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Heres my story.
I went with my mom to the GNC near us
I pick up the creatine monohydrate I've been wanting to have for 5 months. I never had creatine, and I researched online how it does not hurt teenagers, such as myself at 16, and is a good healthy supplement for muscle building. HOWEVER, the woman at the counter is telling me that I should only take it once a month, and that a 16 year old shouldn't be taking it unless they want to end up in the hospital with kidney damage. So she suggests glutamine and a sports multi-vitiam. I was so mad the whole time and my mom got convinced by her and now she won't ever let me have creatine Can someone PLEASE on this post convince to my mom that it is safe for a 16 year old to consume. We got the glutamine and multi-vitamin but now I want to return it if I can convince my mom. So please help!

There have been over four hundred studies on creatine and none of them have shown to cause liver damage to healthy individuals. As for where creatine's bad rap came from...I think there was a study (maybe more than one) done several years ago that included a guy taking steroids...for obvious reasons, the subject's liver wasn't functioning correctly and he skewed the results. And apparently if you make mice consume the equivalent of their bodyweight in creatine it can cause liver or kidney disfunction. It probably would cause you to have liver problems if you were forced to eat your bodyweight in...anything. It should be safe...it has been taken for years and years by teens and there has never been shown to be serious adverse side effects.

That glutamine was a waste of money. Bioavailability of glutamine from oral supplementation is...not good. If I were you, I would get GNC's Mass XXX and 250g of creatine monohydrate. Take half of the recommended serving of the Mass XXX for your post workout shake and add 5g of creatine. That will give you a great ratio of carbs/protein & your creatine. I think that's your best bet. Oh btw, I work at GNC also.

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Thank you so much
You working at GNC and telling me this is good proof for my mom to hear. Why the hell was that woman telling me wrong?

Um, because a person at GNC is as likely to know anything about sports nutrition as a person at Target is to know about how fabrics are made just because they sell clothes. It is retail work.

I wouldn't be surprised if they get higher commision on the products she sold you then they get on the creatine you were looking at. That is really all they care about.

I've been using creatine on and off since I was 16 (thats 10 years) and no kidney issues to speak of.

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I don't do this for my family, my friends, women, accolades, pride, or ego. I do it for me and no one else, its just part of who I am.

I had considered trying to get hired at GNC as a means by which I could snatch some cheap supplements (back before I began realizing what a bunch of snake oil it all was)... Never followed through with it simply because the guys I knew that worked there were the same guys that have infamy in the weight room. I actually waited for one of these tools to finish a bench press/ curls superset (yes, curls in the squat rack) after asking him "Hey, can I use the squat rack?" he flexed his lats in the mirror looking at himself and said "no" and walked off to bench. I half laughed inside at just how stereotypical he was... fat (I'm sure he was "bulking") pretty good bench press, but I never saw him squat... maybe leg sled once for some kind of weird part of a partial rep thing with as many 45lb plates as the sled would take. At that point I decided that wasn't the place for me. This incident also convinced me that money spent on my membership was better spent on my own home gym, and that training lazy housewives for $10-12/hr take home wasn't good money. So now I generally think of GNC as another cog in the awfully ignorant machine that produces bodybuilding magazines and tries to convince teens that top bodybuilders got their size by taking saw palmetto and not a stack of steroids that would make most beef cattle faint.

I agree. I average about $7/hr just because I want to help/educate people. If I wanted to make over $10/hr, then I could. I look at my job as charity work because I put a LOT more into it than I get out of it and I try to educate the young guys that come in. It's pretty contrary to what GNC stands for, but I figure that it's better that I'm working my job than some other person. I have to keep that in mind because working there can be one of the most disenchanting/discouraging jobs ever.

I would like to think there are more people like you, Ross, but there wouldn't be enough of them to make me feel at ease

The other problem with GNC is that you have ignorant employees pandering to ignorant customers. Neither means harm, but you have guys who come in for the overpriced Muscletech swill and the goof behind the counter is happy to sell it and talk it up. The customer does as much to hose up the employee as the other way around. I can't BEGIN to tell you how often I have a good chuckle over some of the stuff I've heard at the GNC, and not all of it comes from a clerk. I've had customers chat me up too, though I suspect I'm not nearly the 300lb wall of muscle they idolize... Regardless, they often seem disappointed that I won't talk about supplements and how awesome they are. It is like a little cult, supplement heads

To the OP: did it cost more to buy the glutamine and multivitamin than just the creatine?

I think a lot of people, including myself, have been swindled into some worthless supplement at GNC at one time or another. I once went into GNC and asked about a thermogenic... guess which one I got? The Y3 Yohimbine fat burner, which helped as much as a placebo pill would. Btw, the Y3 was, of course, the most expensive one there. Don't mind shelling out a few extra clams if I get the results, but this was ridiculous!

Oh well, as the saying goes "fool me once, shame on you. fool me twice shame on me"

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"The iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you're a god or a total bastard. The iron will always kick you the real deal. The iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends come and go, but 200 pounds is always 200 pounds."

-Henry Rollins
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250g of CM is on sale for $6.99 right now. Glutamine is ridiculously expensive. Mega Men...you can decide. In any case, the Sport vitamin is $19.99 while the regular one is $17.99 & is in fact a better vitamin for athletes. I take dirt cheap vitamins (Solotron or whatever is cheaper) or Adam by NOW. Sounds like it was just a case of an ill-informed sales associate. Creatine got such a bad rap back in the day that a lot of people just wrote it off as unhealthy and never bothered to look into it since then. Like Andrew said, the majority of people working at GNC are nothing more than sales associates...and uneducated ones at that. There is no commission (for most people, and for others it's insignificant) on vitamins or glutamine.