…“Taurine is a ubiquitous amino acid found across the animal kingdom. It is a sulfur-containing amino acid, found in high concentration in the intracellular compartment of excitable tissue, including the myocardium. It functions as an intracellular osmolyte, involved in cell volume regulation. Being a neutral zwitterion, transport of taurine is not accompanied by a change in charge gradient across membranes. This chemical property makes taurine the perfect candidate of cellular osmoregulation. Taurine also regulates sodium and calcium homeostasis, and normal functioning of mitochondria. It has demonstrated ionotropic effects, probably due to its effect on calcium metabolism. Several clinical trials have shown that taurine supplementation improves cardiac performance in those suffering from congestive heart failure. Given its extensive safety profile, taurine supplementation may be beneficial in patients with congestive heart failure.”…
Attia flexing his McKinsey logical thinking muscles here. I think the same could be said for (almost) any supplement. I tend to agree that supplement benefits are way overblown unless solving a deficiency.
Exceptions for me include:
Caffeine (some side effects)
Methylene blue (is blue pee a side effect?)
Berberine
Lithium
Melatonin (maybe a deficiency here)
Akkermansia (may be a deficiency here)
These supplements actually do something good that I can feel or measure without side effects that I’m aware of.
Just listened to your latest podcast!! WHOA on the benefits of melatonin! I had not heard it could help with osteoporosis! I assume this means I should take it regularly instead of only when I wake up too early, right?
@Beth I don’t know but Dr Loh (and @John_Hemming and @desertshores) have me thinking about it again. I take it if I wake up at 2-3am for bathroom). But maybe it’s an every night, and maybe every day (daylight) supplement…
Agree with the deficiency part but it appears that everyone’s taurine levels decline eventually and it looks extremely difficult to get the amounts from the diet that would match 3-6g. Just seems like a no brainer to me.
Attia was arguing that he didn’t believe raising blood taurine would offset aging. Causation vs correlation. Maybe it does. And, what does supplementing taurine along with 10-30 other things at the same time do for aging? I don’t know. I’m guessing more likely to be bad than good.
To be fair, I was convinced to try it. I never felt anything from taurine so it fell out of my top 10 cutoff.
Interesting to see a logic mis-step here from Peter Attia:
“This leaves us with three (non-mutually exclusive) possible reasons for the apparent decline with age: 1) a reduction in dietary intake; 2) a reduction in rates of intestinal absorption of taurine from food; or 3) an increase in the rate of taurine excretion. No nutritional data have ever indicated that people consume less meat and seafood at age 60 than they do as kids, so we can exclude possibility #1. Possibility #2 would suggest that we need to consume more taurine as adults than we do as children in order to absorb the same amount, which in turn might mean that supplementation would boost circulating levels and help mitigate their age-related decline. Possibility #3, on the other hand, would mean that supplementation would have very little effect on circulating taurine.”
Just because age leads to an increase in Taurine excretion, there’s no logical conclusion that supplementation would have very little effect on circulating taurine. The two don’t necessarily follow at all.
Age does tend to increased GBM permeability, but that doesn’t mean supplementation won’t increase circulating levels. It’s perfectly possible that supplementation will increase both circulating levels and excretion.
Studies in humans show taurine is beneficial for congestive heart failure. I can’t see how this could possibly be the case if all the taurine were excreted.
I’ve seen this argument a few places (that taurine metabolism is different in humans compared to model organisms, including primates, and supplementation is unlikely to help). There’s the Attia article, and also one on the HealthSpan blog. I think we have plenty of circumstantial evidence that supplementing taurine is effective in humans:
What were you expecting to feel from taurine? I rarely feel anything from anything I take. I just look at the evidence and hope that using it for decades, allows me to live decades longer. If I want to feel something, I’d just take a bunch of caffeine.