Taurine deficiency as a driver of aging | Hacker News Reader

Taurine deficiency as a driver of aging

science.org

350 pointsgumby292 comments

Solid study, but the core results are based on a single genotype of mouse — C57BL/6J.

Imagine a clinical study of longevity using 120 clones of you or me. Taurine may be effective at extending lifespan and healthspan of C57BL/6J mice but will it work as well using genetically diverse mice such as the UM-HET3 mice?

Like humans, the UM-HET3 mice are genetically diverse (they segregate for about 11.5 million sequence variants). My hope is that taurine supplementation would work just as well using 120 UM-HET3 mice. A robust finding like that would impress me so much more.

I wish high profile journals—Science and Nature and Cell—would demand that submissions include at least several genotypes of mice. N = 1 studies are just barely worth discussing in HN with respect to humans.

In this case the authors did extend to other models to support their claims but these supplementary components do not test longevity directly.

Having pointed out the downside of this work, I am glad to see this study and will treat it as a promising pilot. Given much previous work my guess, and tacitly, those of the authors, is that taurine supplementation will be beneficial for many genotypes of mice and even humans.

However, there will not be one optimal treatment regimen for all mice or for all humans.

By the way: A 16 oz can of Monster contains 2 grams of taurine.

    By the way: A 16 oz can of Monster contains 2 grams of taurine.

My first thought when I reading your post (before I finished): How many grams of taurine per kilogram of body weight were used in the trial?

I found:

    Taurine supplementation increases the life span of mice

To determine whether the observed drop in taurine concentration contributes to aging, we orally administered control solution or taurine at 1000 mg per kg body weight (T1000), once daily at 10:00 am, to 14-month-old (middle-aged) C57Bl/6J WT female and male mice until the end of life.

Woah! That is a lot of taurine. Average adult me are about 60-80 kg. That would be 60-80 GRAMS of taurine per day! (Please correct me if I am wrong.)

According to https://examine.com/supplements/taurine/

"Serious adverse effects have not been reported with taurine supplementation. The highest dose used in a human trial was 10 grams per day for 6 months, and the longest human trial was 12 months and used a dose of 0.5–1.5 grams per day. Based on the available evidence, it’s suggested that 3 grams per day can be consumed indefinitely without risk of side effects."

"The observed safety limit, the highest dose for which one can be relatively assured that no side effects will occur over a lifetime, has been suggested to be 3g of taurine in supplemental form (in addition to food intake) a day.[140] Higher doses have been tested and well tolerated, but not enough evidence is available to suggest lifelong safety of said doses.

There is a notion that taurine causes heart damage, which is currently unsupported (and contrary to a fair bit of evidence). This appears to be due to a misunderstanding of why serum taurine levels are elevated during cardiac failure (which is from taurine leakage from cells)."

My advice, however, is to not take it for antiaging until the science is done on humans, specially at high doses.

Standard intake of taurine in most people is <200mg a day. That would be an astounding amount of taurine. Also, it's a little weird because humans can synthesize taurine, it's a major component of bile, so I'm unclear what mechanism could cause supplementation to have significant effects.

There are a lot of amino acids which the human body can produce that nonetheless show clinical effects when additional amounts are ingested.

I don’t understand the logic either but I’ve decided the human body has a billion things yet unknown to science so I take macro effects at face value even if I can’t learn an underlying mechanism for them.

As a side note, a lot of weightlifters believe taurine reduces muscle cramps.

Maybe there's a benefit to not needing to spend the energy or raw materials needed to synthesize something yourself? The large amounts needed might reflect that outsourcing the production is inefficient.

That makes me wonder how much of the physiological lifecycle we can offload the external processes and how much effect would that have on a human being?

We know, for instance, that connecting the circulatory system from an older animal to a younger one will cause the body of the younger animal to spend energy healing the cellular damage of the older one and can cause the older one to become younger by the markers we measure cellular age.

This is obviously unsustainable for any long term effect, and there are wild issues to consider with regards to the morality of doing this with human beings, but should the science advance to the point where we can grow genetically compatible functional organs, what harm would there be in having young custom grown organs attached to you, offloading everything that can be offloaded (pumping blood, secreting hormones and fresh stem cells, taking in extra oxygen, filtering out wastes, all of the things that your body has to work to do on its own)?

Do you think we would live longer, healthier, younger and more beautiful lives or would we become monsters permanently attached to backpacks stuffed to the brim with biological horror?

I don't think we'd be permanently attached, in that scenario. It would be more like a dock you attach to at night, or when at home.

Still horrific, don't get me wrong, but much less socially gauche than hauling a backpack full of spare parts around.

So basically we would have ports installed? I'm guessing near the kidneys since there are large vessels there that could be tapped into. That's slightly more terrifying to me than carrying an organ sack, but I guess it's important to look good in speedos, too.

I know of a condition that seems to involve inadequate bile production. So hypothetically, it could help in that case.

I know of one that is probably quite common: excess liver fat. Also if you costume crazy low amounts of fat you could probably get low bile production (as in fruitarian low, not whole foods plant based low).

Just one possiblilty: Wikipedia says Taurine takes Cysteine as a precursor, so producing more taurine might reduce cysteine levels. Hypothetically perhaps some of the benefits of tuarine supplementation could actually be achieved by cysteine supplementation instead. Biology can be very complicated ;-)

> humans can synthesize taurine, it's a major component of bile, so I'm unclear what mechanism could cause supplementation to have significant effects.

If the amount we synthesize drops over time then supplementing that would be beneficial?

I'm sure there are parallels in other things the body synthesizes

Humans can synthesise creatine, but we synthesise less than is ideal for elite strength athletes, so supplementation is still effective

> taurine at 1000 mg per kg body weight

Another commenter mentioned that taurine “LD50 is [5000 mg] per kg of body weight”.

So you would want to be very careful - especially if you are old, on medicine, drink alcohol, or have any issues processing taurine (liver/kidney?).

Ok. As im approaching my first half-kilo, my 250th can of energy drink, i'll slow down.

500g of taurine for a 100kg person - 50% chance you will be slowed down permanently (LD50 == Lethal Dose 50% - 1 in 2 chance of death).

One can of Red Bull feels like imminent death to me.

There is a comment much further down the page explaining how dosages don't translate across species like this. Apparently the human equivalent would be 6.48 grams per day.

Regardless of the humans body weight? I find that curious if so!

Could you post a link to the comment you mentioned? I scrolled down but didn't find it... :(

probably this one:

> Human-mouse conversion ratio is 1:12.3

>1000 mg per kg body weight

1g/kg body weight daily of ANYTHING is A LOT. 0.1% of your entire bodyweight.

What's interesting is I checked Wikipedia and found:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taurine

>accounts for up to 0.1% of total human body weight

>The mean daily intake from omnivore diets was determined to be around 58 mg

So this study is adding the entire amount found in a typical human's bodyweight every day.

1g/kg is 1%.

It's 0.1%

my bad, it totally is!

Human-mouse conversion ratio is 1:12.3, so about 6g a day. I easily eat a gram if I drink a ton of coffee.

Thank you to share! Where does that ratio come from? Please educate us.

The human-mouse equivalent dose ratio/interspecies allometric scaling is a foundational topic in exploratory pharmacological studies. You can find information f.e. in "A simple practice guide for dose conversion between animals and human".

Forward-quoting a comment by rale00 below:

"You don't directly convert dosage across species like that. The dosage they tested on monkeys was 250mg/kg, and the human equivalent would be less than that."

