Where to Find Taurine and the Best Source

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I compare the cost, convenience, and safety of various plant, animal, and supplement sources of taurine.

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Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.

Foods that contain the highest levels of taurine come from the sea, particularly seaweed and shellfish. Here it is graphically, so you can see how shellfish compare to other meat. The most concentrated source, though, is dried nori, the seaweed sheets used to make sushi.

Land plants, however, have negligible amounts. So, a singular focus on increasing dietary taurine risks driving poor nutritional choices, because plant-rich diets are associated with human health and longevity. I mean, energy drinks have taurine too, but slamming monster Red Bull rockstar cocaine is probably not the best option. The best choice would probably be to eat a healthy plant-based diet with supplemental taurine. It’s such a simple molecule; it can be inexpensively synthesized. So, you can just get pure taurine powder.

Here’s how it all breaks down. We can start with concentration. Pure taurine obviously has the most, then dried nori, then an average of clams, oysters, mussels, and scallops, then the average across nine energy drinks, then fin fish, including the highest, yellow sea bream, down to tuna, one of the lowest. Then an average of chicken, beef, and pork.

Nori’s looking pretty good until you realize how light it is. To get one gram of taurine, you’d have to eat 10 servings a day, which is 40 sheets of nori, which, even if you could stomach it, would exceed your recommended iodine intake for the day. The easiest way to get a gram would be a quarter teaspoon of pure taurine powder, though one can of most energy drinks would do it. But then there’s the issue of added sugars or artificial sweeteners. Two daily servings of shellfish is a lot of shellfish, but certainly doable. Easier than eating eight daily servings of regular fish or 18 servings a day of land animals.

Here’s the cost comparison. This is where taurine powder really shines––at as little as a penny per day when bought in bulk, it’s 50 times cheaper than the next on the list. I used a combination of canned and fresh shellfish for this comparison. If you just did like canned clams, it would be more like $2.50 a day. In terms of saturated fat and cholesterol, shellfish are extremely lean, though the dietary guidelines recommends that dietary cholesterol consumption be as low as possible––90 is less than half an egg yolk.

Allergies are an issue for some. Shellfish is actually the most common type of food allergy in the United States, affecting about one in 35 people, though it may be as high as one in 10, depending on the method of diagnosis. Allergies to land-based meat are rare, unless you’ve been bitten by certain types of ticks.

Foodborne illness can also be a problem, particularly since shellfish, like oysters, are sometimes eaten raw. Usually, it’s just gastroenteritis, but it can sometimes develop into serious infections. Shellfish are filter-feeders, so they just pick up and concentrate pathogens from the environment. Most outbreaks are from human fecal pathogens from sewage that get in the water or the overboard disposal of feces from boats. I guess I never really thought about that, but like most crews from oyster-harvesting boats were just like tossing their waste overboard, and it came back to bite them.

How common is contamination of shellfish with foodborne human fecal viruses like norovirus, the most common cause of foodborne gastroenteritis? Nearly one in three samples of shellfish carries this kind of fecal contamination that can make us sick; yet, most consumers ignore the fact that shellfish usually come from places polluted by untreated human waste. Though fecal contamination is also found in 85 percent of retail ground beef and turkey, about half of chicken, and a third of pork. Thankfully, these meats are cooked, but still, contaminated poultry products probably cause the most food poisoning deaths, not shellfish.

Then, anytime you’re talking about the aquatic food chain, there are industrial pollutants. Pollution of the oceans is widespread and worsening, and pollutants include toxic heavy metals like mercury, microplastics, and industrial toxins like PCBs. Yes, we’ve been eating shellfish for more than a hundred thousand years, but that was before we so polluted our waterways. Shellfish pump and filter such large quantities of water in their feeding processes that they just tend to accumulate a lot of heavy metals. So, the consumption of contaminated shellfish can lead to neurological and developmental defects, reproductive and gastrointestinal disorders, and, in extreme cases, death. That seems a little extreme. They’re talking about contamination with algal toxins.

While filter-feeding, shellfish can ingest toxic algae, which can produce 100 different natural toxins. So, the shellfish can accumulate these toxins and pass them on to consumers. So although we refer to them as shellfish toxins, they’re actually no more from the shellfish themselves than the human fecal viruses were.

