Most of what is known about creatine, was learned from men’s bodies.
KOVA was born from one simple discovery — and the conviction that women deserve better than an industry that forgets them.
A research base built almost entirely on one sex.
Creatine has been studied for over forty years. More than five hundred peer-reviewed trials. It is, by some distance, the most rigorously validated supplement in sports nutrition. And yet, between 2014 and 2020, fewer than 6% of those trials studied women exclusively. The rest were conducted on men, or on mixed groups where female data was rarely separated out.
This is not unusual. It mirrors the rest of medical research. It just happens to be unusually well documented in creatine — which makes the gap unusually visible.
A gap that is rapidly closing — and one we built KOVA to help close.
The female-specific research that does exist is, in its own quiet way, remarkable. Women maintain 70 to 80 percent lower creatine stores than men. They synthesise creatine at roughly 20% lower rates. The brain — which consumes 20% of the body’s energy and runs almost entirely on ATP — appears to benefit measurably from supplementation in women under cognitive load, in postmenopausal bone density, and in mood-related trials. The room for meaningful effect, in women, may be larger than in the population the research was originally built for.
We built KOVA to start with that 9%, and grow with it.
One sachet. Five grams. Every morning.
KOVA is one sachet of pharmaceutical-grade creatine monohydrate, taken once a day with water or coffee. Five grams. The dose the research uses.
Each sachet also contains five co-ingredients chosen because a measurable share of European women are deficient in them, and because the science supports their inclusion alongside creatine: magnesium bisglycinate, lichen-derived vitamin D3, vitamin K2 as MK-7, folate as 5-MTHF, and vitamin B12 as methylcobalamin. The active forms. The doses the trials use.
Every batch is independently tested by Eurofins, an internationally accredited laboratory. The most recent report: creatine assay 102%, creatinine below 0.01%, dicyandiamide not detected, dihydrotriazine not detected, all heavy metals not detected. The full certificate of analysis is published for every production run, and downloadable on our science page.
We don’t sell a stack. We don’t sell a routine. We don’t sell a “starter kit.” We sell one product that does one thing, with as much care as we can put into it. That is the whole offer.
Restraint, written down.
A brand is the sum of what it says yes to. We think it is also the sum of what it says no to. So we wrote those down too.
Built on work we did not do.
KOVA exists because a small group of researchers — over the last two decades — quietly built the female-specific evidence base that the mainstream creatine research left out. We cite three of their names below. Eleven more sit on our science page, with citations attached to every claim we make.
Her work on sex-specific exercise physiology laid much of the groundwork for why a formula like KOVA is needed at all.
Lead author of the 2015 trial on creatine and bone density in postmenopausal women — the study behind our bone-health rationale.
Lead author of the 2021 Nutrients review of creatine across women’s lifespan. Her synthesis informs every dose on our science page.
A note on this. None of these researchers work for KOVA. None of them have endorsed this product. We have not approached them and we will not imply otherwise. They are scientists, and their work is theirs. What we have done is read it — closely, repeatedly — and built a product that takes their conclusions seriously. If our work falls short of theirs, the failure is ours. If it stands up, it is because they did the research that made the standing-up possible.
The team that does the rest.
KOVA itself is a small team in Amsterdam. We are not researchers. We do not pretend to be. We source the raw materials, we work with a GMP-certified manufacturer in the EU, we send every batch to Eurofins for independent verification, we write what you read on this site, and we answer your emails ourselves.
If you have questions we have not answered well enough, write to hello@takekova.com. Someone here, not a chatbot, will read it and reply within one business day.
A short and honest tally.
We did not start KOVA to build a brand. We started it because the most studied supplement in the world had almost never been studied in the body we were trying to support. That seemed worth correcting.
The rest is just doing the work.