Share your Taurine experiences (and I think i'm poisoning myself with the oral equivelent of 6 gm)

[vision blue]

I started taurine every other day about 2 weeks ago. So far I love the results, but based on what others have said here about what happens later i'm concerned I will eventually pay the piper. So curious to know others experiences.

I also didn't realize when i started just how much I was taking. I'm using powder meant for oral ingestion, but instead, i have it absorb thru my mucous membranes. Apparently though, if you do that, its like the equivelent of 10 times dose when you ingest it! (and indeed i verified that if you specifically buy taurine made for sublingual use, it's about 1/10th the dose or 75 mg) If that's really true, then i'm well above the safe limit. And i usually react so badly to even normal size doses of anything.

so each 1/4th teaspoon contains 675 mg, but since i'm not ingesting, i'm getting the equivleent of over 6 grams had I ingested it. Most say safe upper limit is 3 grams at least for long term use. and keep in mind i do not weigh very much and usually, even before had huge med intolerances, I would already have to take only 1/2 an adult dose. then it became a 10th..

Anyway wondering if i really blasted myself, why I feel good and not sick. (well,you know, relatively). its helping my gut as well and think i can tolerate more foods now. So I don't want to stop! I really need taurine- am deficient in it - but just don't know how to titrate to get what i should be getting.

it does seem to lower my blood pressure- sometimes alot- but then get huge rebound. But my new autodysfunction seems to encourage huge swings in bp, so that doesn't help any.

Also would be happy to talk about taurine deficieny if anyone wants to get into the biochem of it all. And if not, still would like to hear more experiences if there are more.

 

[Hip]

I'm using powder meant for oral ingestion, but instead, i have it absorb thru my mucous membranes. Apparently though, if you do that, its like the equivelent of 10 times dose when you ingest it!

That's new to me. Would you have weblink to where you read that?

 

[Judee]

We have used just a tiny amounts (just a pinch) of taurine for normalizing heart rhythms in both my mom and me but if we use too much it seems to have a rebound effect and make the arrhythmias worse.

Not sure if this will be helpful to what you're trying to figure out though.

 

[Mary]

@vision blue - I tried taking taurine for sleep, quite a low dose compared to you - 500 mg. in capsule form. It helped for a few days but then seems to make my sleep worse. I was so disappointed because it helped a lot at first.

Why are you taking it? What benefits are you getting?

I'm afraid I don't know the answer to your question about a safe dose or oral ingestion vs. absorbing it through your mucous membranes.

 

[Chris]

I still take a 650 cap every few days with no ill effects--I started taking it some years ago when I started to get some PVCs (Premature Ventricular Contractions)--the cardio was not alarmed, but my reading suggested this was not a good thing, and I also found that Taurine might help--and it did; have had no recurrences for several years now.

 

[Carl]

I take 1 or 2ml scoops of it at a time but have tended to keep it at 1ml recently because it can promote sleep. It is meant to be helpful to the heart and circulation which I need to be very careful with. Apart from the potential to promote sleep I do not have any negative effects. I cannot say for certain that is alone promotes sleep because I usually take it with other aminos which can also promote sleep. It's a balancing act trying to balance stimulation with inhibition which I do not always get correct.

 

[pamojja]

Took 3 g/d for 10 years. Absolutely no ill effects.

 

[vision blue]

That's new to me. Would you have weblink to where you read that?

Do you mean for taurine or for conversions from sublingual to oral generally? For the latter, will see if can find a textbook that discusses it. The conversion varies depending on substances - e.g. if someting doens't dissolve well in saliva then sublingual won't be that great but alot of time 10 times dose is a good starting point. But...

If you've got something like naloxine, an opiate antagonist, i think the oral equivlent of sublingual is only something like 1.7 times, but at the other extreme , if you've got cromyln sodium, i believe the oral dose is like 100 times greater than the mucousal (nasal) dose. Amino acids are very well absorbed thru mucosa so one would expect a high conversion.

