Taurine.. Time to Throw it Away? Two New Studies

0:00 Two years ago, a breakthrough study yielded exciting evidence that torine could help combat aging. But a study just published casts serious doubt about those earlier results. And this is actually a great thing, as I'll explain. So, is it time to throw away your torine supplements in the garbage? Well, let's take a look at what this new study tells us and what it means for our health. Torine is an amino acid, and it's found naturally in the body, especially in the brain, heart, and muscles. It plays many roles from energy metabolism to supporting nervous system function, and having too little can cause problems. It leads to for instance a condition called cardiomyopathy which makes it hard for the heart to function properly. And for decades torine has been added to energy drinks. But more recently interest in torine has surged in relation to aging. And the study from 2 years ago had a lot to do with this. So what did the study find? Well there were actually two key

0:46 discoveries. The first was about the impact of torine supplementation. The researchers were interested in the potential for torine to extend lifespan and they looked at how worms responded to extra torine. Here's what they found. The lifespan of worms treated with torine increased by 10 to 23%. Now worms are a long way from humans, but they also tested torine's effects on mice, which are biologically much closer to us. And in this case, the results were equally impressive. Lifespans increased between 10 to 12% and life expectancy at the 12 month mark went up from 18 to 25%. The impact here is huge, and you can see why people were excited. But even though we're closer to mice than we are worms, we're still an entirely different species. So, should we expect similar results in humans? Well, this is where the second key discovery in the study comes into play. They looked at

1:32 several different species and the researchers noticed something interesting about torine levels. It looked like they decreased rapidly with age. This was true in mice and monkeys and the evidence suggested that it was true for us as well. So, taking these two discoveries together, the researchers came to a striking conclusion. The reasoning went like this. Torine supplements help mice and worms live longer. And torine levels in mice and worms, they drop with age. So the reason that torine supplementation has this lifespan effect must make up because of the natural decline in torine levels. So if we prevent this decline, we might be able to slow down aging. It's a plausible hypothesis that fits their data and it led to an obvious question. Would the same relationship hold true for humans? Could we slow down aging by boosting our torine levels? And they proposed that testing this in trials would be the next logical step.

2:19 But there's a brand new study that throws this convincing picture into serious doubt. The scientists behind it noticed something interesting about the torine research. Though the 2023 study made headlines for discovering a decline in torine with aging, there are other studies that found the opposite to be true. In fact, they combed through the literature for this most recent study and they found that the results were all over the map. Some studies found a decrease in torine with age while others found an increase and some found no change. So, what's actually going on here? And the answer is critical because if torine levels don't actually decrease with age, then the theory put forward by the 2023 study is wrong and the hope that torine supplements could help extend lifespan is undermined. So that's what the researchers set out to clarify what actually happens with torine levels as we age and to get a definitive answer

3:04 to this question. They took a different approach compared to that 2023 study. So it had to do with how they collected the data on torine levels in relationship to age. And this turns out to be vitally important. There are two very different ways to do this. So on one hand, we could assemble a group of people with a range of ages and check their torine levels in their blood. We'd end up with a set of data points that consisted of an age and a number representing torine levels. We can then put them in order from youngest to oldest and see what the patterns look like. This is what the authors of the earlier study did. It's called a cross-sectional analysis. And from that analysis, it appeared that levels declined with age. But there's a completely different way to do this. We could assemble a group of people and check their torine levels and then we could check their levels again 10 years later and then we could compare how those levels changed in the individuals

3:51 with time. This is called a longitudinal study and it takes longer to do obviously but it's generally more accurate. That's because there are lots of other factors that could potentially explain the differences in levels from a cross-sectional analysis. To see how, consider this example. Suppose we were looking at cross-sectional data on the link between age and anxiety. What we see today is that there's much higher levels of anxiety among those who are young compared to those who are older. And based on that, we might conclude that anxiety is associated with youth and declines with age. But looking at the longitudinal data, it appears that those who are now old experienced a lot less anxiety when they were young compared to those who are now young too. So based on the data that tracks individuals throughout time, we might not see any decline in anxiety with age. Perhaps it even goes up. So in this new

4:36 study on torine they considered cross-sectional data but they were also careful to collect longitudinal data looking at how torine levels changed with time in the same individuals that is crucial in the same individuals. So looking at things this way it casts a very different picture for humans. They use data from the Baltimore longitudinal study of aging. Participants in that cohort had blood samples taken three to five times over a period of around 8 years and it included people aged 26 to 100. They also included cross-sectional data from two other cohorts. They then looked at the longitudinal data for primates and mice and they identified a consistent pattern across the various different data sources. Toring levels did not decline with age. In fact, the opposite appears to happen. This overturns one of the key assertions from

5:22 their 2023 study. And the claim is important because it played a central role in the story about torine and aging. If torine drops naturally as we age, then maintaining levels through supplementation could help combat aging. But now it appears that the levels don't drop at all and the differences in individual levels tend to be greater than the differences across a lifetime. This would make it really hard to try and specify appropriate levels of torine at particular seasons of life. That in turn would mean that we can't look at torine levels as a measure for how much we're aging biologically speaking. What's more, the researchers found that torine levels didn't seem to correlate consistently with markers of aging. So, they examined muscle strength and body weight, for example. These are two standard things that tell us about the trends in aging, but there was no consistent link with torine levels. So,