There were some other replies in the thread. Does not scale linearly from mouse to humans. The human equivalent (from memory) is about 8 gm/day.

> By the way: A 16 oz can of Monster contains 2 grams of taurine.

And at least 50%+ of the "added sugar" recommendation(s) for an entire day (depending on whether you look at FDA, AHA, etc. guidelines).

You make good points, for sure, and I appreciate your comment and insights. But, "sugar" is definitely an issue with a lot of current foods.

Carbohydrates are crucial building blocks, biochemically. However, there are numerous increasingly documented adverse effects stemming from "simple sugars" consumption - both epidemiologically, and mechanistically / molecularly (e.g., "glycation").

That said, I'd absolutely recommend sugar over many other available sweeteners. In fact, there are a whole host of "refined" food "modifiers" increasingly available and used that seem to have often unfortunately deleterious effects. For example, even substances like inulin, sugar alcohols, etc., that can be beneficial (have been determined to contribute to healthfulness) in various foods that have been eaten by humans for centuries if not millennia, often end up either not beneficial or actually harmful as applied in current "modern food chemistry".

This isn't to say that we must go "paleo", nor that there are inherent or unsurpassable problems in formulating and "manufacturing" (always a word I love, when it comes to food ... meh) new food products that are safe and have advantages over many entirely unprocessed foods (hell, cooking IS a form of processing, and it's rather crucial given our physiologies, improving safety and nutrition of many types of foods significantly). But, food processing and manufacturing is a rather lightly regulated industry in some ways, and much of it moves far faster than studies of the implications of all of the new formulations, additives, etc.

Time and again, people and industry have been enamored of some apparent "free lunch" that has bitten us in the ass, so to speak, ultimately.

> That said, I'd absolutely recommend sugar over many other available sweeteners.

I sure wouldn't. Many of the classic, non-nutritive sweeteners like sucralose have been tested more thoroughly than almost any substance we ingest. Even at heroic doses tens of thousands of times higher than what would be used normally, no significant health effects have been noted.

In contrast, we have sucrose: a caloric carbohydrate that rapidly and reliably raises blood sugar, and due to its fructose content, has been linked to NAFLD. If nothing else, it's 'empty' caloric value, high palatability, popularity in beverages, and low cost (especially as the almost functionally identical HFCS) has without a doubt been a major contributor to the obesity epidemic.

So sure, removing all added sweeteners ('natural' or otherwise) would be better, but a NNS is way, way better than sugar.

You seem knowledgeable about sucralose ("Splenda" in US commercial branding). Thank you to share. On Wiki, it says that sucralose is "genotoxic", but provides no further information. I read the genotoxic Wiki page -- sounds terrible. What am I missing? To be clear: This is not a scare post, rather "explain it to me like I am a 5 year old"!

When I Google <<sucralose genotoxic>>, most of the results are untrustworthy, click-bait news sources.

The genotoxic edit was added by an IP editor citing an in-vitro study, I wouldn't pay much attention to it, you can find higher quality references on the article, for example this one:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027869151...

Nice post. Thanks for the info. I was bothered that "genotoxic" didn't have a reference.

For other readers, I didn't know what "in-vitro study" meant. Google tells me:

    In vitro is Latin for “in glass.” It describes medical procedures, tests, and experiments that researchers perform outside of a living organism. An in vitro study occurs in a controlled environment, such as a test tube or petri dish.

> Many of the classic, non-nutritive sweeteners like sucralose have been tested more thoroughly than almost any substance we ingest.

..until last week:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sucralose+cancer

Also: https://www.splenda.com/blog/splenda-brand-statement-on-rece...

>> > By the way: A 16 oz can of Monster contains 2 grams of taurine. And at least 50%+ of the "added sugar" recommendation(s) for an entire day

They could try using glycine as a sweetener. Another amino acid that we could use a little more of. It really does taste sweet.

There are 0 sugar versions of monster

Whats your thoughts on the dosage? They use 1g per kg of body weight! If I drank Monster to get the equivalent dosage I think I'd probably die... How did they arrive on that dosage?

That's because Monster has caffiene and other chemicals in there that may kill you! The Taurine itself probably won't kill you as LD50 is 5g per kg of body weight

LD50 should be taken with a huge grain of salt for any compound. First of all LD50 is just the dose required to kill half the subjects within some short time frame. Long term toxicity is not captured by this number. And doses well below LD50 can still kill you.

Also, because you can't overdose humans with drugs until half of them die(in most jurisdictions...), the number is pretty much always based on animal experiments. And it's quite typical for some things to be wildly more toxic in certain species than in others.

Crucially, a dose of 1g/kg has never been tested in humans in the short or long term.

I'd be very hesitant to say that 1g/kg is unlikely to kill a human being based on LD50 being 5g/kg. It could very well have an unacceptably high risk of death, or long term toxicity.

Also, please don't make statements like this based on LD50 unless you're absolutely sure. Someone who understands even less about it might look at it and thnk "this guy seems to know his stuff", and then do something stupid.

What’s the LD50 of a huge grain of salt.

While the mouse example of 1000mg/kg is ridiculously high, the monkey trial used 250mg/kg.

Assumption time: assume a 67kg human who consumes 3 cans of redbull a day (not especially unusual). they are ingesting 9000mg (total) per day, which comes out 135mg/kg. Given the easy availability of Taurine supplements in almost any pharmacy it’s not a stretch to see this pushed significantly higher.

Added to the above, this was an initial trial, and it’s very possible the therapeutic levels of Taurine supplementation may be significantly lower (there appeared to be a correlation of health and life extension between the mice and monkeys even with the significant difference in dosages) it’s very possible that the 3 can of red bull dosage is efficacious. Of course that could be mitigated by the high levels of sugar and caffeine but that is outside of the scope of this conversation.

To summarize : 250mg/kg was efficacious in monkeys and no lower bound was determined, it’s possible the amount of Taurine in 3 cans of redbull (assume 9000mg) per day is within the clinically effective range.

> Crucially, a dose of 1g/kg has never been tested in humans in the short or long term.

I wonder if some bodybuilders didnt take a lot of taurine

Trials like these usually use herculean doses like this. If you remember, the "aspartame can kill you" trials also used an incredible amount of aspartame to kill the mice.

please let us not all start chugging Monster to live longer. 2 grams of taurine will surely be nullified by all the other crap in there

Didn't read the study, but would it be good if they had 120 clones of you and gave 60 taurine and 60 a placebo, and the taurine ones showed better longevity?

Yes, it would be good and this is precisely what they did in this study.

WHy does it have Taurine? I honestly don't know why any of the non-caffiene non-b vitamin ingredients are in "energy drinks" like Taurine.

According to GPT4 there's research indicating that taurine increases metabolism, improves athletic performance, helps regulate neurotransmitters (so could be construed to improve cognitive functioning), and improves cardiovascular health.

I'd wager you can't conclude from any of that research that putting a gram of it in a drink will help with anything at all, but from a marketing perspective it's a name that carries all the right connotations.

GPT4 is not a search engine. Please stop.

Cite sources or don't do this.

I did cite my source by saying it's GPT4, so you know exactly what quality to attribute to the information. I figured it was a good enough source given the context, because my point was that taurine is a good fit for marketing. For that purpose it doesn't really matter whether the information is true. What matters is public perception, and I trust that that's well represented by GPT4 in this case.

GPT4 isn't a source of information. It's a probabilistic string of text.

Cite actual sources, please.

according to gpt4 there's reasearch that indicates that spice melange assists in cognitive loads especially relating to navigation in fold space

Love it! Waiting eagerly for next installment of Dune.

