Whats your thoughts on the dosage? They use 1g per kg of body weight! If I drank Monster to get the equivalent dosage I think I'd probably die... How did they arrive on that dosage?
That's because Monster has caffiene and other chemicals in there that may kill you! The Taurine itself probably won't kill you as LD50 is 5g per kg of body weight
LD50 should be taken with a huge grain of salt for any compound. First of all LD50 is just the dose required to kill half the subjects within some short time frame. Long term toxicity is not captured by this number. And doses well below LD50 can still kill you.
Also, because you can't overdose humans with drugs until half of them die(in most jurisdictions...), the number is pretty much always based on animal experiments. And it's quite typical for some things to be wildly more toxic in certain species than in others.
Crucially, a dose of 1g/kg has never been tested in humans in the short or long term.
I'd be very hesitant to say that 1g/kg is unlikely to kill a human being based on LD50 being 5g/kg. It could very well have an unacceptably high risk of death, or long term toxicity.
Also, please don't make statements like this based on LD50 unless you're absolutely sure. Someone who understands even less about it might look at it and thnk "this guy seems to know his stuff", and then do something stupid.
While the mouse example of 1000mg/kg is ridiculously high, the monkey trial used 250mg/kg.
Assumption time: assume a 67kg human who consumes 3 cans of redbull a day (not especially unusual). they are ingesting 9000mg (total) per day, which comes out 135mg/kg. Given the easy availability of Taurine supplements in almost any pharmacy it’s not a stretch to see this pushed significantly higher.
Added to the above, this was an initial trial, and it’s very possible the therapeutic levels of Taurine supplementation may be significantly lower (there appeared to be a correlation of health and life extension between the mice and monkeys even with the significant difference in dosages) it’s very possible that the 3 can of red bull dosage is efficacious. Of course that could be mitigated by the high levels of sugar and caffeine but that is outside of the scope of this conversation.
To summarize : 250mg/kg was efficacious in monkeys and no lower bound was determined, it’s possible the amount of Taurine in 3 cans of redbull (assume 9000mg) per day is within the clinically effective range.
Trials like these usually use herculean doses like this. If you remember, the "aspartame can kill you" trials also used an incredible amount of aspartame to kill the mice.
