5 ms·

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. Taur

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.

tiffanyg 3y ago
> By the way: A 16 oz can of Monster contains 2 grams of taurine. And at least 50%+ of the "added sugar" recommendation(s) for an entire day (depending on whether you look at FDA, AHA, etc. guidelines). You make good points, for sure, and I appreciate your comment and insights. But, "sugar" is definitely an issue with a lot of current foods. Carbohydrates are crucial building blocks, biochemically. However, there are numerous increasingly documented adverse effects stemming from "simple sugars" consumption - both epidemiologically, and mechanistically / molecularly (e.g., "glycation"). That said, I'd absolutely recommend sugar over many other available sweeteners. In fact, there are a whole host of "refined" food "modifiers" increasingly available and used that seem to have often unfortunately deleterious effects. For example, even substances like inulin, sugar alcohols, etc., that can be beneficial (have been determined to contribute to healthfulness) in various foods that have been eaten by humans for centuries if not millennia, often end up either not beneficial or actually harmful as applied in current "modern food chemistry". This isn't to say that we must go "paleo", nor that there are inherent or unsurpassable problems in formulating and "manufacturing" (always a word I love, when it comes to food ... meh) new food products that are safe and have advantages over many entirely unprocessed foods (hell, cooking IS a form of processing, and it's rather crucial given our physiologies, improving safety and nutrition of many types of foods significantly). But, food processing and manufacturing is a rather lightly regulated industry in some ways, and much of it moves far faster than studies of the implications of all of the new formulations, additives, etc. Time and again, people and industry have been enamored of some apparent "free lunch" that has bitten us in the ass, so to speak, ultimately.
- briHass 3y ago
  > That said, I'd absolutely recommend sugar over many other available sweeteners. I sure wouldn't. Many of the classic, non-nutritive sweeteners like sucralose have been tested more thoroughly than almost any substance we ingest. Even at heroic doses tens of thousands of times higher than what would be used normally, no significant health effects have been noted. In contrast, we have sucrose: a caloric carbohydrate that rapidly and reliably raises blood sugar, and due to its fructose content, has been linked to NAFLD. If nothing else, it's 'empty' caloric value, high palatability, popularity in beverages, and low cost (especially as the almost functionally identical HFCS) has without a doubt been a major contributor to the obesity epidemic. So sure, removing all added sweeteners ('natural' or otherwise) would be better, but a NNS is way, way better than sugar.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    You seem knowledgeable about sucralose ("Splenda" in US commercial branding). Thank you to share. On Wiki, it says that sucralose is "genotoxic", but provides no further information. I read the genotoxic Wiki page -- sounds terrible. What am I missing? To be clear: This is not a scare post, rather "explain it to me like I am a 5 year old"! When I Google <<sucralose genotoxic>>, most of the results are untrustworthy, click-bait news sources.
    - vhcr 3y ago
      The genotoxic edit was added by an IP editor citing an in-vitro study, I wouldn't pay much attention to it, you can find higher quality references on the article, for example this one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691517302818 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027869151...
      - throwaway2037 3y ago
        Nice post. Thanks for the info. I was bothered that "genotoxic" didn't have a reference. For other readers, I didn't know what "in-vitro study" meant. Google tells me: In vitro is Latin for “in glass.” It describes medical procedures, tests, and experiments that researchers perform outside of a living organism. An in vitro study occurs in a controlled environment, such as a test tube or petri dish.
insaider 3y ago
Whats your thoughts on the dosage? They use 1g per kg of body weight! If I drank Monster to get the equivalent dosage I think I'd probably die... How did they arrive on that dosage?
- grepfru_it 3y ago
  That's because Monster has caffiene and other chemicals in there that may kill you! The Taurine itself probably won't kill you as LD50 is 5g per kg of body weight
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
    LD50 should be taken with a huge grain of salt for any compound. First of all LD50 is just the dose required to kill half the subjects within some short time frame. Long term toxicity is not captured by this number. And doses well below LD50 can still kill you. Also, because you can't overdose humans with drugs until half of them die(in most jurisdictions...), the number is pretty much always based on animal experiments. And it's quite typical for some things to be wildly more toxic in certain species than in others. Crucially, a dose of 1g/kg has never been tested in humans in the short or long term. I'd be very hesitant to say that 1g/kg is unlikely to kill a human being based on LD50 being 5g/kg. It could very well have an unacceptably high risk of death, or long term toxicity. Also, please don't make statements like this based on LD50 unless you're absolutely sure. Someone who understands even less about it might look at it and thnk "this guy seems to know his stuff", and then do something stupid.
    - tonymillion 3y ago
      What’s the LD50 of a huge grain of salt. While the mouse example of 1000mg/kg is ridiculously high, the monkey trial used 250mg/kg. Assumption time: assume a 67kg human who consumes 3 cans of redbull a day (not especially unusual). they are ingesting 9000mg (total) per day, which comes out 135mg/kg. Given the easy availability of Taurine supplements in almost any pharmacy it’s not a stretch to see this pushed significantly higher. Added to the above, this was an initial trial, and it’s very possible the therapeutic levels of Taurine supplementation may be significantly lower (there appeared to be a correlation of health and life extension between the mice and monkeys even with the significant difference in dosages) it’s very possible that the 3 can of red bull dosage is efficacious. Of course that could be mitigated by the high levels of sugar and caffeine but that is outside of the scope of this conversation. To summarize : 250mg/kg was efficacious in monkeys and no lower bound was determined, it’s possible the amount of Taurine in 3 cans of redbull (assume 9000mg) per day is within the clinically effective range.
linsomniac 3y ago
Didn't read the study, but would it be good if they had 120 clones of you and gave 60 taurine and 60 a placebo, and the taurine ones showed better longevity?
- kdamica 3y ago
  Yes, it would be good and this is precisely what they did in this study.
throwaway2037 3y ago
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.)
- spiderice 3y ago
  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.
  - amarant 3y ago
    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... :(
    - khimaros 3y ago
      probably this one: > Human-mouse conversion ratio is 1:12.3
- jaggederest 3y ago
  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.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
WHy does it have Taurine? I honestly don't know why any of the non-caffiene non-b vitamin ingredients are in "energy drinks" like Taurine.
- winternewt 3y ago
  According to GPT4 there's research indicating that taurine increases metabolism, improves athletic performance, helps regulate neurotransmitters (so could be construed to improve cognitive functioning), and improves cardiovascular health. I'd wager you can't conclude from any of that research that putting a gram of it in a drink will help with anything at all, but from a marketing perspective it's a name that carries all the right connotations.
  - eropple 3y ago
    GPT4 is not a search engine. Please stop. Cite sources or don't do this.
    - winternewt 3y ago
      I did cite my source by saying it's GPT4, so you know exactly what quality to attribute to the information. I figured it was a good enough source given the context, because my point was that taurine is a good fit for marketing. For that purpose it doesn't really matter whether the information is true. What matters is public perception, and I trust that that's well represented by GPT4 in this case.
      - eropple 3y ago
        GPT4 isn't a source of information. It's a probabilistic string of text. Cite actual sources, please.
  - RugnirViking 3y ago
    according to gpt4 there's reasearch that indicates that spice melange assists in cognitive loads especially relating to navigation in fold space
bartislartfast 3y ago
please let us not all start chugging Monster to live longer. 2 grams of taurine will surely be nullified by all the other crap in there

