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.)
"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?
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 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
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.
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".
"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."
I found:
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.)