of powder.
The figures below are the ones published in food analyses, survey studies and one position stand, each with its source. Amounts are what was measured or estimated, not a target anyone should eat to.
Where the creatine in food comes from
About 95% of the body's creatine sits in skeletal muscle, bound and unbound, where it recycles energy during short, hard efforts (what is creatine). Animal muscle works the same way, which is why meat and fish carry creatine and plants do not. The International Society of Sports Nutrition's 2017 position stand puts the arithmetic simply: roughly 1–2% of the body's store is broken down to creatinine every day, so the body needs to replace about 1–3 g a day depending on muscle mass — about half from the diet, the rest made in the liver and kidneys from three amino acids.
The measured figures
Most "creatine content of foods" lists online repeat one old table without saying where it came from. These are the figures that can be traced to an analysis or a named source:
| Food | Creatine | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Beef, chuck / round / loin | 9.6 / 10.2 / 10.5 mg per g dry weight | Wu, Amino Acids 2020 (own analysis) |
| Herring, raw flesh | 350–420 mg per 100 g | Hughes, J Sci Food Agric 1960 |
| Beef or salmon, uncooked | about 1–2 g per pound (454 g) | ISSN position stand, 2017 |
| Milk | about 0.1 g per kg | as used in Bakian et al., Transl Psychiatry 2020 |
| Cranberries | about 0.02 g per kg | as used in Bakian et al. 2020 |
| Corn, potato, soybean, wheat flour, white rice | 0 | Wu 2020 |
| Average across creatine-containing foods | 3.88 g per kg | the coefficient US survey studies apply (Korovljev et al. 2021; Ostojic 2021) |
Three things stand out.
The figures do not agree closely. Herring at 3.5–4.2 g per kg and the ISSN's 2.2–4.4 g per kg for beef and salmon overlap, but the range across and within studies is wide. The authors of the 2020 depression analysis wrote that creatine contents "vary widely within and among animal protein subgroups depending on the experiment" — which is why the population studies fall back on one average.
Dairy is not a meaningful source. At about 0.1 g per kg, a 250 ml glass of milk carries around 25 mg — roughly a two-hundredth of a supplement scoop.
Plants measure zero. Not low: zero, in the staples tested. This is the root of the lower muscle stores and larger supplement response reported in people who eat no meat or fish, covered on creatine for vegetarians and vegans.
No food label and no national table lists creatine
Creatine is not on the US Nutrition Facts panel, and it is absent from the national food-composition data too: the raw beef entries in USDA's FoodData Central, checked on 2026-09-28, report 18–22 nutrients each and none of them is creatine. A 2025 review by Sergej Ostojic in Nutrition Reviews lists "labeling the creatine content in common foods" and new food-chemistry studies among the steps needed before anyone can set a dietary reference value for it.
That is why every US intake estimate below multiplies grams of meat and fish by a single average. It is a reasonable workaround and it is also a real limitation: the intake figures are only as good as that one number.
How much food equals one scoop
A standard 5 g serving of creatine monohydrate carries about 4.4 g of creatine once the water in the crystal is subtracted (how much creatine should I take covers where the 5 g figure comes from). Divided by the measured and estimated contents above:
| Food basis | Food to supply 4.4 g of creatine | For a 20 g loading day (≈17.6 g creatine) |
|---|---|---|
| Survey average, 3.88 g/kg | ≈ 1.1 kg | ≈ 4.5 kg |
| Herring, 3.5–4.2 g/kg | ≈ 1.05–1.26 kg | ≈ 4.2–5.0 kg |
| Beef or salmon, ISSN 1–2 g per lb | ≈ 1.0–2.0 kg | ≈ 4.0–8.0 kg |
| Milk, 0.1 g/kg | ≈ 44 litres | — |
All of these are raw weights. The 2020 depression analysis put the same point another way: replacing the roughly 2 g a day an average adult excretes as creatinine through diet alone would take about 500 g of raw meat a day. That is the whole practical difference between food and a supplement — the molecule is the same, but the amounts used in trials (the 20 g loading days and 3–5 g maintenance described on creatine loading phase) are several times what any ordinary diet delivers.
