What does taurine do in your body?
Taurine has several demonstrable functions in your body: it supports the retina, heart, and brain, and helps cells maintain their balance. For ageing and weight management, the evidence in humans is still too thin to draw conclusions from.
Taurine is a substance your body produces on its own, and one you also take in through meat and fish. It is found in high concentrations in the brain, the heart, and the retina. Those concentrations are no coincidence: taurine plays an active role in all of those tissues.
In the brain, taurine dampens excessive nerve activity. Whether it works precisely as a messenger substance between nerve cells is not yet certain, but it is well established that it influences other signalling systems in the brain. It also helps cells maintain their volume when the environment changes, for example during dehydration or when blood salt levels are high. This has been demonstrated in animal research, with indications that the same applies in human brains.
For the retina, taurine is probably indispensable. Infants who were fed intravenously without taurine developed problems with their retinal development. This is partly why taurine is now included in virtually all infant formula. In eye diseases, taurine also appears to neutralise harmful oxygen particles (free radicals) and to activate protective enzymes, although more research is needed to determine whether this also slows the progression of retinal conditions.
For the heart, there are clear indications that taurine helps regulate blood pressure and improves cardiac function. In Japan it has even been approved as a treatment for heart failure. The precise mechanism has not yet been fully clarified, but studies in both humans and animals point in the same direction. Taurine also appears to support the energy centres of the cell (mitochondria), which may be relevant in the context of ageing and metabolic problems.
In animal research, taurine also reduces fat accumulation and inflammation in fatty tissue. Whether this works the same way in humans has not yet been sufficiently demonstrated. The same applies to the role of taurine in ageing more generally: the indications come primarily from animal and laboratory studies, and it is too early to draw conclusions about anti-ageing effects in humans.
All claims are based on reviews (no randomised trials or meta-analyses in the source list). Most effects are biologically plausible and partly confirmed in humans, but for some applications (anti-ageing, obesity) the evidence is still almost exclusively derived from animal and laboratory studies.