For taurine in particular, or any specific one, its' hard to find a lookup table unless its very popular, so one good approach is to check the dosages of products that use different delivery systems. For oral, i checked a few supplements and they are often between 500 mg and 1000mg (1 gram) with instructions varying from one two twice per day. For sublingual, found one, and dose is 20 drops which equal 50 mg with instructions to take 15-25 drops per day. So it's roughtly one tenth. Consistent with what i was expecting given the absorption of AAs in mucous membranes.

When you say its new to you, what was your sense of the equivelence and why?

 

[vision blue]

We have used just a tiny amounts (just a pinch) of taurine for normalizing heart rhythms in both my mom and me but if we use too much it seems to have a rebound effect and make the arrhythmias worse.

Not sure if this will be helpful to what you're trying to figure out though.

Yes, this helps. When you say pinch, i guess you are also using powder. Do you swallow it? I also have some heart arrhymias - right now "non specific T wave abnormality" which means everyone ignores it and near constant palpiations. I know people use it for PVCs also, which i get sometimes. But this is intersting; it is consistent with what someone posted that she had been told there's a "sweet spot" for taurine- has differnet effects depending on dose, and based on a study in rats i read, differnces on whether its taken every day or not . i hate meds like that; very hard to contorl

 

[vision blue]

I will keep answering questions tomorrow or as soon as I get another burst of typing energy. Thanks everyone for these great responses! they are very helpful.

 

[Hip]

Do you mean for taurine or for conversions from sublingual to oral generally?

The sublingual route is used when orally bioavailability is low (for example when stomach acids break down and destroy a substance, or when the first-pass metabolism breaks down the substance). Then sometimes you can get higher bioavailability from the sublingual route.

But if oral bioavailability is good, then there is usually no advantage of sublingual administration.

I cannot find any figures for the oral bioavailability of taurine, but generally only if oral bioavailability is low would sublingual be effective.

For taurine in particular, or any specific one, its' hard to find a lookup table unless its very popular, so one good approach is to check the dosages of products that use different delivery systems. For oral, i checked a few supplements and they are often between 500 mg and 1000mg (1 gram) with instructions varying from one two twice per day. For sublingual, found one, and dose is 20 drops which equal 50 mg with instructions to take 15-25 drops per day. So it's roughtly one tenth.

I don't think that would be a reliable way of determining oral versus sublingual bioavailability. Sublingual doses will always be small, because the oral mucous membranes can only absorb small amounts of substance.

 

[vision blue]

I can't get the multi quote to cooperate so will do it old fashioned way: you said" The sublingual route is used when orally bioavailability is low"

My reply: This is often merely because there is a bias in US for oral meds rather than other delivery methods

You said "(for example when stomach acids break down and destroy a substance, or when the first-pass metabolism breaks down the substance). Then sometimes you can get higher bioavailability from the sublingual route".

My reply: This implies this is rare - the exception rather than the rule - to get higher bioavailalbity for same dose sublingually. Def not what I know at all. Most comparisons favor the sublingual route. Another way to think about it is to consider IV delivery. Its similar to submucousal in that it bypasses the GI tract. Many if not most substances lose effectiveness having to work their way thru digestive track- one of the reasons you mention and there are others. And that's just for healthy- for ill with compromised digestive systems the advantage of submucousal can be even higher. But back to IV, there's more data there to compare - to pick one at random, I just looked up acyclovir, and antiviral used both as IV and oral. Dose for shingles iv 10 mg per kg 3 times a day. For a 120 lb adult, that's about 540 mg 3 times a day. Dose for shingles orally is 800 mg 6 times a day. so in this case, dose of oral has to be about 3 times as high as IV

You said: "But if oral bioavailability is good, then there is usually no advantage of sublingual administration"

My reply: "no advantage" on ly in sense that most people can tolerate oral meds in the doses needed just fine- says nothing to imply that sublingual doses are equivelent to oral ones. It's a frequently found soundbyte that's out of context.