I really wish they didn't have so much damn niacin(B3) in them. Niacin has side effects like sweating and flushing in doses not much higher than RDI, and yet one 500ml energy drink typically contains 250% RDI of niacin.

Like, why the fuck? At least cut it down to at most 100%.

No, there are different forms of vitamin B3. Niacinamide (aka nicotinamide) is the non-flushing form.

It is a reasonably well documented protectant of neurons and mitochondria.

Here is one great example publication related to a mouse model of glaucoma:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28209901/

I take 3 gm/ day and have for 6 years with what I think are notable improvements in cognitive function. Your mileage may vary.

Taurine is said to have an anti-anxiety effect. I have taken it for this reason and believe it is effective (or placebo ..).

My assumption was it helps ease the stimulant effects of all the other stuff in energy drinks.

Taurine? I've been jacking myself full of that since Middle School! Thanks RedBull!

Jokes aside, This feels like one of "Wine is Good for you" In moderation and other fine point details. Not buying it.

Can't stop laughing. The day after is terrible, but with the aging factor relevated - here is the recipe of favorite anti-aging cocktail

Jäger Bomb

Ingredients 1 1/2 ounces Jägermeister Liqueur 1/2 (8.4-ounce) can Red Bull energy drink

https://www.thespruceeats.com/jager-bomb-recipe-759713

I've always enjoyed Jäger bombs half and half. Then again, no one survives living in Champaign, IL without getting well acquainted to Jägermeister.

I've was always partial to the Blue Guy at Kams.

jaeger has a history as a traditional alpine bitter of serving some sort of medicinal purpose. like chartreuse or absinthe, lots of the herbal ingredients inside sometimes helped soothe upset tummies, or in the case of wormwood, expel parasites and worms.

or a nice steak. 1 - 14oz steak, season with tiptop steak seasoning, grill 3-4mins per side on med heat. let rest 5 mins. enjoy.

The nice steak and its sides provide the essential… stomach lining… to cope with the jägerbomb

Octopus and squids works too. Buy boiled and/or pre-sashimi’d, open package, slice as needed and serve with soy sauce.

Somehow I hated them as a child. Maybe it was too much for my body back then.

> The median life span of taurine-treated mice increased by 10 to 12%, and life expectancy at 28 months increased by about 18 to 25%. A meaningful antiaging therapy should not only improve life span but also health span, the period of healthy living. We, therefore, investigated the health of taurine-fed middle-aged mice and found an improved functioning of bone, muscle, pancreas, brain, fat, gut, and immune system, indicating an overall increase in health span. We observed similar effects in monkeys.

I don't think any studies have shown red wine to have a clear casual impact like that, even just in mice.

10-12% of a mouse's life is 5 or 6 months. Assuming it's going to extend human lives by 7 years and not 6 months is being optimistic at best.

MSM media is always trying to convince people they can live longer if they stick with coffee, berries, dark chocolate and wine — as if those foods needed boosters. And if true I’m quite sure we’d have people out there living to 150…

People are very receptive and willing to share your articles around when you tell them they're better off keeping enjoying they current lifestyle.

They have an incentive to boost "forbidden pleasure" foods that are popular with their subscribers. The subscribers get an excuse to do what they are already doing, the article feels dramatic because of the fake controversy, and the article is a little more viral by pretending to tell people something secret or surprising.

You probably can live longer if you stick with coffee (black), berries (minus the food you put the berries on top of), dark chocolate (unsweetened), and wine (in strict moderation).

Alcohol is a carcinogen, so if you’re optimizing for “living longer” you should take exactly 0 mL a day.

If you’re optimizing for living happier, on the other hand…

Oxygen is a carcinogen, now what...

That’s why we recently decided to cut its presence in the atmosphere by dramatically increasing CO2.

But as usual, inhale in small amounts only. There might be a cure coming at some point, but don’t hold your breath.

:^)

Now do weed.

Genome-wide DNA methylation association study of recent and cumulative marijuana use in middle aged adults https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-023-02106-y

And in general, if you’re smoking it…

There is no such thing as 0 tollerance. Don't believe the anti-alcohol hype. There is such thing as hormesis, for basically any poison.

Evidence for hormesis is not convincing.

That is not true. Hormesis is a fact.

Can you link to some evidence I may have overlooked?

Sure: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=hormesis

https://asomenopausia.com/booksmedbio/Hormesis%20-%20The%20D...

Dark chocolate isn't exactly the safest food, even unsweetened:

https://time.com/6243073/heavy-metals-dark-chocolate-food/

For those curious, here's the report linked in that article:

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/lead-and-...

A similar problem exists with Polonium-210 uptake in tobacco... although no one ever called tobacco healthy or safe. I basically live on dark chocolate, wine, red meat and tobacco, so we'll see what gets me first.

I guess the would matter on where in the world too the cocoa was grown. In the Caribbean the soil wouldn't have heavy metals.

Add to that the high oxalate content in dark chocolate.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08891...

The third most common cause of death in the United States, at least before COVID was a thing, is "accidental self-inflicted injury."

Heart Disease and Cancer, most in old age, are the top two.

Making micro adjustments to your diet just doesn't stand a chance at making a meaningful difference.

I'd really like to see that category broken down by sobriety. The overwhelming majority of my accidental self-inflicted injuries have happened when I was drinking. Broken shoulder (let's have sex on the arm of this chair... oops, it has wheels), broken kneecap (running upstairs), partially severed thumb (sure, I'll just open this plastic case with a knife!)...

The suggestion you're replying to was basically "cut out a ton of extra sugar" which would quite likely have an impact on heart disease.

Instead of wine I'd go with resveratrol directly.

The people I know who talk about these items the most vocally also frequently have fast food.

> Jokes aside, This feels like one of "Wine is Good for you" In moderation and other fine point details. Not buying it.

I mean, pinot noir has a lot of resveratrol. You'd just need 750-1000 glasses daily.

Is that a challenge? Because my mother in law just calls that Thursday.

AFAIK, at this point resveratrol does not look promising.

David Sinclair wrote in "Lifespan"[1] that they extended mice lifespan by (iirc) something like 40% but amounts of resveratrol used was something like mentioned 750-1000 wine glasses daily when translated to humans.

While Wikipedia suggests that resveratrol is not proven to help with anything, I'm still taking 600mg in the morning, along with 600mg ALA and 100mg of CoQ10. Placebo is an effect, too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifespan%3A_Why_We_Age_%E2%80%...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGmmBJq0NNo

I think at this point Sinclair has lost a lot of credibility

Thank you. Saddening but informative.

I was chatting about resveratrol this very week with a colleague, ex pro athlete, writing about "Nutrition in Sports" for his PhD. Looking forward to discussing these findings with him.

The really interesting clincher wasn't the association of taurine with anti-aging, but the association of exercise with increased serum concentrations of taurine.

> Not buying it

What is there not to buy?

They tested it in mice and it increased lifespan, they never claimed it worked for humans in the study.

> To test whether taurine deficiency is a driver of aging in humans as well, long-term, well-controlled taurine supplementation trials that measure health span and life span as outcomes are required.

Did you read the abstract?

Unfortunately all the sugar is working in the opposite direction.

Do they actually have mice drink wine?

As a PhD and a hobby writer myself, I tend to put a lot of attention on first sentences. And it is something that all academics do, specially when submitting to the highest divinities, i.e. Science and Nature.

The first sentence in the structured abstract of this paper is curious:

> Aging is an inevitable multifactorial process.

