Taurine: The Human Trials, and the Energy Drink Problem

Abstract

Taurine is in almost every energy drink and in a great many supplements, on the strength of findings that mostly did not test taurine.

A 2021 review in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition took the unusual step of excluding every study in which taurine was not the sole ingredient. Nineteen studies survived that filter, and they point to an effective range of roughly one to three grams a day.

Boost contains 500 mg. This article explains why we are telling you that number sits below the range where effects have been demonstrated.

1.Where the Reputation Came From

Taurine entered popular use through energy drinks rather than through a clinical literature. A 2023 review in Nutrients by Antonio Costantino and colleagues, examining the effects of energy drinks on the human body, records the marketing position directly: taurine and gluconolactone are claimed to be the main components responsible for the effects attributed to Red Bull.

The same review lists what is actually in these products alongside taurine: caffeine, sugar, guarana, ginseng, L-carnitine. Guarana is itself a caffeine source.

So the studies showing that an energy drink improves alertness or reaction time are studies of a mixture containing a well-established stimulant, a sugar load, and several other compounds. Attributing the result to taurine is a choice, not a finding.

We have said this about our own product before it appeared in an article. Our formulation page for Boost records, as the thing the literature does not establish, that the most cited cognitive finding tested a drink containing taurine and caffeine together, so the contribution of taurine alone cannot be separated out.

2.The Review That Filtered Them Out

Jeffrey Kurtz, Trisha VanDusseldorp, J. Andrew Doyle and Jeffrey Otis at Georgia State University searched Google Scholar, Web of Science and PubMed through September 2020, and applied an inclusion rule that solves the problem above.

Articles were excluded if taurine was not the primary or only ingredient in the supplement or food source. Also excluded: animal studies, participants over fifty, participants with health issues, and anything published before 1999.

Nineteen studies met the criteria, testing doses of one to six grams, given either acutely — ten minutes to two hours before exercise — or chronically over seven days to eight weeks.

This is the right way to build a review of a compound that is usually sold inside a mixture, and it is why we prefer it to the larger literature.

3.What Survived the Filter

The reported improvements cluster in exercise physiology rather than cognition: maximal oxygen uptake and time to exhaustion across five articles, three and four kilometre time trials in two, anaerobic performance in seven, muscle damage in three, peak power in two, recovery in one.

There were also metabolic changes across five articles — reduced lactate, creatine kinase and inorganic phosphate, lower inflammatory markers, altered glycolytic and fat oxidation markers.

The authors' dosing summary is the sentence that matters for anyone reading a label: taurine appears effective at approximately one to three grams a day, taken acutely across six to fifteen days, one to three hours before activity.

They are also explicit that the effectiveness of taurine as an ergogenic aid remains controversial, which is an unusual thing to write at the top of a review that then reports positive findings, and is to their credit.

4.What This Says About 500 mg

One to three grams is two to six times what Boost supplies. The effects listed above were produced at doses our product does not contain.

They were also produced on outcomes we do not claim. Time to exhaustion, peak power and creatine kinase are exercise measures. Nothing in this filtered literature is about attention, alertness or mental performance in an ordinary working day.

There is a further gap worth naming. Taurine is present in the diet — in meat, fish and dairy — and it is synthesised endogenously, as Guoyao Wu sets out in a 2020 review of dietary taurine and related compounds in Amino Acids. Someone eating an ordinary omnivorous diet is not deficient, and supplementation studies in the non-deficient are a different proposition from correcting a shortfall.

5.Safety, Briefly

Taurine itself has a substantial safety record at the doses studied, which is part of why it appears so widely.

The energy drink literature is a separate matter and considerably less comfortable. The Nutrients review cited above is titled "The Dark Side of Energy Drinks" and its concerns are cardiac — arrhythmia among them — arising from products combining high caffeine with sugar in young consumers.

Those concerns attach to the products rather than to taurine, and it would be as much a distortion to blame taurine for them as to credit it with the alertness. We mention it because a reader searching for taurine will encounter that literature and deserves to know which component it is about.

Editorial Comment

Boost contains taurine at 500 mg. The honest account of why is that it has a long presence in this category and a substantial human safety literature — not that we have evidence it does something at that dose.

The filtered review puts the demonstrated range at one to three grams, on exercise outcomes. We supply less, for different purposes, and we are not going to pretend the gap does not exist.

There is no authorised health claim for taurine in the European Union, so we make none. Any suggestion that the taurine in our product improves energy, focus or performance would be unsupported by this literature and prohibited besides.

One practical note. If energy drinks are how someone currently manages tiredness, the compound worth their attention in those products is caffeine, which we cover in a separate series — and persistent tiredness that does not lift with rest is worth a doctor rather than a can.