Taurine suddenly isn’t all it was cracked up to be. What happened?
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
The antiaging industry is a behemoth. We are collectively spending billions of dollars a year on an eclectic mix of pills, powders, ice baths, and more, all for the promise of extending our lives. No doubt this is, in part, thanks to enthusiastic podcasters and influencers promising us extraordinary benefits — often even citing science to make their case.
One of the more popular supplements out there is taurine. You can find it in powders, capsules, and energy drinks. Taurine itself is a simple amino acid, one of the building blocks of proteins; it occurs naturally in most animals, including humans. But a series of studies over the years has shown something interesting: If you look at rodents, apes, and even humans, levels of taurine in the body seem to decline a bit with age. There is also evidence that adding taurine back into your body as a supplement may improve some of the problems that come with aging. It’s not a ridiculous idea, because taurine is important for many biological processes — like your body’s creating new cells — and so if you don’t have enough of it, that could be a real problem.
This all sounds great. Why not spend money on taurine supplements?
Unfortunately for anyone who wants to live forever, new data casts doubt on the idea that taurine is vital to prevent aging. In fact, despite those earlier studies, there may not even be a decline in taurine at all as you age. That’s according to a paper published this month in Science.
The new study is a multifaceted analysis looking at three cohorts of humans and a series of studies in mice that assessed what happens to taurine as we age. This study did something that no others had really done with taurine research before: It looked at a longitudinal sample of humans. What this means is that rather than comparing the taurine found in people of different ages at a single point in time — which is what most research had done so far — this study instead took a group of women and followed up with them over a number of years.
The results were surprising. There was no decline in taurine as the women aged. In fact, their taurine levels increased slightly. Although there were indications that higher taurine levels were associated with some improvements in strength, there was, overall, no consistent correlation between taurine and any age-related health outcome.
These findings were replicated in the two other human groups and one mouse group that the scientists evaluated. This has caused quite the media storm, because this result casts doubt over the entire idea that taurine levels decline as we age. It also renders all those taurine supplements dubious, because there’s no clear data here showing that you want more of the amino acid in your body. This one study has been big news!
The paper — and the response to it — is immensely revealing. It shows just how little it takes for something to become a huge player in the antiaging supplement world. Overall, this might look like a wild flip-flop: A popular and widely sold supplement with some science behind it just doesn’t seem to work.
But the thing is, taurine pills have never been shown to offer significant health advantages. The evidence that adding taurine back in via supplement confers benefits? Those studies are small and have obvious issues. Generally, we’ve run vanishingly few studies on taurine supplementation. On top of that, many of the studies we do have reveal that taking the pills has little to no effect.
If all it takes to debunk a popular supplement is a single study assessing the levels of the chemical in human bodies over time, imagine how fragile the rest of the wellness industry must be. There are dozens of things that people put into their bodies every day that have just as little evidence as taurine did, prior to this study, for any benefit. If we were to look deeper into every supplement that’s backed by a few papers and that seems legitimately promising, a lot of them would simply not pan out. That’s how science works: You come up with a good idea backed by some inklings of evidence, you gather more information, and you often learn you were wrong. The longevity space is an industry riddled with enthusiastic hypotheses — but very little good data.
I’m not saying that every antiaging supplement is definitely a complete waste of time. But there’s a massive industry here profiting off our ignorance, and very little incentive for anyone to investigate whether these pills actually work. If these were pharmaceuticals, there would be massive clinical trials with thousands of participants. Instead, we get a handful of woeful papers, which amounts to little more than a slightly educated guess.
Personally, as a 35-year-old man, I take all the supplements with proven health benefits — that is, I take none of them. I have yet to come across evidence that convincingly shows that adding a supplement to my day would bring any real benefit to my own health and well-being. There is not a specific deficiency in my body that my doctor has advised me to correct, and I am not and cannot get pregnant, which is the other instance in which very specific supplementation can be helpful.
This latest study is, at the end of the day, just one more study. If you like your taurine, there’s no strong data here to stop you from taking it, but there’s also no good reason to keep spending your money. The new data casts doubt on the antiaging properties of taurine. I hope it reminds us all just how weak the data that sits behind most longevity supplements really is.