tiffanyg 3y ago

> By the way: A 16 oz can of Monster contains 2 grams of taurine. And at least 50%+ of the "added sugar" recommendation(s) for an entire day (depending on whether you look at FDA, AHA, etc. guidelines). You make good points, for sure, and I appreciate your comment and insights. But, "sugar" is definitely an issue with a lot of current foods. Carbohydrates are crucial building blocks, biochemically. However, there are numerous increasingly documented adverse effects stemming from "simple sugars" consumption - both epidemiologically, and mechanistically / molecularly (e.g., "glycation"). That said, I'd absolutely recommend sugar over many other available sweeteners. In fact, there are a whole host of "refined" food "modifiers" increasingly available and used that seem to have often unfortunately deleterious effects. For example, even substances like inulin, sugar alcohols, etc., that can be beneficial (have been determined to contribute to healthfulness) in various foods that have been eaten by humans for centuries if not millennia, often end up either not beneficial or actually harmful as applied in current "modern food chemistry". This isn't to say that we must go "paleo", nor that there are inherent or unsurpassable problems in formulating and "manufacturing" (always a word I love, when it comes to food ... meh) new food products that are safe and have advantages over many entirely unprocessed foods (hell, cooking IS a form of processing, and it's rather crucial given our physiologies, improving safety and nutrition of many types of foods significantly). But, food processing and manufacturing is a rather lightly regulated industry in some ways, and much of it moves far faster than studies of the implications of all of the new formulations, additives, etc. Time and again, people and industry have been enamored of some apparent "free lunch" that has bitten us in the ass, so to speak, ultimately.