What cooking does
The only heat-processing measurement found for this page is the herring study: at 115 °C, about a quarter of the creatine converted to creatinine, and total creatine plus creatinine also fell as some of it bound to the proteins while they coagulated. Creatinine is the same breakdown product the body produces, and it does not act as creatine.
Heat also matters for another reason worth stating accurately: creatine and creatinine in meat are among the precursors of heterocyclic amines, compounds formed on the surface of meat cooked at high temperature. That is a question about cooking method, not about creatine supplements, and it is outside this page's scope.
How much people actually eat
Three analyses of the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), all using the 3.88 g/kg average:
| Population | Average dietary creatine | Share eating little or none |
|---|---|---|
| 89,161 respondents aged 0–85, 1999–2018 | 0.70 g/day | — |
| 1,221 adults aged 65+, 2017–2018 | 0.76 g/day | 19.8% ate none on the survey day |
| 8,407 people on a self-reported special diet, 2003–2023 | 0.82 g/day | 69.5% below 1 g/day |
Set against a turnover of 1–3 g a day, average food intake covers well under half, and the body's own synthesis makes up the difference. That is normal physiology rather than a deficiency: people who eat no creatine at all still make it. What the survey data do show is that the muscle stores a supplement fills are not something a typical diet approaches — which is why the trials measured on how long creatine takes to work begin from the same baseline whether their volunteers ate steak or not.
Two cautions on those survey figures. They come from one or two days of dietary recall, multiplied by one average coefficient, so individual intake is estimated rather than measured. And one researcher, Sergej Ostojic, is an author of three of the four NHANES analyses cited here; in the 2026 paper he declares membership of AlzChem's scientific advisory board on creatine and co-founding a company that develops creatine-enriched foods. The figures are published and reproducible from the public survey; the framing of low intake as a problem is where that interest is most relevant.
What is established, and what is not
- Established: creatine in food comes from meat and fish; plant staples contain none; milk contains very little.
- Established: matching a 5 g supplement scoop with food takes roughly a kilogram of raw meat or fish.
- Established: average US intake from food is under 1 g a day on survey estimates.
- Not established: precise creatine contents for most foods, cuts and cooking methods. The published figures are few, old in places, and vary widely; national food tables carry none.
Sources
- Kreider RB, Kalman DS, Antonio J, et al. International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: safety and efficacy of creatine supplementation in exercise, sport, and medicine. J Int Soc Sports Nutr 2017;14:18. PMID 28615996 (full text read 2026-09-28).
- Wu G. Important roles of dietary taurine, creatine, carnosine, anserine and 4-hydroxyproline in human nutrition and health. Amino Acids 2020;52:329–360. PMID 32072297 (table of beef and plant-food contents read 2026-09-28).
- Hughes RB. Chemical studies on the herring (Clupea harengus). IV. Creatine in herring flesh, and its behaviour during heat processing. J Sci Food Agric 1960;11(12). doi:10.1002/jsfa.2740111204 (abstract read 2026-09-28).
- Bakian AV, et al. Dietary creatine intake and depression risk among U.S. adults. Transl Psychiatry 2020;10:52. PMID 32066709.
- Korovljev D, et al. Temporal trends in dietary creatine intake from 1999 to 2018. J Int Soc Sports Nutr 2021;18:53. PMID 34193199.
- Ostojic SM, et al. Dietary intake of creatine and risk of medical conditions in U.S. older men and women: NHANES 2017–2018. Food Sci Nutr 2021;9:5746–5754. PMID 34646542.
- Ostojic SM. High prevalence of low creatine intake among individuals following common special diets. Ann Nutr Metab 2026;82:32–35. PMID 41248084 (conflict-of-interest statement read 2026-09-28).
- Ostojic SM. Assessing dietary creatine intake in population studies: challenges and opportunities. Nutr Rev 2025;83:e2009–e2014. PMID 39441715.
- USDA FoodData Central, Foundation Foods raw beef entries, nutrient lists read via API 2026-09-28.