Taurine is the most abundant amino acid you’ve never heard of. Strong evidence suggests that groups with the longest life spans consume higher amounts of taurine than those of us in the rest of the world. High intakes of taurine could be the underlying factor in the world’s longest-living populations — and for good reason.
Taurine supplementation can mitigate the damaging effects of fat, glucose, and excess insulin. Taurine strengthens and protects heart muscle cells and the system of blood vessels that supply blood throughout the body, helping to protect against atherosclerosis, heart attacks, and strokes.
And taurine protects vision and hearing. It may prevent and alleviate seizures, and it has been shown to treat the most common cause of liver disease in the United States.
With epidemiological evidence that it contributes to the longevity of famously long-lived groups, taurine belongs on the short list of supplements necessary for maintaining optimal health in the face of aging.
Taurine is essential and everywhere inside you — like love and coffee. But you probably don’t know much, if anything, about this powerful compound. The list of taurine benefits is long, including keeping your body running.
What Is Taurine?
Taurine is a sulfur-containing amino acid that supports immune, nervous, and cardiovascular health. Taurine is essential for the function and repair of the body’s tissues. Taurine is critical for regulating electrolytes and minerals across cell membranes, which is vital for promoting hydration at the cellular level. Metabolically, taurine supports cell energy production and is a component of bile salt formation, which is essential for digestion and the body’s processing of cholesterol.
Benefits Of Taurine
The connection between taurine and a long life is so strong that researchers have dubbed taurine “The nutritional factor for the longevity of the Japanese.”
Taurine promotes cardiovascular health, insulin sensitivity, electrolyte balance, hearing function, and immune modulation. In animal research, taurine protects against heart failure, reducing mortality by nearly eighty percent. Its benefits are so extensive that scientists have described taurine as “a wonder molecule.”
Because of taurine’s essential role in the body, supplementing with taurine can provide numerous health benefits, including restoring insulin sensitivity, mitigating diabetic complications, reversing cardiovascular disease factors, preventing and treating fatty liver disease, alleviating seizures, reversing tinnitus, and more.
Taurine Prevents Obesity
One of the ways taurine can help improve overall health is by fighting obesity. Obesity impacts everybody, primarily because of the inflammation-generating abdominal fat stores. Human studies show that 3 grams per day of taurine for seven weeks reduced body weight significantly in a group of overweight or obese (but not yet diabetic) adults.Subjects saw significant declines in their serum triglycerides and “atherogenic index,” a ratio of multiple cholesterol components that predicts atherosclerosis risk.
Taurine Promotes Glucose Control—and Treats Diabetes
It is a known fact that taurine concentrations are lower among people with diabetes than in healthy individuals. Given the above information about low taurine levels promoting obesity, it is clear that the low levels of taurine only serve to promote the interdependence of diabetes and obesity. Fortunately, human studies have shown that supplementing with just 1.5 grams of taurine a day can restore taurine levels to those in healthy control subjects, and additional animal research has shown that taurine supplementation can help prevent the onset oftype II diabetes.
Average taurine concentrations are essential in controlling diabetes and the impact of its consequences. Taurine helps control diabetes by reducing blood glucose and restoring insulin sensitivity. But it doesn’t stop there. Taurine helps prevent—and even reverse—many of the consequences associated with the disease.
In adult diabetics, supplementation with 1.5 grams of taurine daily for just 14 days can reverse diabetes-induced abnormalities in arterial stiffness and the vasculature’s ability to respond to changes in blood flow or pressure. This can be critical to the longevity of people with diabetes since these types of abnormalities are to blame for diabetics’ increased risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. In addition, studies in people with diabetes show that taurine helps protect heart function and helps prevent heart muscle damage due in part to the ability of taurine to increase glucose transport from blood into energy-hungry heart muscle cells. In increasing glucose transport into energy-producing cells, blood glucose levels are lowered.
Additional studies have revealed that taurine supplementation is effective against diabetic complications as well. Taurine supports nerve fiber integrity, potentially slowing or reversing painful diabetic neuropathy. In the retina, another target of destructive elevated blood glucose, taurine fights glucose-induced oxidant stress and preserves the health of light-sensing cells in diabetic retinopathy.Kidney damage, another consequence of diabetes, can be minimized with taurine supplementation in diabetics.
Taurine Reverses Cardiovascular Disease Factors
Taurine has powerful effects on the heart and blood vessels. People with higher levels of taurine have significantly lower rates of dying from coronary heart disease. They also have lower body mass index, blood pressure, and levels of dangerous lipids. Many mechanisms account for these powerful heart and blood vessel effects.
