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Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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).

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

Humans can synthesise creatine, but we synthesise less than is ideal for elite strength athletes, so supplementation is still effective

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