Taurine and aging: Is there anything to it? | Hacker News Reader

Taurine and aging: Is there anything to it?

science.org

64 pointsetiam69 comments

After looking a bit into the longevity stuff I’ve come to the conclusion that 80% of the benefits for health come from simple habits: sleep well, move daily, work-out regularly, eat fresh and moderately, and maintain social connections. That’s it.

Oh, and of course genetics. Doesn't matter very much if you have a genetic pre-disposition to some bad disease and you don't know that. So, make sure you're getting screened per recommendations!

Apparently, the less paperwork you deal with, the longer you live. Somewhere out there, a 132-year-old is thriving simply because no one ever processed their birth certificate — and correlational data suggests that weak administrative systems might just be the true secret to longevity, sparing people the existential stress of ever having to file anything at all

Is this because the poor record keeping is a vector for fraud?

https://www.nst.com.my/world/world/2024/12/1148062/bad-recor...

if there is a natural disaster, which happens frequently at the southern point of Japan (a blue zone for longevity) then records can be destroyed. when records are destroyed you just have to ask folks what their birthdays are. Turns out you can collect retirement early if you say you were born years before you actually were.

There are drugs like metformin which appear to have a drastic affect on lifespan in patients with or without diabetes.

But yes generally, premature death seems to come from bad lifestyle choices over a lifetime, so being proactive is gonna yield the greatest return.

I take Metformin and don't have diabetes, but don't think there's much of a chance of significant benefits. Would expect diabetics etc to have noticably higher healthapans offset by the diabetes symptoms. It's been a heavily-taken drug for decades...

Metformin is a prescribed drug, so how do you obtain a prescription if you're an otherwise healthy person (i.e., someone w/o diabetes)?

Not the parent, but I take it by going to any pharmacy in Ukraine and asking for it. Prescription not required. In my case it’s part of a treatment protocol for insulin resistance but the pharmacist doesn’t ask and I don’t tell them.

When I lived in Georgia it was also that easy.

It's also not a prescribed drug everywhere. Some countries do let people make medical choices on your own without needing to have your hands held by some legal gatekeeping for even minorly risky drugs.

Know a doctor.

Isn't there some liability there?

Yeah, and I don’t expect any new simple solutions to suddenly be discovered either.

That's the gist of it, plus supplements +drugs. I think the bottom line is that people are becoming more accepting that extending lifespan is a good and possible thing, but we aren't close to knowing how to do it. So we grasp at whatever we can, even if it's ineffective.

Its funny to me, because there’s many strong studies that basically show the life expectancy for vegetarians is about 10 years higher, but most people including myself wouldn’t become a vegetarian despite the clear health benefits.

Couldn't this be, maybe, one of those "correlation is not causation" thingies?

The original taurine paper in Science was obviously a mess to some of us in the field. They did not even have plausible taurine concentrations. Poor review process.

There is no reason to supplement with taurine or with resveratrol. Resveratrol debunked firmly by both the Interventions Testing Program in mice (Miller et al 2011, a paper with Sinclair as a coauthor) and earlirr by Timothy Bass and Linda Partridge and colleagues in two widely used model organisms (C elegans anf Drisophila, 2007).

Yes David Sinclair is vocal and has a book: but look at the evidence and compare to rapamycin.

Rapamycin is a drug with strong prolongevity effects at almost any age in both sexes at an appropriate dose to inhibit only mTOR-C1 signaling (4 to 8 mg once per week).

There ARE side effects to almost any drug. And rapamycin will not be a good drug for a subset of humans in some environments. For example rapamycin is one if the last drugs I would take if I was caring for a room full of 5-6 year olds all day. But surprisingly it was a good drug to be taking during COVID-19 if you were older. perhaps by reducing the inflammatory hyper-vigilance that killed so many older humans. See Kaeberlein’s study of 333 biohackers in 2023.

what about methylene blue? I saw an article around the other day saying basically that it’s mostly hype, but I’ve also heard good things about it.

Tough to handle though!8-)) It gets all over the place: stains skin, clothes, most everything else unless you handle it as if you were in a laboratory.

Never thought about it before but handling MB in a chem lab might be a very good way to show beginning students how difficult it is to do good lab work and how easily traces of material (and organisms) may pass from one place to another (contact).

The problem is RM as you know, is the negative effects from immunosuppression. Makes it tougher to justify than others.

Yes, at higher doses that affect mTORC2 signaling. At a low intermittent dose it is an immune modulator, not an immune suppressor. Much work on parsing the two. But we do not know much about the role of genetic difference in responses ti this drug, so caution is appropriate.

