There was absolute despair in the longevity community a few months ago.
A study on taurine appeared to smash the hopes that taurine supplements could extend lifespan.
Now, I never quite understood why there was such a commotion when that study was published, as I’ll explain—and I continued to take taurine supplements, especially since a new human study of 1,394 people published on the 23rd of November 2025 reinforces my decision.
Let’s dive into the controversy.
Table of Contents
- Taurine Overview and Early Studies
- The 2023 Anti-Aging Study
- The Controversial Follow-Up Study
- Why I Wasn’t Convinced by the Panic
- What the Human Data Really Shows
- The New Meta-Analysis of 1,394 People
- My Taurine Dosage and Form
- References
Taurine Overview and Early Studies
Taurine is an amino acid. 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. Having too little can cause problems. It leads, for instance, to a condition called cardiomyopathy, which makes it hard for the heart to function properly [1].
It is becoming clear that taurine deficiency is also associated with cardiomyopathy in humans [1].
And for decades, taurine has been added to energy drinks.
But more recently, interest in taurine has surged in relation to aging. But why?
Awareness of taurine’s possible health effects isn’t new. For a long time, the focus was on heart health. For instance, a study back in 1984 found a significant positive impact of taurine supplements in heart failure patients [2].
But then, in the early 2000s, researchers noticed an intriguing link. They were looking at taurine intakes and heart disease mortality rates across 61 populations in 25 countries. One group jumped out—the Japanese. They had the lowest mortality rates. And they also get unusually high amounts of taurine in their diets [3].
But that’s just observational data, which can easily be misleading. So while exciting, we needed more robust evidence to have a clearer picture of what’s going on.
The 2023 Anti-Aging Study
A decisive tipping point came with the publication of a hugely important study in 2023. The authors found that taurine supplementation indeed seems to improve various markers associated with aging in mice and monkeys [4].
They discovered that taurine also extended average lifespan in mice and worms in the lab. The median lifespan of taurine-treated mice increased by 10 to 12%, and life expectancy at 28 months increased by about 18 to 25%. It also increased lifespan in multicellular worms [4].
Importantly, they also argued that taurine levels tend to drop with aging. They found this pattern to hold across mice, monkeys, and humans. Blood concentration of taurine declines with age in mice, monkeys, and humans [4].
They connected the dots. Taurine levels drop as we age. Supplementing with taurine counteracts some of the processes of aging and yields a healthier, longer life.
Now, they were careful about what they said here. They identified taurine deficiency as a driver of aging just in mice, worms, and monkeys. Taurine abundance decreases during aging. A reversal of this decline through taurine supplementation increases health span and lifespan in mice and worms, and health span in monkeys [4].
What about humans? Well, they said we needed more data to be sure. To test whether taurine deficiency is a driver of aging in humans as well, long-term, well-controlled taurine supplementation trials that measure health span and lifespan as outcomes are required [4].
But that didn’t stop the supplement market for taurine from exploding. It was touted loudly online as an anti-aging supplement.
The Controversial Follow-Up Study
But then came last year’s study. The researchers behind it identified a fatal flaw in that 2023 study. Though that 2023 study made headlines for uncovering a decline in taurine with aging, there are other studies that found the opposite to be true. In fact, as the authors of last year’s study combed through the literature, they found that results were all over the map. Some studies have found a decrease in taurine with age. Some found an increase. Some found no change [5].
So the researchers wanted to find out what was actually going on.
To get a definitive answer to this question, they took a different approach than the 2023 study. It had to do with how they collected the data on taurine levels in relationship to age. And this turns out to be vitally important.
There are two very different ways to do this. On the one hand, we could assemble a group of people of a range of ages and check the taurine content in their blood. We’d end up with a set of data points that consisted of an age and a number representing taurine levels. We could then put them in order from youngest to oldest and see what the pattern looks like. This is what the authors of the earlier study did. It’s called a cross-sectional analysis. And it appeared that levels declined with age.
But here’s another way to do it. We could assemble a group of people and check their taurine levels. Then we could check their levels again in 10 years. And we could then compare how levels changed for the same individual through time. This is called a longitudinal study. This method takes longer to do, obviously. But it’s also generally more accurate. That’s because there are lots of other factors that could potentially explain differences in levels in a cross-sectional analysis.
To see how, consider an example. Suppose we were looking at cross-sectional data on the link between age and anxiety. What we see today when we do this is much higher levels of anxiety among the young than those who are older. Based on that, we might conclude anxiety is associated with youth and declines with age. But looking at longitudinal data, it appears that people who are now old experienced a lot less anxiety when they were young than those who are now young do. So based on data that tracks individuals through time, we might not see any decline in anxiety with age. Perhaps it even goes up.
So in this new study on taurine, they considered cross-sectional data. But they were also careful to collect longitudinal data, looking at how taurine levels change through time in the same individuals. Looking at things that way, a very different picture emerged.
