[Apologies to my esteemed subscribers and random readers for taking so long to produce an article: my excuse is that I had a number of family issues to deal with that prevented concentrated writing...]
Yesterday the BBC and other MSM carried news of the latest discovery in 'miracle' substances: taurine. Taurine is a nutrient, an amino acid, found in meat and fish, also available as a supplement, with claims that it can act like an "elixir of life", slowing the effects of ageing.
The scientific report suggests taurine plays a role in reducing cellular senescence - where cells in the body stop dividing - a hallmark of ageing. The nutrient also appeared to keep mitochondria - the power stations in the body's cells - functioning. But how it does any of this remains unexplored.
Interestlngly, the levels of taurine in both animals and humans decline with age, with levels around 80% lower in old people and animals than in the young. One further fact before I launch into my musings on the topic: taurine is virtually non-existent in plants, therefore has to be derived from animal protein or manufactured in the body. As to the latter, no article in the MSM explains how, although funnily enough various webpages by veterinary organisations and pet food manufacturers do. Essentially, taurine is a unique amino acid in that unlike most amino acids that connect in long chains with other amino acids to make all the various proteins needed for normal body function, taurine is found free in many of the body’s cells/tissues as well as within bile, a digestive liquid produced by the liver and secreted into the intestinal tract. Omnivores like us can synthesize sufficient amounts of taurine from other amino acids (specifically converting methionine to cysteine to taurine). Dedicated carnivores like cats, however, can make some taurine, but the enzyme required to make it out of cysteine is in short supply and needed in other physiologic pathways. Taurine is therefore considered an "essential" amino acid in cats.
I mention cats, because, apart from the fact that I am rather fond of cats, cats are very long-lived comparative to their size. The general rule of thumb within the animal kingdom is that smaller animals (think hamsters, shrews or mice) are pretty short lived, partly due to a massively high metabolic rate, while larger animals (think elephants, giant tortoises or horses) have greater longevity, again partly due to a slower metabolic rate. Cats of the domestic moggie variety counter this trend. For their small size they are remarkably long-lived, far outliving dogs of similar size, and on average outliving the larger sized dogs too (Labradors, Rottweilers etc.). Reaching 17, 18, or 19 years of age is pretty normal for an otherwise healthy family cat, and into their twenties is not too unusual (our oldest boy is 23, deaf as a post but still going strong), with the outliers and record breakers achieving their 30s. No dog, no matter how large, can match that. One thing that distinguishes canines from felines is that cats are 100%, dedicated carnivores, while dogs are sort of hemi-carnivores with demi-omnivore habits thrown in for good measure. Cats if feeding themselves in the wild or fed an appropriate diet if domestic - do not ever try to force a "vegetarian" diet on your cat, it is basically animal abuse - therefore have a very high taurine content through all the animal proteins they eat. I knew all this before, but never linked the taurine consumption to either general health of cats or their longevity. Now the recent articles on taurine as "elixir" got me thinking.
In humans, "you are what you eat" is a well-known adage. We all know that five-a-day is good and processed food is bad, even if we don't personally follow the advice. We also all know that there are dietary fads, perceived food allergies and intolerances, and a growing minefield of cultural diktats around food. One of the latest fads, or marketing ploys, or globalist agendas - take your pick or subscribe to all three simultaneously, it doesn't make that much of a difference for the argument - is "plant-based food", and I use the term "food" very loosely here, since the stuff sold as such is so highly processed as to be barely recognisable as something you might wish to ingest.
Now if the research into taurine is as important as I think it is, it will shatter the supposed benefits of "plant-based" diets, since as we have seen, plants cannot give us the taurine we need for health and longevity, and most importantly for health in longevity. Longevity is not just about clocking up more and more years, but about ageing well, about maintaining health and hence quality of life into longer years. Eating bugs may give us some proteins, and popping a daily taurine pill may do as well, but apart from profits for the semi-pharmaceutical companies producing such stuff, no one will really benefit. And remember, when it comes to supplements, until very recently all the mainstream health advice had been to get your essential nutrients from fresh, unprocessed, actual "proper" food in preference to pills, potions and other supplements. Vitamin C from a fresh fruit was supposedly better than vitamin C from an effervescent tablet.