If the paper were discussing aging in general, the use of the word "inevitable" would be an expected adjective. Not entirely useful, it wouldn't be new information because everybody knows that aging is inevitable, but excusable.

Yet, the paper is discussing counteracting--if only a little--aging. I would have written "Aging is a poorly understood multifactorial process" (to be modest), or "Aging is the combination of natural drift and degradation in complex systems and evolved coping mechanisms" (to set the world on fire).

So, to me, this first sentence sounds like cultural subservience: "Before you get the pitchforks and the bonfires, we don't want to be young forever, please spare us. Now, with that out of the way, aging is a multifactorial..."

> cultural subservience

Or perhaps recognition that we live in the time of a Fallacy-Industrial Complex?

"Aging is inevitable, there is no magic, don't delude yourself into thinking that you are going to avoid aging by gorging on some single element or compound. Get enough rest, take care of your teeth and gums, exercise daily, and maintain a healthy weight. Everything else is a marketing scam.

That said, here's what we found playing with mice and taurine..."

I'm surprised to see no mention of exercise in the comment section. It seems that working out produces "[...] increased the concentrations of taurine metabolites in blood, which might partially underlie the antiaging effects of exercise."

For the able-bodied, it may be enough to incorporate more exercise into our life?

If you are working out a lot, you might want to consume more taurine anyways (which you can naturally get from eggs and meat). It's an important amino acid that supports muscle growth.

I believe it plays a factor in getting salts/electrolytes to the tissue, but I'm not 100% clear on that.

If you're old, Eat more protein.

Anyone doing any degree of attempt to recover (lost) muscle tone as an older person is told 'eat more protein' to help "feed" muscle mass rebuilding after the exercise induced stresses which are heading to "bigger muscles"

So if you eat more protein, you're going to get Taurine.

Drinking a can of "monster" is not the answer.

Does this mean "exercise extends life" is actually .. the protein you eat building muscle is supplying the taurine you need to extend life?

(no: more muscle is a net good all of its own. it helps with diabetes/insulin issues, it helps with core stability == less accidents. it helps with preventing bone loss. it helps with cardio. but ... )

This actually may not be good advice, because methionine restriction has been found to mimic caloric restriction in extending lifespan, and also inhibits cancer cell growth.

See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5008916/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32138282/ for example.

Go for pea protein then?

Would it be more practical to take a supplement containing all the amino acids used by [human] ribosomes?

Those, as I understand them to be, are:

alanine, arginine, asparagine, aspartic acid, cysteine, glutamine, glutamic acid, glycine, histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, proline, serine, threonine, tryptophan, tyrosine, valine.

And why am I not seeing taurine in this list?

https://www.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/education/AminoAcid/the_twenty.h...

In the study mice were given 1000 mg taurine per kg body weight per day. In comparison a typical taurine supplement for humans is 1000 mg total.

IOW they gave the mice a dose of taurine that, proportionally, i'd be unwilling to take.

You don't directly convert dosage across species like that. The dosage they tested on monkeys was 250mg/kg, and the human equivalent would be less than that.

The basic formula from mouse to human is (X mg * (3/37)) = human equivalent dose in mg/kg.

In this case (1000mg * 3/37)) comes out to 81mg/kg. So, if you weigh 80kg, it comes out to 6.48 grams per day.

That's a lot of taurine, but not really a crazy amount. Easy enough to consume.

I see that Amazon sells 1 gram capsules of taurine (several vendors). So, yeah, not too difficult to consume. One brand I saw is about $0.08/gram, so it wouldn't be overly financially burdensome, either.

IMO anything you buy from Amazon that goes into your body should be considered at best fraudulent and at worst toxic until proven otherwise.

Is there a precise biological explanation for that factor, e.g. metabolism rate or something?

> oxygen utilization, caloric expenditure, basal metabolism, blood volume, circulating plasma proteins, and renal function

The equation is from here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17942826/

For what it's worth, the rat equation is (X mg * (6/37))

Keep in mind that it's a loose/general guideline. Basically a starting point. But usually a quite accurate one.

When my son had cancer, many of the medication dosages were based on body surface area. Maybe it is similar to that.

https://reference.medscape.com/calculator/692/body-surface-a...

> Serious adverse effects have not been reported with taurine supplementation.[24] The highest dose used in a human trial was 10 grams per day for 6 months, and the longest human trial was 12 months and used a dose of 0.5–1.5 grams per day. Based on the available evidence, it’s suggested that 3 grams per day can be consumed indefinitely without risk of side effects.[24]

https://examine.com/supplements/taurine/

For what it’s worth, Wikipedia is currently referencing a 2009 study which had previously tested 1000mg/kg in humans.

Really? For a 100kg human (me) that is 100g a day of taurine which is more than 3 ounces or this whole bottle

https://www.amazon.com/NOW-Supplements-Taurine-Strength-Caps...

and costs about $9. Seems like a lot. Contrast that to the claim that people should eat about 800mg/kg a day of protein overall

https://www.sclhealth.org/blog/2019/07/how-much-protein-is-s...

Not saying it is a good idea, but based on that one study I did not read, the amount is tolerable without acute symptoms.

1000 mg ... you mean a gram :-) ?

he meant 0.001 kg

Or about 5e-34 solar mass, which is the only natural way to measure your intakes :)

Don‘t miss out the related perspective article on this: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi3025

It discusses important issues like

„ A key issue for any longevity intervention is whether it causes calorie restriction (which can extend life span) or acts through independent mechanisms. Singh et al. found that taurine supplementation did not affect food intake in mice but nonetheless caused a small decrease in body weight, indicating a calorie deficit. Energy expenditure was higher in taurine-treated mice and intestinal transit time was accelerated, although it is not clear if nutrient absorption was decreased. The change in intestinal behavior is intriguing, because taurine is conjugated to bile acids to form bile salts, which facilitate uptake of dietary lipids (1). It will be crucial to control for the effects of taurine on body composition and nutrient uptake in future studies.“

Taurine is an amino acid, aka a building block of protein. It's found in abundance in meat and seafood.

(I had trouble parsing the title of this piece. Insert joke here about how I don't need to read this article because I no longer own a car nor have a driver's license.)

Taurine does not contribute to protein structure.

Taurine helps regulate the levels of water and minerals in the blood, contributing to overall fluid balance and proper functioning of the muscles and nerves.

Also it acts as a neurotransmitter in the brain.

Taurine is found in high amounts in the eye and it's thought to protect against retinal degeneration.

Finally Taurine is used in the formation of bile salts.

But, unlike most amino acids it’s not used in protein synthesis.

Thank you.

I'm confused. Taurine is found in meat, fish, and apparently, RedBull. But I thought there was a negative correlation between health/aging and eating lots of meat and RedBull. Is there a secret source of taurine that I'm missing? If I double up on fish, can I expect to live longer, assuming I don't accidentally increase my mercury levels?

No one has ever proven a direct causal relationship between (unprocessed) red meat consumption and poor health. The studies which purport to show a link are all low quality observational studies that suffer from the healthy subject effect and failed to control for some confounders. If there is a real effect it is very small, much less significant than total calorie intake.

Perhaps another example of us not really having a clue what's going on with biology, and how it's especially bad when this intersects with anything related with diet. Biology of aging is already extremely difficult, and that's just when we can try for separation of variables in studies of organisms such as yeast. Moving to mammals causes incredible challenges in determining molecular biology drivers, and trying for small molecules interventions beyond that typically causes far too much to be lost in translation. Diet just takes it a bit further by mixing a huge concoction of small molecules together and calls by a simple name, like 'egg'. So all in all, if you want to learn what's really going on, try learning the planarian or yeast cell biology literature first before moving on to these more complex systems in order to get a decent idea for how much weight they hold.