6:08 what does this all mean for that 2023 study? The key data point is this. Torine levels don't appear to drop as we age. The takeaway is that the proposed link between torine and aging doesn't seem to hold. Low circulating torine isn't a driver of aging and therefore supplementing with torine probably isn't going to slow it down. It seems like these results should be really disappointing and I'm going to explain what I'm going to do with torine supplements in a moment. But as I said at the outset of this video, these new results are actually a really good thing. Let me explain why. Studies like this one show us that the process of making scientific progress is working as it's supposed to. We move forward by proposing theories, testing them, and then continuing to refine our understanding. A key part of this process is careful, rigorous testing of our assumptions and often retesting things that other researchers have

6:54 already looked at. So, this study gives us a great example. The researchers of that 2023 study said that torine declines with age. But those behind this newer study had worries about the methods used in that earlier study. They wanted to see what longitudinal data might reveal, and they did the hard work. And now we know the earlier conclusion was too hasty. We need to go back to the drawing board. Uncovering a misunderstanding is a key part of moving forward and now we can understand torine better than we did before. But this leaves me personally with a very practical question. So I take torine as part of microvitamin plus powder. So does it make any sense to continue doing that? Well, as I've thought about these results of this new study, I still have a nagging question. Why did torine increase the lifespans of yeast, worms, and mice in that 2023 study? So, I'd like to see the interventions testing

7:40 program take a careful look at torine supplements to confirm or deny those earlier results. It might turn out to be the case that the benefits are real and we don't yet understand the mechanism. Leaving that question aside, though, extending lifespan wasn't the reason why I started taking torine in the first place. I make my health decisions based on human data, not pre-clinical data. And in this case, research has uncovered some intriguing benefits. So for instance, a new study published last year looked at measures related to metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is a significant health concern because it increases the risk of heart disease, strokes, type 2 diabetes, and chronic inflammation. In a meta analysis, for example, of randomized clinical trials that looked at parameters related to metabolic syndrome. So these included things like cholesterol, blood pressure, and insulin sensitivity. That analysis

8:26 included 25 trials involving over 1,000 participants, and it found that torine decreased fasting blood sugar levels, blood pressure, triglycerides, LDL cholesterol, HBA1C, and insulin levels, but it had no effect on body weight. The doses used in those studies varied between 1 g and 6 g per day, and the analysis showed that torine is safe. But before jumping ahead, we have to note some cautions with that data. We need to consider the potential of bias. So the individual studies included in that analysis, some of them are poor quality and the outcome is unreliable. So of the 25 studies analyzed, 18 lacked critical information about how they were conducted, putting them at risk of bias. The remaining seven had low risk of bias. None had high risk. So it's a bit of a mixed bag as far as quality goes. And another critical issue is the short

9:12 duration of the included studies. So most lasted no more than 2 months with only a few extending up to a year. So due to those limitations, the authors of the analysis stressed the need for longerterm studies to validate torine's effects. But there is some additional data showing other ways that torine might help with heart health. So for example, one study of 120 individuals found that torine seemed to lower blood pressure by about seven units. And that study gave some additional insights about how torine might be doing that. So the researchers found that it was due to improvements in the way that blood vessels can respond to and regulate pressure. And there's one final connection with heart health. Several clinical studies have shown that torine supplements improve cardiac performance and those suffering from heart failure. Again though, with most of the findings that we've looked at in this video, we could use more evidence to strengthen

9:59 our conclusions. But if that's true, why do I take torine? Well, for me, it's simple. Even if it's preliminary, we do have a wide variety of experimental results in humans that all point in the same direction. Torine seems to have a number of significant impacts on parameters connected to a healthier life, but we always need to think about safety. So we have to weigh the benefits against the costs. And in this case, the evidence that we have is that torine is safe. But on the point of safety, there has been a new study on cancer cells that's caused a lot of confusion for people online because it identified torine as a regulator of myoid cancers. So it's important to note that this is a study of existing cancer cells in a petri dish. It's similar to how there are single cell studies showing that glucose will accelerate existing cancer cell growth or that NAD will accelerate existing cancer cell growth. This is

10:45 very very different from the effects in the real human body. And for me at this stage, the human evidence suggests that the benefits of torine outweigh the risks. So for me, I'm going to continue to take torine as part of microvitamin plus powder. We're already on formula version 6 and formula version 7 has started to roll out in the USA. So it's not like torine is locked into microvitamin. And that's why I'm saying I continue to take it. If I wanted to take it out, it's very easy to do. When the research points to the need to make a change as evidenced by all the existing changes I've already made to microvitamin, I won't hesitate to do it. And again, just because I take a supplement does in no way mean that you should as well. So, for now, it looks like torine might not be the key to extending lifespan that many had hoped. But there's another supplement that's been around for years that's starting to show some exciting promise in this area. So, make sure to check out this next

11:31 video to find out what it is and the latest research that's revealing its potential impact.