Now of course, with a "climate emergency" allegedly necessitating the culling of cattle to reduce their methane-laden flatulence, and protein from bugs promoted as a planet-saving food choice, never mind the abomination of "lab-grown meats", the rise of synthesised "plant-based" diets is suddenly good for you. Good for the masses in any case, since I'm pretty sure that the forbidden fruits of airmile-guzzling, red-meat bloodied, farming-intensive "real" foods will still be available to anyone with money at a price. With all the talk about social justice and reducing inequality, we are heading towards ever greater food inequality. Already now it is blatantly obvious to anyone who cares to look that food inequality is the main reason for the so-called obesity epidemic in the developed and developing world, fed on cheap, processed junk food. And not just obesity, but overall lower quality of life, more illness, lower life expectancy.
A glance at history will bear this out. My beloved medieval times saw as great as if not greater food inequalities as we are seeing now. The gulf between the diet of the average medieval peasant and the feast of the lord was massive. The stuff that gets flogged as "medieval banquet" by enterprising restaurants today is strictly from the upper end of the social scale - nobody now would touch a medieval peasant's pottage with a barge pole. And what we know about the social differences of diets in the past, and how they physically affected people, is borne out by archeology, specifically palaeopathology, the study of disease in human remains. One thing we can observe here is the difference in physiology between medieval populations in archaeological terms, for example burial archeology. Excavations at different cemeteries have revealed stark differences in what we would now call health inequalities. By comparing the average of burials at one cemetery with the averages of another, we can make inferences about the kind of people buried there, for instance whether they were a rural or urban population, monastic or secular, peasants or high-status. And the most modern archaeological techniques can even tell us about the diets of the deceased: how much meat content, or predominantly fish-derived protein, where the person spent their childhood and youth (before dental enamel becomes fixed) and the effects of any nutritional deficiencies. To sum this up in a nutshell: The evidence from medieval funeral archeology points to large inequalities of health due to social status and concomitant diet. People from the upper classes who had greater meat and (fresh) fish consumption were on average taller, less disease-ridden and older than their impoverished peasant compatriots.
Wealth is health, and always has been. Good, fresh, nutritious food is more expensive than processed junk. Once food becomes seen purely as calorific intake (your recommended 2000 calories a day per average adult), the physiological effects of different diets will become ever greater. If we are indeed heading towards a world where the poor pop taurine pills for faux-environmental reasons and the wealthy continue to feast on fresh meat, we are not just returning to all that was bad about the Middle Ages, but exceeding those inequalities, because we know better but prioritise worse.
This post hits the center overlap on the Venn diagram of my biggest interests — diet, cellular metabolism, health, food, anthropology, and cats. My favorite blog, by a veterinarian who investigates the minutia of (human) metabolic chemistry, recently had an article about this exact thing—taurine and cats. "Chicken fillets are not meat. If you're a cat" http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2023/05/chicken-fillets-are-not-meat-if-youre.html
Thank you for another excellent article. The last time we had a pet dog, we fed him only raw meat. His muscles rippled; his eyes were bright; his coat shone. He also got an occasional egg, or a tiny bit of a vegetable, a drop of iodine. To be blunt, anyone who feeds their cat a vegetable diet is either nuts, stupid, or both. How cruel! Myself, I like to eat organic grass-fed beef, chicken (rarely) sardines, and unprocessed vegetables & fruit. I do love fish, but can’t trust a lot of it these days; so I mostly only eat the fish my brother catches in a spring-fed lake here in Wisconsin. Sugar and grains don’t seem to promote health.