Energy drinks aren't a good source-- there's lots of Taurine, sure, but the net effect of the drink acts as a diuretic. Chronic dehydration will subtract from life expectancy.

What if you drink water with it?

the wikipedia entry for taurine states that the human body can synthesize taurine from cysteine as well.

the wikipedia entry also says dietary taurine intake is rather low, considering the doses the main article talks about, about 40-400mg/day taurine intake.

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taurine

~post deleted for privacy~

I will report back on the experiment, however.

Be sure to rule out the 'sugar rush' effect. Not that your ~150 millilitre (or just over 5 fl oz) drink is the world's worst in that respect - it weighs in at around 4 teaspoons of sugar, based upon my googling. Some energy drinks have more.

It's still the sugar equivalent of having a small cup of tea/coffee/water, and stirring in 4 sugars. If chugged down quickly, that's quite a hit! Even if not, it's still more sugar rich than most things you'll intake in your day-to-day.

Your experience may well be due in part or whole to taurine, I can't say. But parents of young children everywhere can attest to the effect of one overly sugary serving resulting in quite a bit of resultant hyperactivity and mood change over the following hours. So your experiments may benefit from some controls in that respect.

It was a sugar-free monster. Drinking or eating other sugar rich products do not have the effect.

I'm not sure what your original post said, but more a response to the other commentor on "chugging down quickly".

Note that energy drinks have caffeine, and if you consume a lot of caffeine in a short time it can be fatal.

For anyone wanting to consume taurine, you can simply buy taurine. No need to drink energy drinks which I'm sure aren't super healthy (even without sugar).

That's great, then. It seems like, depending on how knowledge develops, taurine may become quite the popular product. As a person in a not-dissimilar situation - thanks a lot for posting.

You're a nice person. Thanks for the post.

Make sure to report back

Any nutrient deficiency is usually a proxy for a poor diet, or at least a diet lacking some key foods.

For taurine, it would be some animal food source, specially molusk/fish.

Or digestive disorders like IBD

Agree, but in that case oral supplementation won't help

Got it. So I need to eat more cat food.

Note most protein chains have taurine, like whey.

If you are following the 1g per kg per day of protein guideline, you likely have been taking in plenty of taurine and your body makes some too.

But general population nutrition basically gets worse every year, people other than athletes are likely not getting enough protein.

Food prices now are also going to be a huge problem, protein isn't cheap in any form.

Interesting, so Red Bull is actually healthy?

Anecdata: a heavy (2 x 8oz cans/day) consumer of Red Bull I got sleep problems starting around 34.

Can't be sure they are related, but Red Bull is definitely the main suspect.

I've developed sleep problems as I've gotten older, but I've never touched Red Bull.

We can't draw any generalizable conclusions from isolated anecdotes like this.

Maybe for you or maybe not, but I need to write this out there: My wife (42 YO) started to experience sleep issues around a year ago. She tried with lots of stuff including delayed-release Melatonin, and nothing quite worked well. Until she started taking ZMA pills [1]. This supplement really solved her issues. I take "half dose" sporadically and really helps me get a full good deep night sleep.

It may or may not work for you, but it's one of those things that may be worth try it, and they sell it GNC and similar mainstreet stores.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZMA_(supplement)

It is the magnesium that is relevant.

Sure, but something formulated as a profound energy stimulant containing the equivalent of a cup of coffee of caffeine plus other energy boosters could be rightly suspected of affecting energy levels, and so possibly also sleep, given two per day?

Sleep naturally degrades as we age. So potentially the "development" is less a result of doing or not doing something versus just the degradation of sleep as a natural part of the aging process.

Sleep degradation is really not a natural consequence of aging. Rather it tends to be caused by negative lifestyle factors typically correlated with age, in particular obesity. Let's be clear about the causality here.

Because unfortunately, your problem as you get older is baggage - the worst thief of sleep of all time. Sorry, no cure unless you're a zen stoic psychopath. Would love to achieve that designation myself.

That’s a high amount of sugar. That by itself can’t be too good.

I drink the 0 sugar version.

I doubt the sugar alone is to blame and not the high caffeine content.

There is not that much caffeine in Red Bull surprisingly. It’s a lot compared to a soda but it pales if you compare it to coffee: it’s approximately half as much as what’s in an espresso. Caffeine-wise, drinking two cans should be fine (provided you don’t drink a ton of other caffeinated beverages).

Honestly my first guess here is that we are in the presence of a confounding variable. I can somewhat imagine the life style which goes with having to drink two cans of Red Bull everyday. The cause of the sleep problems starting at the beginning of early middle age might actually be found here.

I don't think it's anything confounding; it's likely just age. Old people are really sensitive about drinking caffeinated coffee late in the day for reasons I never understood until my mid-30s, where suddenly I had to watch soda intake after 6pm or I'd get insomnia.

(Also, use phone/monitor night mode and don't do anything intense within 1hr of bed-- no gaming, no exercise, no forums, no outrage-inducing news, etc. Wind down with something boring.)

And do you suspect the taurine, or the caffeine?

Was actually needing some caffeine to up me toda. I debated having a sugar free Red Bull but even the sugar free ones are not great for you due to the sucralose

I know I won't change anyone's already set opinions here, but for anyone reading this and not sure what is being discussed: there's absolutely nothing wrong with consuming sucralose.

I personally find what poses a risk to my health (actually my waist line) is if I have one sugar free drink (sweetened) I just crave more.

I don't know if the sugar mitigates some effect, or it's purely driven by psychology and me unconsciously feeling unrestricted in consuming sugar free drinks. But I see a clear effect in me.

I even tried coke life when it existed to see if I managed it better but it was too short lived to know.

Yes your blood sugar is regulated by insulin

You don't know this! I don't take issue with you consuming it but you absolutely shouldn't have confidence that there aren't negative effects from consuming something humans never had to adapt to. Just say "we don't know of anything wrong with consuming it"

These artificial sweeteners are among the most studied chemicals in the world. At some point you've gotta say okay, they're fine, or okay, they're not.

If artificial sweeteners are so well studied as you claim then why sucralose was found to damage DNA while erythritol was linked to heart attacks in studies just this year?

Sugar or nothing for me personally.

Studied by whom for what goal? They're also some of the most astutely-avoided substances, with various products proudly proclaiming they don't contain them. Such markets could well potentially exist due to user experience trumping studies.

So I take it you're on the "okay, they're not" side of that divide?

I mean, how many more decades does one need to really make a decision on these?

2-3 generations. Historically demonstrable as a metric to be sure about the ill effects of a new substance/tech. History is littered with examples of consumers & industry placing convenience & profits ahead of what's sensible to these ends.

Eg, X-rays - 60 years from invention, popularity, child use, "crazy" people claiming they're bad, to suspicion they might be, conservative study, realising they're screwed, all kinds of safety standards being applied, and acceptance.

Radiation, thalidomide, PCB's, DDT's, smoking, Asbestos, etc. Sometimes it can be faster or slower, but 2-3 human generations is also pragmatic as you can reasonably assess effects on offspring as well as sufficiently-aged pioneers.

I mean, why are people even considering artificial sweeteners? Isn't it only because it's taken us all several decades to realise refined sugar is fucked after initially thinking it was great if not at least "safe"?

I'm happy ingesting organic fruit, but I understand many out there prefer their bodies used as profit-making devices.