I understand that trying to take supplements to slow aging is a crap shoot. That said I take Taurine in the form of eating dark chicken meat, legs and thighs. I also take NAD+ with resveratrol as publicized by David Sinclair at Harvard.

I believe that the very best thing to do to maintain health and perhaps have higher quality of life, later in life, is to meditate, forgive other people and yourself, and generally balance spirituality, good sleep, good food, and walk outside a few times a day.

EDIT: left off two big things. As we age we need vitamin D supplements and I personally also believe in loading up on Omega 3 by eating walnuts, chia seeds, and salmon.

Don’t forget some type of strength training. There’s plenty of research that it reduces all cause mortality. Likely by pushing back the time you become frail.

This might get turned on its head in a couple years. Some new research just came out on combining incretin based therapies (ie semaglutide) with myostatin blockers (in this case trevogrumab and garetosmab) and the monkey lost a crap load of fat while also putting on muscle mass. It's a hell of a time to be a monkey, hopefully it translates into a hell of a time to be a human in a few years. Also, I would like some samples of whatever substance the guys naming these drugs are consuming. Whatever it is, they are wasting it on naming drugs when they should be using it to write science fiction.

Obviously the inventors were called Trevor and Garett

Link to the research?

Absolutely. I saw this with aging loved ones. The most “durable” ones fared better as they aged and had health issues.

As you age, each acute medical event has a real impact and recovery is slow and limited. You have to be at an high baseline to crawl back up.

My dad had a stroke that really affected him badly, but he recovered a lot and worked hard. It was all set back by a cold and a uti that resulted in a hospitalization. That basically did him in. Everything you can do to make sure that you can stand up and get around as long as possible means that you’ll be able to live a longer fulfilling life.

My grandfather was hit by a car at 80 and only recovered because he has the constitution of a tank.

Even afterwards he fights daily to do everything himself.

I should, but I don't. I do hike four hours a week and swim for a half hour every day very early in the morning. Thanks for the reminder, you are 100% correct. I am in my mid 70s, so I think I only need resistance training about twice a week.

You need it every day at that age to preserve bone density.

Here's an exercise anyone can do almost everyday that will increase bone density. I do it in the shower or wherever there's a solid safe tile floor:

Start with both knees and hips bent (like a football linebacker just before the snap), legs apart and arms bent at the side to maintain balance. Set one foot slightly ahead of the other. Now, using primarily the heels of your feet, jump up slightly(preferably only a few inches) and slam both heels back down, while switching which foot is forward. [Don't jump so much that you straighten your legs; instead keep knees bent at all times]. You're hopping in place and striking your heels on the ground, with the right foot forward first and then with the left foot forward, back and forth. Make sure the heel hits the tile and bears the brunt of the force (rather than the toes). Do 20 of these hops each time you're in the shower.

Slamming the heel of the foot into the floor vibrates the large bones of the legs. These vibrations will strengthen (all of) your bone over time.

Is there a name for this particular exercise?

Well, I call it the "longer balls" exercise b/c, each time your heels hit the floor, unless you grab your nut sack, you will feel the impact!8-))

So, to correct the instructions:

...stand legs apart and arms bent at the side to maintain balance, nutsack in one hand if male, ..

Citation?

Need what exactly? Resistance training or strength training? Or both?

actually you need it 3 times a day

No anaerobic training? You’ll really want that bone density and general mobility down the line, and it also helps greatly aligning the others (pushes you to sleep, eat ealthier, helps with stress etc)

I've been doing a similar routine + intermittent fasting (Late breakfast/early dinner) + NMN and metformin. Probably isn't doing anything useful.

Re vitamin D: I supplement with that as well, but for a tangential reason: Avoiding sun exposure (esp mid-day) without sunblock avoids photoaging and reduces skin cancer risk. But this leaves you at a Vitamin D deficit, hence the supplement.

I have a tub of taurine, but haven't been taking it; seemed like the evidence was thin, and this article supports that conclusion.

Yes, intermittent fasting seems to have good effects. I used to restrict eating to the period 11am to about 5pm, and I felt better. Now all I do is to avoid eating any food within three hours of going to bed. I don't know how reliable my Apple Watch really is, but my deep sleep ratings are much better when I stop eating after a light early dinner, and this makes some sense: if you are actively digesting food your heart rate is probably increased and generally your body can settle down. As you know, digesting food is a major activity.

Science has shown that the best quality sleep is achieved when core temperature drops about 3 degrees, and this is almost impossible when one has eaten a meal within an hour or two of going to bed.

