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Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2037

    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.)

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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.

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).

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.

> 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

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 ;-)

> 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.

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