> I mean, why are people even considering artificial sweeteners? Isn't it only because it's taken us all several decades to realise refined sugar is fucked after initially thinking it was great if not at least "safe"?

Can't speak for anyone else obviously, I use sucralose to sweeten plain nonfat greek yogurt for breakfast. It tastes like churned asshole without it, but it's otherwise a great food with everything I need for breakfast. Then I flavor it with either a certain number of calories, or artificial flavoring, depending on the day's goal.

I use sucralose in particular because it's what was available, but I'd be perfectly happy using aspartame or whatever instead if that's what was usable.

Have you tried allulose/Monk Fruit? That's the new zero calorie sweetener hotness. I've been using it for sweetener the past year and haven't heard of any ill effects but that could just be due to lack of studies like we have for sucralose and erythritol.

Agree on the Greek yoghurt taste. I'd sweeten it with banana, as it can mix nice without much effort and is also packed with nutrients along with only a tiny bit lethal radiation. Calories I've no idea about though.

I've often wondered why grocery stores are infested with flavored yogurts, especially when they are often out of the plain variants that I'm seeking. I've thankfully never felt the need to 'flavor' yogurt and prefer its taste unadulterated - sourer the better.

There are studies for and against artificial sweeteners. There are studies funded by industry. There is such a thing as corruption in science and corruption in regulatory agencies. The global artificial sweetener market size is $7 Billion.

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/this-common-sugar-sub...

I think you'll find nothing I said contradicts that statement.

You have a short memory. Not long ago you wrote the following

> I know I won't change anyone's already set opinions here, but for anyone reading this and not sure what is being discussed: there's absolutely nothing wrong with consuming sucralose.

Then I posted a link to a study showing Sucralose is toxic.

Yes and I'll stand by that statement. I think you'll find, once again, that nothing I said contradicts the statement you made, which is:

> There are studies for and against artificial sweeteners. There are studies funded by industry. There is such a thing as corruption in science and corruption in regulatory agencies. The global artificial sweetener market size is $7 Billion.

I get that you're on the "okay, they're not" side of that divide that we all find themselves on. That's fine, and you are welcome to come to that conclusion. It's not one I've come to, but that's why the world is made up of different people. Remember, what I actually said was:

> These artificial sweeteners are among the most studied chemicals in the world. At some point you've gotta say okay, they're fine, or okay, they're not.

as well as the post you quoted. So I'm really not sure what you're arguing about here. Nothing I said contradicts your statement of "There are studies for and against...". Indeed, there are. Decades of them.

You wrote

> there's absolutely nothing wrong with consuming sucralose

Well, there are studies showing that there is something wrong with consuming sucralose.

I posted a link to such a study. That contradicts your statement.

You actually posted a link to a news article about a study, not a link to a study. And no, it doesn't contradict my statement that there's nothing wrong with consuming sucralose. It by itself is a piece of evidence, and doesn't by itself override decades of evidence.

The article contains direct links to studies

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10937404.2023.2...

https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj-2022-071204

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2022.84839...

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2607/10/2/434

This obviously logically contradicts your statement.

Your sophistry is incredible. Let's see how you bullshit your way out of this one.

There's no sophistry here. I simply find the FDA's GRAS finding, and the EU SCF's findings, to be much more convincing than a handful of restricted studies.

You, clearly, do not feel the same, but given that you feel that my position on this is "sophistry" and "bullshit", it is obvious that we are incapable of having an actual discussion on it.

I'm with xcv here. It's impossible to have a logical discussion with someone who doesn't see a contradiction between "sucralose is toxic" and "there is nothing wrong with sucralose", and it's impossible to have a fairminded discussion with someone who gives objections as speed bumps instead of arguments. If you really cared whether he had linked to a news article vs a study, you would have been satisfied and apologetic when he showed you the article linked to a study; instead you just switched to objections about the quality of the study.

I'm really not understanding why this is being called a contradiction. These studies have, in a good scientific fashion, uncovered some amount of evidence. This evidence has to stand up against 25 years of the FDA recognizing sucralose as generally-recognized-as-safe (GRAS), and the decades prior that made it reach that point. That's a tall hurdle!

A contradiction as the term is being used here, to claim my position is invalid, would mean the studies have found some mathematical proof from axioms that sucralose is toxic. If they did, that would certainly be a contradiction! But that's not what happened. They ran some experiments and found their results. That's good science! But that's not the sort of thing that creates a logical contradiction. Their results don't immediately invalidate 25 years of GRAS status and the decades of work and observation that resulted in that status. They say something more like "hey that's interesting, and worth taking a closer look and getting a better understanding".

My statement that seems to cause some bones of contention was "there's absolutely nothing wrong with consuming sucralose". The study might cause some disagreement there, but the FDA agrees with me on this one. That's not a contradiction in my logic, that's a scientific disagreement. People can disagree in science without there being a contradiction in the logic of either side. Logic has some pretty strict mathematical requirements, after all.

edit: Aand, going back to what I originally wrote, this is the exact statement from the other user that I said I was not contradicting with anything I wrote: "There are studies for and against artificial sweeteners. There are studies funded by industry. There is such a thing as corruption in science and corruption in regulatory agencies. The global artificial sweetener market size is $7 Billion."

All of those things are true, and nothing I wrote addresses them at all. From there we seemed to have launched into a debate about studies. Which, that's fine, but that's a totally separate type of disagreement!

"Contradict" does not mean "disprove".

"there's absolutely nothing wrong with consuming sucralose" contradicts the linked studies and the opposing statements that were made by myself and others here.

This is a simple fact by the definition of the word "contradiction".

Whether the FDA is correct about sucralose or not is actually irrelevant to this point.

Someone can believe the Earth is flat. Another can believe the Earth is a cube. Their beliefs contradict each other but do not prove or disprove anything.

I agree that the sentences you quoted didn't contradict anything you wrote and I was on your side at that point. After xcv explained that he meant the link, I was annoyed that he had been so vague, but I updated my expectation to "ok, now Blackthorn will understand the intended contradiction and either agree or explain why both things somehow can be true at the same time".

I think xcv is right that the problem lay in your definition of "contradiction". Whether Position A contradicts Position B has nothing to do with whether Position A has mathematical proof or the FDA agrees with Position B. It's simply whether A and B can both be true at the same time. "Toxic" and "nothing wrong with it" cannot.

Thank you for having a reasonable discussion with me though!

This is simple logic. It seems that you don't understand the meaning of the word "contradiction"

"a combination of statements, ideas, or features which are opposed to one another."

You wrote that there is no problem with sucralose. I showed studies indicating a problem with sucralose. That is a contradiction.

Then you gaslight us saying there is no contradiction. Sophistry and gaslighting.

This is basic english and logic.

Words like "gaslight" must have no meaning anymore. All of my comments are here for reading. If you think I'm lying...I don't know what to tell you.

There's no contradiction. The FDA marks sucralose as GRAS, which means "generally recognized as safe". There's a study you found that disagree. There's other studies over the decades that disagree as well. You may choose to believe the body of evidence gathered by the FDA that made it make its recommendation, or you may choose not to. It appears that you do not wish to engage in good faith here, and prefer to make attacks against me and claim that I am gaslighting you, so I will not be continuing this conversation further.

Referring to the FDA is an appeal to authority. Yet another logical fallacy from you.

They are a regulatory agency and are part of the most corrupt government on earth (US Government). You are outsourcing your thinking to a corrupt government agency staffed by extremely mediocre people who are not intellectually capable of doing the research themselves.