Or if you live in a hot country. But that makes me suspicious of this finding - it should mean that everyone (without AC) in hot countries sleeps badly. I doubt that to be true though.

It may well be the sun exposure and not the vitamin D that's good for you https://www.outsideonline.com/podcast/inside-rowan-jacobsen-...

Certainly vitamin D can't be the one and only molecule that's produced in the human body by a photocatalytic pathway.

Wouldn't surprise me. This is a tough nut to crack because it is likely true, but photo aging and skin cancer are unquestionably true and negative effects of UV exposure.

Are you getting enough vitamin k complex? Depending on the D dose you are taking there are some indications that that might be important to avoid arterial calcification (among other things). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5613455/

Does intermittent fasting apply to those that is underweight?

Will depend on age and the definition of underweight. Intermittent fasting is probably generally beneficial to maintain the health of already healthy humans up to 75 years of age. But at that age exercise and weights (gently) probably more helpful.

I based it on BMI, which indicates that I'm underweight and AI suggested fasting is not recommended.

As far as I know there is little if any proven benefit to vitamin D supplementation, but a lot of links between high vitamin D and good health markers. Just a reminder that you should try to get some sun exposure as well for natural vitamin D, as that may well be where the health benefits really come from

As an aside when it comes to sun and vitamin D: your body will still produce vitamin D from the sun if you wear sunscreen. You also get all the mental health benefits like serotonin and whatnot with sunscreen.

So, if you're a partial sun plant (white person), you should get sun but you should use sunscreen, and you'll be fine and that will work.

Vit D is actually one of the few vitamin supplements that have proven benefits, if you live far from the equator.

Supplemention specifically, or raised vitamin D? This article suggested otherwise but I haven't followed it up https://www.outsideonline.com/podcast/inside-rowan-jacobsen-...

Anything you want to share that raises it above all else? Especially as you agree that all other supplements are basically snake oil.

They are talking about vitamin supplements specifically.

These are all good life practices but you've forgotten one key component of mental aging: many individuals' growing lack of curiosity as they age. Lifelong learning, and generally also contact with others, is very important to keeping the mind sharp as one gets older.

I do still write books on AI and tech https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson

My Dad lived to almost 102 and he was learning new things right up to the end of his life. He was a physics professor and Berkeley but in retirement he got into model trains, organized social activities, and taught himself 3D animation and started writing scripts and got into digital story telling.

So, I agree with you, always learning new things makes life interesting and probably has health benefits.

>crap shoot

Funny you say that:

"It is a major constituent of bile and can be found in the large intestine. It is named after Latin taurus (cognate to Ancient Greek ταῦρος, taûros) meaning bull or ox, as it was first isolated from ox bile in 1827 by German scientists Friedrich Tiedemann and Leopold Gmelin."

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

none of that stuff is going to prolong your life

A Downside of Taurine: It Drives Leukemia Growth

https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/a-downside-of-taur...

This has to be taken as one of many data points. Many things that are good for your body will also drive increased cancer growth

I would really like to thank you for posting this comment.

I shared the study with my stepfather, who is suffering from Leukemia, and is also taking a ridiculous number of various unregulated supplements.

All of us in the family, and his top 1% doctors, have been trying to get him off of most them. It's been a losing battle so far.

I shared the link that you posted, and it may have finally done the job.

Another downside:

> Microbiologists have discovered a new intestinal microbe that feeds exclusively on taurine and produces the foul-smelling gas hydrogen sulfide.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/09/230918105118.h...

I can't speak for aging, but my strong personal experience with taurine tells me that it does help, a lot. It is excellent for anyone with dry eyes, which is a lot of people. It is also good for anyone who relies on caffeine a fair bit, which is why it's in energy drinks.

I was taking taurine 1000 mg per day but stopped when I heard a plausible link to colon cancer. Having a strong family history, it wasn't worth the risk.

Eagerly awaiting the results of this trial: https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.2024.42.16_suppl.TPS363...

Uncertain though how they will separate the effects of the taurine from all the other stuff including sugar that is contained in energy drinks.

I think this is a hard theory to pin down as it might depend on how much taurine producing bacteria an individual has in their gut B. wadsworthia, so two people could have very different outcomes while taking the same amount of taurine.

Answer from TFA: no

> But taken together, all of this new information makes me glad that I have not been loading up on the taurine for purposes of graceful aging, I can tell you that for sure.

this is the first time I’m hearing taurine had been linked in any way to aging (while also finding out that’s no longer supported by evidence). all I knew was that it’s something energy drinks have. but I’m curious, did this take off as a popular supplement?

Read the first couple lines, closed the page, and concluded that I should drink more Red Bull.