When humans ingest different toxins accumulated in seafood, they may exhibit different poisoning syndromes. There’s paralytic shellfish poisoning, amnesic shellfish poisoning, neurotoxic shellfish poisoning, and diarrhetic shellfish poisoning.

Symptoms-wise, these can include abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, severe headaches, confusion, agitation, sleepiness, memory loss, coma, loss of coordination, excessive scratching, tremors, heart arrhythmias, seizures, lethargy, inappetence—I’d never heard that word for loss of appetite––blindness, muscular twitches, behavioral changes, convulsions, and death, sometimes within hours. No antidotes are available. Sometimes, neuropsychological symptoms can last for years.

Some of the toxins may be carcinogenic, linked to a variety of different cancers. This may help explain cohort studies that found associations between colorectal cancer and the consumption of shellfish and shrimp. But, of course, it could also be the industrial pollutants.

The bad news is that toxic algae blooms are getting worse, thanks to climate change, but the good news is that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has established a surveillance program to test for toxins; so, there are regulatory limits. Unfortunately, despite strong regulatory limits protecting people from acute poisoning, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting there are significant health consequences following repeated exposures to levels of an amnesic neurotoxin known as domoic acid, even when below current safety guidelines.

Those in the Pacific Northwest who eat a lot of razor clams, for example, with presumed safe levels, were found to be at risk for clinically significant memory problems. They are five to six times more likely to have problems with everyday memory, like having to check whether you actually did something, or forgetting to tell someone something important, or being forgetful day to day. The toxin doesn’t seem to be affected by cooking, and the “very high” levels of consumption were just more than 15 clams a month, so Washington State tells its residents to eat less than that. But to reach a gram a day of taurine, you’d have to eat 10 a day—300 a month. The bottom line is that even at levels deemed “safe” under current regulatory limits, algal toxins may not make mollusks the best source for taurine supplementation.

Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.

Motion graphics by Avo Media

Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.

Foods that contain the highest levels of taurine come from the sea, particularly seaweed and shellfish. Here it is graphically, so you can see how shellfish compare to other meat. The most concentrated source, though, is dried nori, the seaweed sheets used to make sushi.

Land plants, however, have negligible amounts. So, a singular focus on increasing dietary taurine risks driving poor nutritional choices, because plant-rich diets are associated with human health and longevity. I mean, energy drinks have taurine too, but slamming monster Red Bull rockstar cocaine is probably not the best option. The best choice would probably be to eat a healthy plant-based diet with supplemental taurine. It’s such a simple molecule; it can be inexpensively synthesized. So, you can just get pure taurine powder.

Here’s how it all breaks down. We can start with concentration. Pure taurine obviously has the most, then dried nori, then an average of clams, oysters, mussels, and scallops, then the average across nine energy drinks, then fin fish, including the highest, yellow sea bream, down to tuna, one of the lowest. Then an average of chicken, beef, and pork.

Nori’s looking pretty good until you realize how light it is. To get one gram of taurine, you’d have to eat 10 servings a day, which is 40 sheets of nori, which, even if you could stomach it, would exceed your recommended iodine intake for the day. The easiest way to get a gram would be a quarter teaspoon of pure taurine powder, though one can of most energy drinks would do it. But then there’s the issue of added sugars or artificial sweeteners. Two daily servings of shellfish is a lot of shellfish, but certainly doable. Easier than eating eight daily servings of regular fish or 18 servings a day of land animals.

Here’s the cost comparison. This is where taurine powder really shines––at as little as a penny per day when bought in bulk, it’s 50 times cheaper than the next on the list. I used a combination of canned and fresh shellfish for this comparison. If you just did like canned clams, it would be more like $2.50 a day. In terms of saturated fat and cholesterol, shellfish are extremely lean, though the dietary guidelines recommends that dietary cholesterol consumption be as low as possible––90 is less than half an egg yolk.

Allergies are an issue for some. Shellfish is actually the most common type of food allergy in the United States, affecting about one in 35 people, though it may be as high as one in 10, depending on the method of diagnosis. Allergies to land-based meat are rare, unless you’ve been bitten by certain types of ticks.