You stated there is no problem with sucralose. I referred to studies showing that there is indeed a problem. Then you say there is no contradiction, but this is a contradiction by definition. To insist that there is no contradiction is blatant stupidity at best, and gaslighting at worst.

I am sorry that you get personally offended by English dictionary definitions and basic logic.

"snapcaster, flashback counterspell" "gg"

For anyone reading this looking for a more nuanced take: [0].

[0]: https://usrtk.org/sweeteners/sucralose-emerging-science-reve...

Sucralose found in common sweetener damages DNA, may cause cancer [1]

[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/sucralose-found-in...

Reality: At the very highest concentrations of the sucralose compound tested in this study, using cells in petri dishes, one marker of gene damage was slightly elevated

In reality, I try to minimize my exposure to known carcinogens.

This one is quite avoidable.

If your epistemic standard is based on what happens to a single marker of cells in a petri dish at concentrated levels of exposure, then the list of foods you should avoid is endless. You couldn't even eat meat nor all sorts of vegetables even though those foods improve human health outcomes in clinical trials.

For example, that experiment can't even capture the most basic hormetic effect.

I've recently been wondering if sucralose isn't the agent driving a recent increase in cancer cases among young people.

Putting lots of chlorine atoms in your sugar is not a good idea.

We got my mom to stop using it when she developed some bad rashes on her hands. Turns out, sucralose was the cause.

There might be. A research shows it is genotoxic at times.

https://healthnews.com/news/chemical-in-artificial-sweetener...

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/cancer-warning-over...

look here bud, they confirmed it in a pitri dish. I think we can proceed to throw all the food in my house out now

I have extremely strong anecdotal evidence that sucralose is toxic to my gut fauna. Two years of suffering are enough to convince me, but I'm hopeful to see the research that confirms it sooner than later.

This is actually a good point: The fact that it does not get metabolized by the body does not mean it does not get metabolized by some valuable bacterial symbionts.

Another good point was, the fact that it doesn't get metabolized (much) before excretion does not mean it does not interfere in destructive ways with valuable physiological processes on the way:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/trouble-erythritol

Hey, if you've found it's bad for you, then by all means don't consume it! The nice thing about sweeteners, unlike a lot of other food stuff, is that there's a lot of options out there.

Yes, I know this. However you're making the blanket statement that it's harmless, and I simply have to push back on that. If it affected me this negatively, it's surely causing harm to others.

I mean my wife is allergic to lactose, but I wouldn't say lactose is anything but generally harmless.

"...but I wouldn't say lactose is anything but generally harmless."

Obviously you've never lain (I cannot call it sleep) with a lactose-intolerant SO after an evening of milk-laden feasting (loves Indian desserts which, with Indian meal included, ratchets up the noxious undercover methane emissions by about 10,000%). The dog even moved out of the bedroom!8-((

What's wrong with sucralose?

There's recent research showing it's genotoxic in even moderate quantities: https://news.ncsu.edu/2023/05/genotoxic-chemical-in-sweetene...

Putting chlorine in sugars that get metabolized seems to be a very bad idea because it leads to some very radical compounds getting loose in the cell.

Sucralose isn’t metabolized. The body excretes it in the same quantity you take in.

Also table salt is half chlorine and not a health issue (at least not because it contains chlorine).

The body is complex.

Funny, just yesterday was watching a video of wild foxes animal shelter and they were feeding raw eggs to them. Talking about importance of Taurine - https://youtu.be/z8W0LSarQ8s

So... drink more Red Bull?

Cat food has tons of taurine in it because cooking food destroys taurine but unlike humans cats cannot produce taurine themselves.

More like eat more sashimi (which is uncooked by definition) or sushi that contains sashimi since uncooked fish meat contains a fair bit of taurine. Carpaccio would be a good option as well. If my budget supported it, that's a dietary change I'd be more than happy to make.

Or think of mass-market cat food as a dietary supplement

That's good to know my retirement plan will keep me looking young.

Bad plan

Cat food is incredibly expensive!

Inflation is a funny thing. I once had a fencing coach who ate cat food because it was cheap and the school didn't pay him a living wage.

At the low end of the market (had a cat that lived 19y on this stuff), Meow Mix original is 3500 calories per kg. A 10kg bag costs $35 in Canadian dollars or about US$28.

So just a couple dollars a day for an adult.

Well sure, but it'll also keep me clear of urinary crystals.

each Red Bull has 1000mg of taurine (source: https://www.redbullsingapore.com/products)

I'd be curious to know why taurine in blood declines with age? Though supplementation is fine, if the diet stays the same, what is happening in the body that makes it unable use the taurine which is naturally in food.

Also, apparently only animal products contain taurine, and vegans have lower levels of taurine.

https://veganhealth.org/protein/taurine-and-carnitine/

I am not sure this is true in all strains of mice. Remember these are data generated from a single fully inbred strain of mouse. I am checking now fir s set of 40 strains we have studied to get a better sense of the decline.

In general the digestive system becomes less effective at extracting all amino acids as we age. This is why elderly people need to increase their protein intake in order to avoid sarcopenia.

That's interesting. Looks like I'll be spending part of my day looking at how our gut changes with age.

Thanks!

Obviously the real driver of aging is that there was no selective pressure to keep the organism working after sufficient semi-clones were brought online, and keeping an organism functional is a hard problem.

The solution is to gain the ability to simulate the organism that results from a particular DNA sequence, understand the design problems in the organism, fix the problems, then alter human DNA to include the fixes.

We aren’t going to find a simple fix, sorry everyone.

But if the organism lived longer it would keep pumping semiclones. And if organisms are basically huge self-sustaining feedback loops, why won't they keep sustaining ... forever until some pressure forces them to decay

Because the semi clones are a full process reboot. Rebooting is an easier way to solve the problem of continuing to exist into the future.

You can search the space of evolutionarily adjacent entities faster by semicloning once and letting the fittest of those semiclone further, compounding the mutations. Such a strategy will likely out-compete a slower searching one into extinction.

Sexual reproduction, which increases fitness? So theoretically the offspring are more fit clone producers so competing with them is bad, M’kay?

But who invented fitness? Theoretically a self-sustaining chemical reaction can go on forever, and it is energetically less costly to search ways to sustain it even further rather than rebooting the whole organism from start. The invention of death must have happened before the beginning of evolution. Which reminds me that our quest for immortality is the end of it.

There are trade offs for living longer. For example, children of older fathers are more likely to have birth defects.

There are almost certainly easier solutions that at least mitigate the problem even if it doesn't fully solve the problem. A similar problem might be type 1 diabetes, where an issie with the immune system causes the body attacks the cells which produce insulin. There is no cure for type 1 diabetes. However, now that we understand some of the mechanisms, we can monitor blood sugar levels and artificially regulate them so what was previously a fatal disease is now manageable. If we can figure out similar mechanisms with aging, we can treat it even if we can't completely "cure" it.

There is selective pressure for aging because populations of organisms that don't age cannot evolve to adapt to new environments.

Theoretically possible, but aging looks a lot more like gradual system failure than “feature on top of immortality”.

If you take Essential Amino Acids your body will make whichever aminos it needs most.

You can target supplement something, but it might not be the most critical link at the moment.

I order stuff off the Internet from time to time including taurine, is there an easy/cheap way to test things that come through the post from Amazon or another company are Taurine and don’t contain things they shouldn’t?

The supplement industry strikes me as dubious! Is there a better way to think about this?

I’ve been considering the same. I think, first off, Amazon is absolutely the worst place to buy supplements due to potential fakes.