Taurine supplementation lowers blood pressure by reducing the resistance to blood flow in the blood vessel walls and minimizing nerve impulses in the brain that drive blood pressure up. Taurine supplementation has been found to reduce the arterial thickening and stiffness characteristic of atherosclerosis, restore arteries’ responses to beneficial endothelial nitric oxide, and reduce inflammation, a direct contributor to cardiovascular disease.
Taurine Enhances Your Exercise Performance
Want a better workout? Try taking taurine supplements. Trained athletes who supplement with taurine experience better exercise performance, and cyclists ride longer distances with less fatigue. There’s a good reason for these positive effects: Taurine helps muscles work harder, longer, and safer.
Harder. Taurine increases muscle contractility (the force with which muscle cells pull together) in both skeletal and cardiac muscles. That means more powerful workouts as muscle works harder.
Longer. Taurine helps exercising muscles rid themselves of lactic acid. Lactic acid causes feelings of pain and soreness and limits how much muscle can continue to work. By cleaning up lactic acid, taurine helps muscles work longer.
Safer. Working muscles generate oxidant stress and damage DNA, leading to the potential for muscle damage and poorer performance. Taurine protects muscles from such damage, so the muscle works more safely.
Taurine Provides Retina Protection
Taurine is especially vital when it comes to eye health. Adequate levels can help prevent age-related vision loss; conversely, a deficiency can lead to troubling vision problems. Age-related vision loss has many different causes, but near the top is the impact of oxidative stress on light-sensing cells in the retina. Such damage leads to age-related macular degeneration and other forms of retinal disease. While taurine is found in very high concentrations in the retina, it declines significantly with age.The taurine found in the retina also fights oxidative stress, especially in diabetes, and helps restore deficient nerve growth factor levels required for maintaining retinal health.
When taurine levels are deficient, a variety of vision problems can occur, including retinal ganglion cell degeneration and, in children, retinal dysfunction. Taurine supplementation has been shown to alleviate diabetic retinopathy. Evidence is strong that taurine is vital in maintaining optimal retinal function.
Taurine Helps Reverse Tinnitus
Taurine plays a vital role in hearing. Studies have found that, in some cases, taurine can reverse the biochemical processes behind hearing loss.Other studies have demonstrated that taurine can almost eliminate ear ringing associated with tinnitus.
Much of the hearing damage occurs not in the ear’s mechanical parts but in the nerve cells that convert sound waves into the electrical energy perceived in our brains. Like other nerve cells, these so-called “hair cells” depend on the flow of calcium ions into and out of the cell. Taurine helps restore and control normal calcium ion flow in auditory cells.
Solution for Seizures
While there are many types and many causes of epilepsy, a disruption in the function of excitable brain tissue underlies all of them. Taurine appears to work by increasing the levels of glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD), the enzyme responsible for the production of the neurotransmitter GABA, as well as by binding to so-called GABA receptors in brain cells, calming them and reducing their likelihood of participating in the random, uncoordinated electrical firing that produces an epileptic seizure.
Taurine Prevents and Remedies Liver Disease
Increasing evidence suggests that taurine may help the most common cause of liver disease in the US, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease occurs when too much fat accumulates in the liver, and it can be caused by insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. Over time, the result is the loss of liver function, leading to liver cirrhosis.
The human liver is our master detoxifying organ, screening our blood flow daily for substances that can damage our bodies. Taurine is an integral part of the liver’s self-protective mechanisms.
Studies show that taurine defends liver cells against free radicals and toxins, helping to reduce the severity of oxidative stress-induced liver injury. This is vitally important in alcoholic and non-alcoholic fatty liver diseases, both of which can progress to cirrhosis and liver failure.
Taurine occurs naturally in food, especially in seafood and meat. The amount consumed in most societies, however, is relatively low. The mean daily intake from omnivore diets was determined to be less than 200 a day, even in individuals eating a high-meat diet. Successful clinical studies with taurine have used 1,500 to 3,000 mg daily. It is challenging to obtain this amount of taurine from traditional dietary sources.
The body makes taurine from the metabolism of the amino acid cysteine. Aging can reduce the amount of taurine made from cysteine, thus making taurine supplementation desirable in maturing individuals.
Taurine is not abundant in most plant foods, and on average, non-vegetarians typically eat around 45-75 mg of taurine daily. Vegans have been shown to have lower blood levels of taurine.
Taurine is found abundantly in healthy bodies. However, disease states—including liver, kidney, or heart failure, diabetes, and cancer—can all cause a deficiency in taurine. And aging bodies often cannot internally produce an optimal amount of taurine, making supplementation vital. Those interested in longevity should consider this essential and super low-cost nutrient.
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