Foodborne illness can also be a problem, particularly since shellfish, like oysters, are sometimes eaten raw. Usually, it’s just gastroenteritis, but it can sometimes develop into serious infections. Shellfish are filter-feeders, so they just pick up and concentrate pathogens from the environment. Most outbreaks are from human fecal pathogens from sewage that get in the water or the overboard disposal of feces from boats. I guess I never really thought about that, but like most crews from oyster-harvesting boats were just like tossing their waste overboard, and it came back to bite them.

How common is contamination of shellfish with foodborne human fecal viruses like norovirus, the most common cause of foodborne gastroenteritis? Nearly one in three samples of shellfish carries this kind of fecal contamination that can make us sick; yet, most consumers ignore the fact that shellfish usually come from places polluted by untreated human waste. Though fecal contamination is also found in 85 percent of retail ground beef and turkey, about half of chicken, and a third of pork. Thankfully, these meats are cooked, but still, contaminated poultry products probably cause the most food poisoning deaths, not shellfish.

Then, anytime you’re talking about the aquatic food chain, there are industrial pollutants. Pollution of the oceans is widespread and worsening, and pollutants include toxic heavy metals like mercury, microplastics, and industrial toxins like PCBs. Yes, we’ve been eating shellfish for more than a hundred thousand years, but that was before we so polluted our waterways. Shellfish pump and filter such large quantities of water in their feeding processes that they just tend to accumulate a lot of heavy metals. So, the consumption of contaminated shellfish can lead to neurological and developmental defects, reproductive and gastrointestinal disorders, and, in extreme cases, death. That seems a little extreme. They’re talking about contamination with algal toxins.

While filter-feeding, shellfish can ingest toxic algae, which can produce 100 different natural toxins. So, the shellfish can accumulate these toxins and pass them on to consumers. So although we refer to them as shellfish toxins, they’re actually no more from the shellfish themselves than the human fecal viruses were.

When humans ingest different toxins accumulated in seafood, they may exhibit different poisoning syndromes. There’s paralytic shellfish poisoning, amnesic shellfish poisoning, neurotoxic shellfish poisoning, and diarrhetic shellfish poisoning.

Symptoms-wise, these can include abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, severe headaches, confusion, agitation, sleepiness, memory loss, coma, loss of coordination, excessive scratching, tremors, heart arrhythmias, seizures, lethargy, inappetence—I’d never heard that word for loss of appetite––blindness, muscular twitches, behavioral changes, convulsions, and death, sometimes within hours. No antidotes are available. Sometimes, neuropsychological symptoms can last for years.

Some of the toxins may be carcinogenic, linked to a variety of different cancers. This may help explain cohort studies that found associations between colorectal cancer and the consumption of shellfish and shrimp. But, of course, it could also be the industrial pollutants.

The bad news is that toxic algae blooms are getting worse, thanks to climate change, but the good news is that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has established a surveillance program to test for toxins; so, there are regulatory limits. Unfortunately, despite strong regulatory limits protecting people from acute poisoning, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting there are significant health consequences following repeated exposures to levels of an amnesic neurotoxin known as domoic acid, even when below current safety guidelines.

Those in the Pacific Northwest who eat a lot of razor clams, for example, with presumed safe levels, were found to be at risk for clinically significant memory problems. They are five to six times more likely to have problems with everyday memory, like having to check whether you actually did something, or forgetting to tell someone something important, or being forgetful day to day. The toxin doesn’t seem to be affected by cooking, and the “very high” levels of consumption were just more than 15 clams a month, so Washington State tells its residents to eat less than that. But to reach a gram a day of taurine, you’d have to eat 10 a day—300 a month. The bottom line is that even at levels deemed “safe” under current regulatory limits, algal toxins may not make mollusks the best source for taurine supplementation.

Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.

Motion graphics by Avo Media

Doctor's Note

That was quite the tangent, but I really wanted to cover every angle of every source. Looks like taurine supplements rather than foods are the way to go, but with some important caveats that I’ll cover in the final video of this series. Stay tuned for the intriguingly titled microbiome video I promised you: Like Beet Juice, Taurine Supplementation May Only Be Safe in the Context of a Plant-Based Diet.

This is the sixth video in a seven-part series on taurine. If you missed the previous ones, check out:

For more on longevity, go to your local public library and check out my book, How Not to Age, available in print, e-book, and audio. (All proceeds I receive from the book are donated directly to charity.)

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