I’ve seen consumer labs.com has done some independent 3rd party testing but it’s not on everything.

There are nootropic outfits that will send you the COA on request. Obviously, who knows what that piece of paper is worth. They could have bought a clean report or could have done a bait and switch.

For my part I research user reviews before I buy something . If a company has been caught lying in the past, I avoid them. No affiliation, I’ve found nootropics depot and lift mode to be well regarded in the Ethernet, generally.Also, Thorne, cellcor, life extension. But again this doesn’t solve the problem of trust. Strangely a lot of internet denizens have a loyalty of their suppliers and typically users report just on what they perceive to be effects and physical properties of supplements received. I also give some weight to anabolic steroid forums. Think what you want about them but the meatheads are real citizen scientists in the realm of chemical ingestion and prone to distrust (and astroturfing on the flip side).

I think some of the smaller companies just buy things off of places like Ali baba. Larger companies still source a ton of their stuff from China. The better smaller companies make an attempt to be transparent with COA, the larger ones just work off their name recognition.

This lack of trust of Chinese consumables extends far beyond just supplements and even the honey industry is implicated in fake products. Recall chinas baby formula fiasco a while back or that they made aquadots out of GHB or the toxic paint they use on toys. Etc. Plenty of reasons for distrust of drop shipped or sourcing from overseas/China.

It’s the Wild West out there in the supplement world and even worse in the “research chemical” peptide world.

I wish we could have a crowd sourced funding for 3rd party testing.

I know it sounds mad but I just want a well tested drink that contains zero stimulants and plenty of good stuff like 6g Taurine, l-cystine, some good magnesium etc. if I knew the testing/provenance of this stuff I’d probably pay $5 per can.

Look for supplements with the NSF Certified for Sport mark. Order direct from the manufacturer instead of Amazon which is full of counterfeit products.

https://www.nsfsport.com/

Order from a trusted pharmacy, rather than from 3rd parties like Amazon.

With the way binning works at Amazon, you can't trust that you will get a legitimate product even if you ordered the same thing you made sure was legitimate last time.

You may be correct, but I doubt there is a high enough profit for such a cheap supplement to be counterfeited and sold 3rd party.

Best way the average person without access to very fancy lab equipment can navigate this is to source from a company that has built their brand on testing and quality. A brand like Thorne or Jarrow has a lot of motivation to test everything and make sure nothing untoward makes it out, since that reputation is the only thing that lets them charge a premium vs the commodity brands.

Maybe just drink Red Bull.

Supplements are dubious, buying things on Amazon you consume is especially dubious.

There are some signals here and there about the legitimacy of various vendors but I’m generally skeptical of all of them, just some more than others.

...in mice.

If you RTFA you will note it specifically calls out the multiple models tested. It also points out that these are evolutionarily conserved pathways, so of course the translatability chances are higher than baseline. To top it off, some of those pathways have already been associated with increased healthspan and lifespan in many other studies.

I am interested in informed skepticism, because this is kinda compelling.

Disclaimer: I don't really know shit.

... and female rhesus monkeys.

Doesn't amino acid uptake generally decrease with aging, leading to sarcopenia/osteopenia? Doesn't exercise generally improve amino acid metabolism? Why focus on taurine?

Would taking supplements work as well? I saw that Taurine supplements are available for cheap. I have no idea what people are taking it for.

Heart health/CHF, physical performance, mood ( seems to “even out” effects from caffeine), liver function/hepatitis.

Magnesium taurate is a must for just everybody!

Did Red Bull sponsor this research paper?

Not good news for vegans looks like, as top sources of taurine are meat?

Turns out Monsters are pretty healthy for you except for all the sugar.

Based on a survey of felines, mice are pretty healthy for you too.

Consider: a rich source of taurine and with a delectable crunch.

Can't wait for this diet plan to go on sale

Yup. I used to be a heavy monster drinker, and I quit because that much sugar a day will kill you eventually.Ia drink a cup of coffee every day now, but I do sip an energy drink when I go on a multi hour drive, and I've found the alertness is unmatched by coffee. So I started adding taurine to my coffee, it works almost as well, good mood lift.

So people on a vegan diet ( low in taurine ) will live shorter?

„However, prolonged intake of a vegan diet with negligible taurine content leads to a decline of only ∼20% in circulating taurine in young healthy individuals (6, 7), suggesting that the ∼80% decrease observed in older people by Singh et al. at least partly reflects a loss of capacity for endogenous synthesis“

See https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi3025

Alcohol abuse riding shotgun for a lot of y'all tho

You say "taurine", I say "meow".

Isn‘t any deficiency a driver of aging?

Wow, Red Bull does give you wings!

You mean that stuff in redbull ;-)

So drink lots of Red Bull eh??

It's the other garbage in the drink that'll do you in!

They fed mice 1g taurine per 1kg body weight per day.

For me that would be 80g per day.

1kg of pure taurine cost 25€ on Amazon.

That makes a 1.20€ per day.

Sounds okay.

After scaling, it comes out to 6.5 grams per day. (See my comment above.)

DO NOT take 80g taurine in a day. You probably won't die, but it's a terrible idea.

I wouldn't.

I just evaluated how much it could cost to gain a few years.

But thanks!

It would likely be less. See approaches like allometric scaling of dosages.

Even better!

I'd expect my blood pressure going through the roof with 80g taurine per day.

They also fed female rhesus monkeys 250mg/kg taurine - 1/4 of the mice dosage.

Makes the value-calculations even more palatable (does taurine have flavour?)

Mice have faster metabolism, so eat more of everything per kg of body weight per day. Square-cube law in action!

so this explains why vegans look older

The Monster zero Ultra drinks I like (no sugar) list energy ingredients as taurine, L-Carntine, caffeine, inositol. I'm bipolar and they make me somewhat manic, which I like because I get creative, but I keep thinking I shouldn't drink them because everyone tells me they are unhealthy. Maybe not?

Well, "healthy" and "unhealthy" aren't binary. Smokers are skinnier than non-smokers.

Also, taking nicotine doesn't seem to be bad. Putting smoke in your lungs on the other hand...

Nicotine is quite bad for your blood pressure.

Not being snarky - but do you have references for that? Most research I've seen either conflates nicotine and tobacco, or finds 'pure' nicotine (eg NRTs) have close to zero negative side effects.

So is salt but it’s worth it

I asked ChatGPT "Is moderate consumption of energy drinks unhealthy?" and the answer was no. Moderate consumption is defined as "For adults, moderate consumption is typically defined as no more than 400 milligrams of caffeine per day, which is roughly equivalent to four cups of coffee or two 16-ounce cans of common energy drinks."

I drink them moderately so maybe the taurine is healthy for me at my age, although excessive consumption could be damaging. "There is evidence to suggest that excessive consumption of energy drinks can have negative effects on the cardiovascular system, including the potential for heart damage. Energy drinks typically contain high levels of caffeine and other stimulants, which can increase heart rate and blood pressure.

I'm under the impression that when people tell me they are unhealthy they are talking about stories of young people who damage their heart by drinking them constantly through out the day.

Are you... treating a language model as a doctor?

Or I could use WebMD. What's the difference?

Why not? Everybody thinks it is God, anyways...

Or you could just take a taurine supplement instead...

It's probably just caffeine.

Can't make decisions on what everyone else says. Drink what you want!

You don't believe in the "wisdom of crowds" I take it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds

Yea! Nutritional science be damned! Smoke crack too! Can't make decisions on what everyone else says after all.

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