{"id":161052,"date":"2025-06-05T19:50:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-05T19:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/161052\/"},"modified":"2025-06-05T19:50:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-05T19:50:10","slug":"taurine-might-not-be-the-anti-aging-miracle-we-hoped-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/161052\/","title":{"rendered":"Taurine Might Not Be the Anti-Aging Miracle We Hoped For"},"content":{"rendered":"

You might want to hold off on stockpiling taurine supplements as part of your anti-aging cocktail. Research published today failed to find evidence that our levels of taurine shrink as we get older, contrary to some earlier studies.<\/p>\n

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health led the research, published<\/a> Thursday in Science. They analyzed long-running data from past human, mice, and monkey studies, finding that taurine levels didn\u2019t change much over time and widely varied between individual animals. The results suggest that taurine isn\u2019t a good marker for age and throw into doubt the idea that it can prolong healthy aging.<\/p>\n

\u201cCirculating taurine doesn\u2019t decline with age in healthy individuals of these three mammalian species across the adult lifespan,\u201d said lead study researcher Maria Emilia Fernandez, a postdoctoral fellow in the Translational Gerontology Branch of the NIH\u2019s National Institute on Aging, in a press conference Tuesday announcing the findings.<\/p>\n

Taurine is a semi-essential amino acid and important micronutrient. Our bodies naturally produce taurine, though it can also easily be found in animal products, supplements, and energy drinks (people once collected taurine from bulls, but it\u2019s now produced<\/a> synthetically). Taurine plays<\/a> many roles in the body, such as helping us make bile acid and keeping our blood pressure stable. In recent years, some studies have indicated that taurine\u2014or rather, the loss of taurine\u2014might also be a key driver of our worsening health as we get older.<\/p>\n

A 2023 study that looked at several different animal models, for instance, found<\/a> that taurine levels circulating in the blood declined as the animals aged. When the researchers added taurine supplements to the animals\u2019 diets, it appeared to slightly extend the lifespan of mice and worms in addition to improving the health of older monkeys. The study also found an association between lower taurine levels in humans and an increased risk of age-related diseases.<\/p>\n

Though this wasn\u2019t the first research to suggest taurine\u2019s anti-aging potential, it certainly sparked people\u2019s attention, including the authors behind this latest research. Not every bit of research on the topic has supported this link, however, and many studies have only analyzed taurine in people and animals at\u00a0a single point in time or for a relatively brief period. The researchers behind the new study wanted to take a closer look at how these levels fluctuated over time across different species and in both males and females.<\/p>\n

They turned to other existing studies or projects involving people, mice, and rhesus monkeys that had longitudinal data on taurine levels in the blood\u2014meaning they could track these levels across the lifespan. Overall, they found that taurine levels didn\u2019t decline in any of the animals or humans they studied; if anything, taurine levels usually increased over time in different groups (the sole exception being male mice). They also found that differences in taurine levels between individuals could sometimes vary significantly, and that these differences were usually larger than the changes seen over an animal\u2019s lifetime.<\/p>\n

In other words, there doesn\u2019t appear to be much of a connection at all between taurine and aging, at least in this research. \u201cOn the basis of these findings, we conclude that low circulating taurine concentrations are unlikely to serve as a good biomarker of aging,\u201d the researchers wrote.<\/p>\n

These are still findings from a single study, so more research will be needed to settle the question. The results also don\u2019t mean that taurine isn\u2019t important to our health. And it is still possible that low taurine levels can contribute to chronic health problems, including conditions that become more common as we age. Likewise, there may be some older people with low taurine who would benefit from increasing their intake.<\/p>\n

Vijay Yadav, one of the authors behind the 2023 study, and his colleagues are currently running a randomized clinical trial testing whether taurine supplements can improve the health and fitness of middle-aged adults. He expects the trial to conclude by the end of 2025, with analysis coming soon after. For now, though, Yadav isn\u2019t saying that people should be downing taurine like it\u2019s candy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe cannot really recommend any supplementation. We need to have a better understanding if it does or it does not [improve health]; that can only be addressed by a placebo controlled trial,\u201d said Yadav in the same press conference Tuesday. \u201cAnd of course there are a lot more questions that need to be addressed before you can really understand the biology to more depth of a particular molecule.\u201d<\/p>\n

While there are certainly things people can already do to stay healthier into their golden years, such as exercising regularly, the track record for anti-aging drugs or supplements overall remains spotty for the time being. And it seems that a universal fountain of youth\u2014if we can ever truly find it\u2014probably won\u2019t contain any taurine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You might want to hold off on stockpiling taurine supplements as part of your anti-aging cocktail. Research published…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":161053,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4318],"tags":[1152,105,67826,4434,67827,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-161052","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nutrition","8":"tag-aging","9":"tag-health","10":"tag-human-longevity","11":"tag-nutrition","12":"tag-taurine","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114632499345019415","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161052\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}