You said: "I cannot find any figures for the oral bioavailability of taurine, but generally only if oral bioavailability is low would sublingual be effective.
I don't think that would be a reliable way of determining oral versus sublingual bioavailability. Sublingual doses will always be small, because the oral mucous membranes can only absorb small amounts of substance"

My reply: Again, this is implying lower doses needed for subllingual or IV is an exception rather than the rule when its the reverse that appears to be true if one looks at many examples. Yes, sublingual doses are smaller because they can only absorb small amounts, but note if the bioequivelent dose were the same as oral, then mucousal absorption could never be used. The fact that it needs less (all those wonderful capilliaries for example) is what allows it to be useful despite the low absorption. So its actually more evidence that dose eqiuvelents have to favor mucousal as needing less. Note how for the sublingual taurine dose, instructions easily could increase the frequency if the reason it was low was becasue of less absorption. but instructions say once a day, not 4 or 5 times not even twice. Or just compare oral to IV since latter does not have same restriction (sure, have to infuse slowly, but that's not why less dose is used)- gave an example of that above - don't have one for taurine though. Have to generalize from other mucousal or IV to oral examples.

 

[Hip]

Can we discuss using scientific concepts:

Whatever route of administration of a drug or supplement is used, it is the blood plasma levels of that drug or supplement that are the key factor. These blood levels are a measurable quantity.

For example, this study found that when 4 grams of taurine was orally administered to 8 subjects, the average peak blood plasma level of taurine (known as the Cmax) that resulted was 86 mg per liter. That's how you measure how effective a given route of administration is, by how much of the substance appears in the blood.

If you want to compare oral with sublingual administration, then you would need to perform a study like the above which measured the peak plasma level after sublingual administration of a known dose.


You said above that:

i have it absorb thru my mucous membranes. Apparently though, if you do that, its like the equivelent of 10 times dose when you ingest it!

If your statement were true, that there is a 10-fold difference, it would mean that you would get the same plasma levels from 100 mg of sublingual taurine as you would from 1,000 mg of oral taurine.

But unless you perform a study on this, you are not going to know whether this is the case or not. Unless there is supporting scientific evidence, it's not possible to compare oral to sublingual administration.

 

[Judee]

Oh, sorry. Just noticed your question to me.

When you say pinch, i guess you are also using powder. Do you swallow it?

Yes, powder...and yes, we swallow it with water. It makes a weird burny feeling on the tongue.

That, along, with a few other things, seems to have cleared up my mom's PVCs. She hasn't had any issues with them occurring for a couple of months now and before that it had been going on for a few years with at least a few events per week.

I get more of the palpitation, fluttering type issues which are helped more by other things like CoQ10 but I still have used that as well and gotten some relief from it.

And, yeah it really is just a very small amount--maybe 20-50 microscopic particles on the spoon. It really works quickly too.

 

[pamojja]

For example, this study found that when 4 grams of taurine was orally administered to 8 subjects, the average peak blood plasma level of taurine (known as the Cmax) that resulted was 86 mg per liter.

Since an average human has 5 liter of blood, from the single 4g taurine dose 420mg arrived in the blood in this study. Or about 10%.

so each 1/4th teaspoon contains 675 mg, but since i'm not ingesting, i'm getting the equivleent of over 6 grams had I ingested it.

One can assume that sublingual transport across the mucus membrane is slow and while keeping 675mg in the mouth at least half gets diluted and washed down the digestive tract by salivation. And blood-levels - if it even turns out 10 times that of oral - still within the expected range of about 3g orally. Shown to be safe in the long term too.

 

[Hip]

Since an average human has 5 liter of blood, from the single 4g taurine dose 420mg arrived in the blood in this study. Or about 10%.

Yes there are about 3 liters of blood plasma in the body, and 5 liters of blood in total (including blood cells), but there is also the interstitial fluid (the fluid that surrounds the cells in the tissues), which has a volume of around 12 liters in the normal-sized person. Substances in the blood can freely move between the blood and interstitial fluid, so the combined fluid volume is 15 liters.