They looked at data sets for humans, primates, and mice. The pattern was consistent. Taurine levels did not decline with age. In fact, the opposite seems to happen [5].
What’s more, the researchers found taurine levels don’t seem to correlate consistently with markers of aging. They examined muscle strength and body weight—two standard things about us that tend to change in predictable ways with age. But there was no consistent link with taurine levels [5].
It seemed the central idea behind the 2023 study was undercut. There isn’t a pattern of declining taurine with age. Therefore, it looks like low taurine isn’t necessarily a driver of aging. And, in turn, this suggests supplementing with taurine isn’t going to slow it.
Cue the meltdown in the longevity community… which never made much sense to me. And here’s why.
Why I Wasn’t Convinced by the Panic
Studies with mice and other kinds of early trials make lots of headlines. But the results seen there often turn out to be misleading. Many times, when experiments are run again, results turn out differently. This actually has a label: The reproducibility crisis.
Here’s how bad it can be. A team of researchers analyzed 53 important studies linked to potential cancer treatments. They could only reproduce the findings of 6 of them. That’s just 11% [6].
So I don’t base my health decisions on mice studies. And I don’t rely on them for the advice I give to my patients, either. Instead, I focus on human data.
What the Human Data Really Shows
And we have a significant amount of it when it comes to taurine. One study considered a large human population in England. Researchers drew on data from the EPIC-Norfolk cohort study. The study had an initial population of 30,000 adults. It followed them for 30 years [7].
They found that higher levels of taurine in the blood were associated with a lower BMI and a lower incidence of type 2 diabetes. They were also associated with lower levels of inflammation [1].
They’re quick to add, though, that association alone doesn’t establish causation.
Which is why we want to look at randomized controlled trials. Here’s a 2024 meta-analysis that combined the RCT data together [8].
The analysis included 25 trials involving over 1,000 participants. It found that taurine decreased:
- Blood pressure (SBP −3.999 mmHg; DBP −1.509 mmHg)
- Fasting blood sugar (−5.882 mg/dL)
- Triglycerides (−18.315 mg/dL)
- LDL cholesterol
- HbA1c (−0.341%)
- Fasting insulin (−1.521 mU/L)
- HOMA index (−0.693)
But it had no effect on body weight. The doses used in the studies varied between 0.5g and 6g per day. The analysis showed taurine is safe, and appears to have positive metabolic benefits [8].
There’s also some early indicators that it could have a significant impact on brain health as well.
For instance, researchers looked at the association between levels of taurine in the blood and the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Based on participants in the Framingham study, they found higher levels of taurine were associated with a 26% lower risk of dementia [9].
Now, I’ve taken magnesium for a number of years, and you have to pair magnesium with something. This is why you have different forms of magnesium such as magnesium oxide, which isn’t well absorbed, or magnesium citrate.
But you can also bond magnesium to taurate, which is the form I’ve taken. Since taurine is an amino acid, it allows the magnesium taurate to ride on amino acid transporters for better absorption.
The New Meta-Analysis of 1,394 People
Those are all of the existing reasons why I take taurine:
- At doses between 1–3 grams, it appears to be safe
- It appears to have metabolic benefits
- It pairs nicely with magnesium
And this new study reinforces my decision.
It’s a meta-analysis that included 34 randomized controlled trials. The focus was on risk factors linked to chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes. When they analyzed the data, it revealed a host of beneficial effects:
- Fasting blood sugar: −5.90 mg/dL
- HbA1c: −0.21%
- Fasting insulin: Standard mean difference −0.55
- HOMA index: −0.57 [10]
Taurine also helped with blood lipids:
- Triglycerides: −14.42 mg/dL
- Total cholesterol: −12.41 mg/dL
- LDL cholesterol: −5.08 mg/dL [10]
Blood pressure:
- Systolic: −4.38 mmHg
- Diastolic: −2.54 mmHg [10]
Markers of inflammation and oxidative stress also decreased:
- C-reactive protein: −1.26 SMD
- TNF-alpha: −0.35 pg/mL
- Malondialdehyde: −1.16 SMD [10]
It’s actually a striking collection of positive impacts across an array of factors central to health, especially as we age.
My Taurine Dosage and Form
As mentioned, I take magnesium taurate as part of MicroVitamin. Magnesium taurate is 8% elemental magnesium. I have 126mg of elemental magnesium in MicroVitamin. So there’s 1575mg of total magnesium taurate material in MicroVitamin, leaving a total of around 1449mg of taurine in the capsules.
126 / 0.08 = 1575
1575 - 126 = 1449 taurine
MicroVitamin+ powder has an additional 1g of taurine, on top of the existing magnesium taurate.
But just because I take a supplement does not in any way mean that you should as well.
References
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1347861323000749
2. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/clc.4960080507
3. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-0-387-75681-3_2
4. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10630957/
5. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl2116
7. https://www.epic-norfolk.org.uk/
8. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11099170/