briHass 3y ago
> That said, I'd absolutely recommend sugar over many other available sweeteners. I sure wouldn't. Many of the classic, non-nutritive sweeteners like sucralose have been tested more thoroughly than almost any substance we ingest. Even at heroic doses tens of thousands of times higher than what would be used normally, no significant health effects have been noted. In contrast, we have sucrose: a caloric carbohydrate that rapidly and reliably raises blood sugar, and due to its fructose content, has been linked to NAFLD. If nothing else, it's 'empty' caloric value, high palatability, popularity in beverages, and low cost (especially as the almost functionally identical HFCS) has without a doubt been a major contributor to the obesity epidemic. So sure, removing all added sweeteners ('natural' or otherwise) would be better, but a NNS is way, way better than sugar.
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  You seem knowledgeable about sucralose ("Splenda" in US commercial branding). Thank you to share. On Wiki, it says that sucralose is "genotoxic", but provides no further information. I read the genotoxic Wiki page -- sounds terrible. What am I missing? To be clear: This is not a scare post, rather "explain it to me like I am a 5 year old"! When I Google <<sucralose genotoxic>>, most of the results are untrustworthy, click-bait news sources.
  - vhcr 3y ago
    The genotoxic edit was added by an IP editor citing an in-vitro study, I wouldn't pay much attention to it, you can find higher quality references on the article, for example this one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691517302818 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027869151...
    - throwaway2037 3y ago
      Nice post. Thanks for the info. I was bothered that "genotoxic" didn't have a reference. For other readers, I didn't know what "in-vitro study" meant. Google tells me: In vitro is Latin for “in glass.” It describes medical procedures, tests, and experiments that researchers perform outside of a living organism. An in vitro study occurs in a controlled environment, such as a test tube or petri dish.

insaider 3y ago

Whats your thoughts on the dosage? They use 1g per kg of body weight! If I drank Monster to get the equivalent dosage I think I'd probably die... How did they arrive on that dosage?

grepfru_it 3y ago
That's because Monster has caffiene and other chemicals in there that may kill you! The Taurine itself probably won't kill you as LD50 is 5g per kg of body weight
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
  LD50 should be taken with a huge grain of salt for any compound. First of all LD50 is just the dose required to kill half the subjects within some short time frame. Long term toxicity is not captured by this number. And doses well below LD50 can still kill you. Also, because you can't overdose humans with drugs until half of them die(in most jurisdictions...), the number is pretty much always based on animal experiments. And it's quite typical for some things to be wildly more toxic in certain species than in others. Crucially, a dose of 1g/kg has never been tested in humans in the short or long term. I'd be very hesitant to say that 1g/kg is unlikely to kill a human being based on LD50 being 5g/kg. It could very well have an unacceptably high risk of death, or long term toxicity. Also, please don't make statements like this based on LD50 unless you're absolutely sure. Someone who understands even less about it might look at it and thnk "this guy seems to know his stuff", and then do something stupid.
  - tonymillion 3y ago
    What’s the LD50 of a huge grain of salt. While the mouse example of 1000mg/kg is ridiculously high, the monkey trial used 250mg/kg. Assumption time: assume a 67kg human who consumes 3 cans of redbull a day (not especially unusual). they are ingesting 9000mg (total) per day, which comes out 135mg/kg. Given the easy availability of Taurine supplements in almost any pharmacy it’s not a stretch to see this pushed significantly higher. Added to the above, this was an initial trial, and it’s very possible the therapeutic levels of Taurine supplementation may be significantly lower (there appeared to be a correlation of health and life extension between the mice and monkeys even with the significant difference in dosages) it’s very possible that the 3 can of red bull dosage is efficacious. Of course that could be mitigated by the high levels of sugar and caffeine but that is outside of the scope of this conversation. To summarize : 250mg/kg was efficacious in monkeys and no lower bound was determined, it’s possible the amount of Taurine in 3 cans of redbull (assume 9000mg) per day is within the clinically effective range.

linsomniac 3y ago

Didn't read the study, but would it be good if they had 120 clones of you and gave 60 taurine and 60 a placebo, and the taurine ones showed better longevity?

kdamica 3y ago
Yes, it would be good and this is precisely what they did in this study.

throwaway2037 3y ago

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.)

spiderice 3y ago
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.
- amarant 3y ago
  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... :(
  - khimaros 3y ago
    probably this one: > Human-mouse conversion ratio is 1:12.3
jaggederest 3y ago
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.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

WHy does it have Taurine? I honestly don't know why any of the non-caffiene non-b vitamin ingredients are in "energy drinks" like Taurine.

winternewt 3y ago
According to GPT4 there's research indicating that taurine increases metabolism, improves athletic performance, helps regulate neurotransmitters (so could be construed to improve cognitive functioning), and improves cardiovascular health. I'd wager you can't conclude from any of that research that putting a gram of it in a drink will help with anything at all, but from a marketing perspective it's a name that carries all the right connotations.
- eropple 3y ago
  GPT4 is not a search engine. Please stop. Cite sources or don't do this.
  - winternewt 3y ago
    I did cite my source by saying it's GPT4, so you know exactly what quality to attribute to the information. I figured it was a good enough source given the context, because my point was that taurine is a good fit for marketing. For that purpose it doesn't really matter whether the information is true. What matters is public perception, and I trust that that's well represented by GPT4 in this case.
    - eropple 3y ago
      GPT4 isn't a source of information. It's a probabilistic string of text. Cite actual sources, please.
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  according to gpt4 there's reasearch that indicates that spice melange assists in cognitive loads especially relating to navigation in fold space

bartislartfast 3y ago

please let us not all start chugging Monster to live longer. 2 grams of taurine will surely be nullified by all the other crap in there