When you administer a drug or supplement (whether orally, sublingually, intranasally, rectally, transdermally or by injection), it first goes into the bloodstream, but then is rapidly distributed into the interstitial fluid as well, into a combined volume of 15 liters.


But there are further and larger water compartments in the body: the intracellular water (the water inside each cell) amounts to around 25 liters in a normal-sized person.

Some drugs and supplement can feely cross the cellular membrane and move into cells, or they may partially cross the cellular membrane. So for such substances, they are distributed into a higher volume still.

See Body water — Wikipedia.



To make things more complex, most drugs and supplements undergo what is called protein binding. This is where a certain percentage of the substance will bind to proteins in the blood and tissues. Typically, once a substance binds to a protein, it becomes biologically inactive and inert (it no longer functions as a drug or supplement). So for example if 50% of your drug or supplement binds to proteins, that percentage is effectively lost.

Sometimes, protein binding can be very high, like over 90% for example, which means that 90% of the drug or supplement is lost.

For example, the blood plasma protein binding of the COX-2 anti-inflammatory celecoxib drug is 97%. And its oral bioavailability is quite low at 30%. That means that when you take this drug orally, only 30% gets through to the bloodstream and interstitial fluid. But then even for portion that does get through to the blood, 97% of this drug in the bloodstream binds to proteins, so very little is left to perform its active biological function.

Or if you take the case of curcumin, that supplement has a very low bioavailability of about 1%, and high plasma protein binding of 98%. So when you take curcumin, only a tiny percentage actually gets through to have an active biological effect. This is why curcumin shows powerful effects in vitro, but as a supplement it unfortunately does not do much.


When drug or supplement concentration levels are measured in the blood, that figure usually includes both the protein-bound portion and the portion freely dissolved in the plasma. But it's only the free portion that is active in the body.

 

[vision blue]

Why are you taking it? What benefits are you getting?

I started because I have a taurine deficiency revealed by both blood and urine amino acid testing. And my other test results consistent with taurine deficiency like low or boderline low potassium and low magnesium. when I could not figure out how to fix the cause of it, no matter how much I tried (I made progress working backward thru biochem chains, but hit a road block and could go no futher) i reluctantly figured i better try taurine.

Much to my surprise, my gut has improved tremendously on it (completly unexpected) and i can tolerate more foods. In addition, I believe its lowering my bp. Its hard to know for sure because i rarely try pure expts any more and coindicentally started a food around same time. And then at first, I got pleaseantly sleepy (that's a first since i feel wide awake even when i'm sleeping...) and as advertised, it seemed to downregulate my symptathetic nervous system. I think that sleepiness thing wore off already though which is too bad. Since usually i do so badly with supplements than eveyrone else does wondefully with, I may be getting too zealous about taurine but started looking in to it more after having positive effects. And on this forum, found some people who had trouble down the road with it, so figured i better post.

 

[vision blue]

I still take a 650 cap every few days with no ill effects--I started taking it some years ago when I started to get some PVCs (--and it did; have had no recurrences for several years now.

That's awesome. have seen claims of that on web. will see if my pvc's are less. Have seen paper with researcher who tried it and arginine on himself and one other case study reporting a combo of taurine and arginine fixed pvcs and other arythmmias. And there's a ton of posts on I forget where- that site that lets people put comments to meds - and many find has been good for all sorts of heart ailments. I'm sure my depletion is contributing to my high oxidative stress levels

 

[vision blue]

I take 1 or 2ml scoops of it at a time but have tended to keep it at 1ml recently because it can promote sleep. ... It's a balancing act trying to balance stimulation with inhibition which I do not always get correct.

By ml measure do you mean liquid? but scoops mean powder? curious how youre dosing.

intersting on balance. right now, i'm all over stimulated 100 percent of time, so I don't have to balance that yet til it comes down some.

 

[vision blue]

Took 3 g/d for 10 years. Absolutely no ill effects.

Any positive ones? And how come you started it and stayed on it? But good to know!!