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.
> 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.
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…
The really interesting clincher wasn't the association of taurine with anti-aging, but the association of exercise with increased serum concentrations of taurine.
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.
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..."
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.
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.
„ 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.)
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Look for supplements with the NSF Certified for Sport mark. Order direct from the manufacturer instead of Amazon which is full of counterfeit products.
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.
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.
[+] [-] robwwilliams|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] redkinght99|2 years ago|reply
Jokes aside, This feels like one of "Wine is Good for you" In moderation and other fine point details. Not buying it.
[+] [-] throwaway888abc|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] quietbritishjim|2 years ago|reply
I don't think any studies have shown red wine to have a clear casual impact like that, even just in mice.
[+] [-] browningstreet|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voytec|2 years ago|reply
I mean, pinot noir has a lot of resveratrol. You'd just need 750-1000 glasses daily.
[+] [-] throwway120385|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arduinomancer|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] az226|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hindsightbias|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsign|2 years ago|reply
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..."
[+] [-] heresie-dabord|2 years ago|reply
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..."
[+] [-] ppeetteerr|2 years ago|reply
For the able-bodied, it may be enough to incorporate more exercise into our life?
[+] [-] devmor|2 years ago|reply
I believe it plays a factor in getting salts/electrolytes to the tissue, but I'm not 100% clear on that.
[+] [-] ggm|2 years ago|reply
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 ... )
[+] [-] raylad|2 years ago|reply
See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5008916/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32138282/ for example.
[+] [-] chasil|2 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] giardini|2 years ago|reply
IOW they gave the mice a dose of taurine that, proportionally, i'd be unwilling to take.
[+] [-] amai|2 years ago|reply
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.“
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|2 years ago|reply
(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.)
[+] [-] cjohnson318|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nradov|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chaxor|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jstarfish|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] canucker2016|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] udkl|2 years ago|reply
I will report back on the experiment, however.
[+] [-] fasteo|2 years ago|reply
For taurine, it would be some animal food source, specially molusk/fish.
[+] [-] pkoird|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedays|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] _hyn3|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostmsu|2 years ago|reply
Can't be sure they are related, but Red Bull is definitely the main suspect.
[+] [-] Grazester|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myth_drannon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opisthenar84|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnulinux|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThrowawayR2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scoundreller|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] canucker2016|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pedalpete|2 years ago|reply
Also, apparently only animal products contain taurine, and vegans have lower levels of taurine.
https://veganhealth.org/protein/taurine-and-carnitine/
[+] [-] pfannkuchen|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fwungy|2 years ago|reply
You can target supplement something, but it might not be the most critical link at the moment.
[+] [-] andy_ppp|2 years ago|reply
The supplement industry strikes me as dubious! Is there a better way to think about this?
[+] [-] salad-tycoon|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nradov|2 years ago|reply
https://www.nsfsport.com/
[+] [-] devmor|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] qgin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colechristensen|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]