Is Taurine Safe?

The title said, “Could your energy drink be fueling cancer?”

“Now what?!” was my first thought. Researchers reported in a press release that the amino acid taurine may help cancerous cells make energy to fuel their growth. Because taurine is found in energy drinks and protein supplements, I wanted to check whether this is something to be concerned about or not.

This was a complex study from the perspective of identifying what were the potential stimulators of tumor progression in bone marrow. A taurine carrier was identified. The researchers conducted tests which added taurine to specific types of leukemia cells to determine tumor progression. They concluded that further research was necessary to find something that would block taurine carriers from carrying taurine into tumor calls where they could stimulate the production of energy via glycolysis. That may be correct or not.

The methods section of the paper was over five single-spaced pages long; that doesn’t make it bad, but each unique test has to have a standard error of the method. In other words, how specific and precise does the method measure the variable?

• Using available leukemia cell lines is a first step to test theories, but we don’t know if that’s how it would work in living human beings.
• They did testing on rodents, but there were only a few rodents in each group.
• On top of that, taurine is naturally produced in the body, and they specifically identified tumor sites as one of the locations where taurine is produced. How can that be differentiated from natural production and supplementation?

In my opinion, they were far too aggressive in their conclusions about energy drinks potentially fueling cancer. For now, the most conservative approach is that if you have an aggressive myeloid leukemia, consider reducing taurine intake from all sources, which would also include meats, dairy, and eggs. There’s a lot more research that has to be done before we definitively know how this information impacts the real world.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

References:
1. https://scitechdaily.com/could-your-energy-drink-be-feeding-cancer-what-scientists-just-discovered/
2. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09018-7