Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

TL;DR: I had my sample lab analyzed and it is not creatine. I have been taking creatine for over 20 years now. I played football through college and have been a competitive powerlifter since. I know my body, and as a vegetarian, I don't get creatine in my diet, so supplementing with creatine is important for me and my training. I have also been consistently using Optimum Nutrition creatine as my preferred brand, until I found that it was not available around June when I needed to order some more (more on that in a bit). For approx 2 months this year my strength was down. I was missing about 2 reps on every exercise. I was thoroughly confused as to how this could happen. I tried shifting my diet, being more consistent with sleep, hydration, and even tried some new supplements. Eventually, fully exasperated, I went to my doctor. I feared that there was something seriously wrong with me. My blood work and physical were all fantastic. Eventually I remembered that it all started around the time I switched creatine brands, so I went into my order history and indeed found that my strength drop coincided with receiving this creatine. I bought this creatine because it was the cheapest at the time and creatine is creatine (or so I thought). Well, after googling a bit I found that there is a global creatine shortage right now (see for yourself) which has caused some brands to be unavailable and other brands to be far more expensive. How was Bulk Supplements able to continue selling for so cheap? Well, for one thing it's worth mentioning that health supplements have no FDA oversight and furthermore, Bulk Supplements makes no claims about product purity (see the listing here on Amazon). Bulk Supplements is at least cutting corners in the processing of the material, but I'll contend that they're selling material of very low purity, if there's any active creatine at all. I bought a different brand of creatine, and in less than 2 weeks my strength rebounded. So, a little about me, I work as a research chemist, which means that at work I have access to analytical chemistry equipment. I supplied a colleague in our analytical department with a journal article outlining techniques for creatine characterization (J Pharm Biomed Anal. 2002 Jul 31;29(5):939-45. doi: 10.1016/s0731-7085(02)00167-x*) and samples of the Bulk Supplements creatine to compare versus the other brand I recently received (Nutricost). They are not the same. I don't know what Bulk Supplements is selling, but it isn't creatine. Unfortunately I'm outside the window for Amazon return and Bulk Supplements told me I'd have to work through Amazon for any help, so I'm SOL there. A side note: when I contacted Bulk Supplements they told me that some lots of their "creatine" can have an odor or color... What? If you know anything about creatine, you know that isn't normal. Avoid this at all costs. *Quote from the abstract: "Some of the over-the-counter (OTC) products tested contained a very low level of creatine in contrast to their label claim."