What You Actually Need to Know About Taurine | Taurine Benefits

At some point in the video, I mentioned taurine, the amino acid, and that created a whole bunch of questions. And so I thought I'd break down some of the basics around taurine and why we might use it clinically, why it might be important, especially to be in your diet, but also as a potential supplement. And we'll get into that right now. So the first thing is, what is taurine? Taurine is an amino acid. Amino acids are what we make proteins and peptides out of. And taurine is a little bit unique in that it's not a structural Creating amino acid directly, meaning it doesn't go into protein formation or that, but it is an indirect protein formation amino acid where it has indirect synthesis stimulation. And I know that's sort of like splitting hairs, but taurine has always been considered unique in that way. So if it's not making directly, you know, proteins and that sort of thing, what is it doing inside of the body? And why is taurine so important when we get to chronic illness, recovery from injury, stuff like that. Well, let's look at the functions of taurine, and this will lead us to a discussion then of what's it doing for us downstream. Taurine does lots of stuff. It's a really wonderful amine in the body. The first thing is it's involved in detoxification. So the first that it's usually, you know, labeled as a detoxifier of would be xenobiotics. So this might be like pesticides or other toxins that come in. It helps out with liver and other cell function. to get rid of these things or at least move them along in their detoxification process. But it also helps to detoxify aldehydes. Aldehydes are neurotoxins. They're generally toxic to the body. Our body has lots of intermediate pathways that make more aldehydes. If we drink alcohol, we get more aldehydes, but also we just make aldehydes naturally. So some people wind up with toxic aldehyde exposure. And one of the things that can be helpful with that is taurine among the other things that are usually thought of. So General detoxification. The next would be protection of your cell components. So the cell membrane, the outer part where all of our receptors and cool stuff are, is protected by taurine. And also the mitochondria that makes all of our energy is also protected by taurine. And that becomes very important because if we are trying to recover from an illness, if we are trying to fend off an invader or a toxin or something, the more protection and the more recovery ability we get from the taurine, the better. Then there are different ways, and this is not often talked about, where taurine can be an antioxidant support. So one of the more well-known ones is when our white blood cells are trying to kill something, they will create something called hypochlorous acid. And that's fine when we're trying to kill stuff, but we also need a balance for, you know, the killing side to, to take apart a hypochlorous acid. It turns out that taurine goes and kind of grabs onto the hypochlorous acid and scavenges it. out of there. So we use it and then it gets rid of the toxic intermediate or the toxic product. Another that it does is to help directly to scavenge reactive oxygen species. These we often will call, you know, things like free radicals, you know, oxidants, things like that. And in doing so, it's especially helpful. This goes back to protecting the cell membrane. It decreases lipid peroxidation. So that could be your cell membranes, that could be your cholesterol, that could be any fat in your body. Really, and then it also is a support, either directly or indirectly, to many of your detoxification-dependent enzymes. So superoxide dismutase is a very important enzyme to help in the detoxification, especially from phase one to phase two detox. Catalase, which is a big detoxifying enzyme to remove oxidants in the cell especially, and then glutathione peroxidase is supported by taurine as well. It also is involved in immune balance. So we talked about the white blood cell, the leukocyte hypochlorous acid. It also gets involved through its redox manipulation in immune balancing. And then finally, one of its more interesting roles is as what we would call an osmolite. Now I'll do some separate content on the clinical importance of this in some of your very highly critical tissues like reproductive tissues, brain, heart. The things that we need to be working. But what is an osmolite? That's sort of a weird word, but the idea of an osmolite is it helps the electrolytes, so the electrically active minerals, ions essentially, go to the proper side of the membranes. So you might ask, what would be the most common electrolytes that we need an osmolite for? Those would be the things that create excitable tissue activity. So that would be things Such as the negatively charged chloride ion, potassium, calcium, sodium, magnesium. So potassium, sodium, calcium, magnesium, and chloride, put all those together, they are through receptor action and transporter action forced onto 2 different sides of your membranes. When we have a trigger for like a nerve cell to send a message, we trigger what's called an action potential and certain types of channels open up and those ions go to the other side. We can't leave them there because then we wouldn't be able to make any more, you know, nerve action potentials, et cetera. So what the osmolite helps to do is when either from nutrition, those minerals, ions show up, or after an action potential generation, they show up on the sides, the osmolite helps to push them back to where they're supposed to be. So by and large, we have particular things on the outside of the cell, particular on the inside of the cell, and During an action potential generation, we move them around. If the taurine, the osmolite, is not there in a sufficient amount, then what will happen is you will have irregular activity of the excitable tissue. You might say, well, great, how would that feel? Right? Well, when taurine levels are low, you often then have potentially intolerance to one of those minerals. You might say, take magnesium, and instead of calming you down, it makes you, you know, more spasm-prone or something like that. Something very atypical. You may not be able to recover after exercise. You may have rhythm problems with your heart or sleep troubles or all sorts of other things. So the osmolite activity is highly, highly critical to the action of nerves, muscle, heart, brain, all of the excitable tissues. And then there's other things that taurine does, which we'll talk about, more in depth in another video, but specifically things like helping your GABA receptors. Now, GABA receptors are in your brain. There's a couple of different types, but the GABA-A receptors open up chloride channels and taurine helps to support and rehabilitate GABA receptors. This is where things like alcohol and benzodiazepines and certain sleep medications work is on the GABA receptors. And so sometimes when you have damage from those substances, taurine can help in the rehabilitation. All right. Well, I hope this kicks off our understanding of taurine and why as an amino substance it is so important, even though it doesn't directly make protein, it does all this other stuff. And it will also lead us to a broader description and discussion of taurine in relationship to heart and brain function, which we'll do separately. So it's all tidy and in one place. All right. Well, I'm Dr. A. Thank you for listening. 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