Taurine, found in energy drinks, meat, milk and fish, slows down cellular aging, study

 An international group of scientists found out that taurine deficiency in people is associated with age-related diseases. Adding it to food extended the lives of mice, worms and monkeys and slowed aging at the cellular level.

Taurine is an amino acid that is found in all products of animal origin: in meat, fish, and milk. In addition, this same sulfonic acid is found in many energy drinks. By the way, because vegetarians do not eat meat, they have a taurine deficiency. At the same time, it is considered a conditionally irreplaceable substance for adults and completely irreplaceable for the body of children.

It is known that taurine is partly necessary for the health of bones, cardiovascular, immune and nervous systems. Last year, a team of Brazilian scientists also found that taurine plays a role in antiaging therapy. At the same time, there are few studies on this topic. Therefore, an international group of scientists, which included specialists from the universities of Columbia, Washington (USA), Munich (Germany), the Institute of Genetics and Medicine (Italy) and many other scientific organizations, decided to learn more about this issue and conducted a series of experiments. Their findings are presented in the journal Science.

First, scientists measured the dynamics of serum taurine concentration with age in humans and rhesus macaques. It turned out that it is constantly decreasing: on average, from 132.3 nanograms per milliliter in one-month-old mice to 40.2 in 56-week-old individuals. Fifteen-year-old macaques had taurine levels 85 percent lower than five-year-old primates. In people aged 60, this level was only a third of that in five-year-old children.

At the next stage, the scientists went directly to the experiment. One group of 14-week-old rodents was given 1,000 milligrams of taurine per kilogram of body weight every day for the rest of their lives, and the other group received a placebo. Food was not restricted for those and others. As a result, the mice that received taurine lived longer than those that were not given taurine: the lifespan of the first ones increased by 10-12 percent. The same was observed in Caenorhabditis elegans roundworms.

After that, the scientists added taurine to the mice's food, which also improved all the studied indicators of their health: with age, they gained less weight, better preserved bone tissue, muscle strength, endurance, and cognitive functions. Plus, they showed fewer signs of anxiety and depression. Something similar was observed in monkeys.

Fortunately, a similar effect was observed in humans: higher levels of taurine and hypotaurine in the blood were correlated with lower body mass index, blood glucose levels, incidence of type 2 diabetes, and levels of the inflammatory marker C-reactive protein (the most sensitive indicator of tissue damage in inflammation, necrosis and trauma).

In general, higher levels of taurine are associated with slower cellular aging. The authors of the study concluded that the deficiency of this substance can be called one of the driving factors of aging in multicellular animals.