Two, Four, or Six Grams: Taurine in Sixteen Female Athletes
Two grams of taurine did not separate from placebo. Four grams moved mean power. Six grams moved peak power too. Sixteen female rugby players took all four doses, each visit separated by 72 hours, and the result is a dose ladder rather than a yes or no.
THE STUDY
- Title. The effects of taurine ingestion on anaerobic and physiological performance in female rugby players.
- Journal. Research in Sports Medicine (Res Sports Med), 2024, volume 32, issue 4, pages 621 to 630. Epub 6 April 2023.
- Authors. Bingöl Diedhiou A, Milanović Z, Can Eser M, Şahin FN, Hamlin M, Can Yıldırım U. Affiliations in Turkey, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Slovenia and New Zealand.
- Design. Randomized, counter balanced, crossover trial with a placebo condition. Indexed by PubMed as a randomized controlled trial.
- Read it: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37024995
WHO WAS IN IT
Sixteen sub elite female rugby athletes. Mean age 21.3 years, mean height 168.0 cm, mean body mass 62.1 kg. That is the whole of how the record describes them, and it names no diagnosis based recruitment criterion. It does not print its inclusion criteria at all, so that is as far as we can take it.
Every participant did every condition. After a familiarization session they came back four separate times, each visit separated by 72 hours, each visit after an overnight fast.
WHAT THEY TOOK
Taurine on its own, in water, at three doses, plus a placebo. Nothing else was stacked with it.
- Low dose. 2 grams of taurine.
- Moderate dose. 4 grams of taurine.
- High dose. 6 grams of taurine.
- Placebo. The fourth condition.
Each dose was taken 1 hour before the test. This is an acute study. Nobody took taurine daily for weeks; each visit was a single dose and a single test.
WHAT THEY FOUND
The test was a 30 second Wingate on a cycle ergometer, which measures how much power you can produce flat out for half a minute. Peak power is your best moment. Mean power is what you held across the whole 30 seconds.
- 2 grams did not separate from placebo. Compared to placebo, the low dose did not change peak power, mean power, heart rate, lactate or blood glucose. All of it landed above the significance threshold.
- 4 grams improved mean power compared to both placebo and the 2 gram dose.
- 6 grams improved peak power and mean power compared to both placebo and the 2 gram dose.
- Nothing moved in the blood. At 4 and 6 grams the authors report little effect on heart rate, blood lactate and blood glucose, again above the significance threshold. Whatever happened, it did not show up in those markers.
The authors' own conclusion is conditional, and we are quoting it as they wrote it: a single dose at the moderate or high level one hour before competition or training "would provide an ergogenic effect on subsequent power output."
WHAT IT DOES NOT SHOW
- Sixteen people. That is small. Every participant doing every condition helps, because each athlete is her own comparison, but sixteen is still sixteen.
- No effect sizes and no confidence intervals. The published abstract reports direction and significance thresholds only, not exact p values. So we can tell you which doses beat placebo, and we genuinely cannot tell you by how much. Anyone who quotes you a percentage from this study is filling in a number that is not there.
- One dose, one hour, one test. This is a single acute dose measured against a 30 second cycling sprint. It says nothing about taking taurine every day, and nothing about how you feel at hour six of a hike or hour nine of a workday.
- Rating of perceived exertion was measured and never reported. The abstract lists RPE among the outcomes collected and then does not tell you what happened to it. Whether the doses felt easier is simply unanswered here.
- The record disagrees with itself on blinding. The authors' own abstract describes the design as randomized, counter balanced and crossover with a placebo, and never uses the word blinded. The PubMed indexing separately tags the record Double-Blind Method. Those are two different hands writing two different things, and the abstract alone cannot settle it, so we are not calling this trial blinded and we are not calling it unblinded either.
- Athletes in their early twenties. Mean age 21.3, all of them competitive rugby players. That is a long way from most of the people reading this page.
- Funding and conflicts could not be checked. The PubMed record carries no funding statement, no conflict of interest statement and no trial registration number, and there is no free full text in PubMed Central. We are not telling you this study was clean or that it was sponsored. We are telling you we could not look, and that you should weigh it accordingly.
WHY IT IS ON THIS SHELF
Because it is a dose ladder, and dose ladders are rare and useful. Most taurine trials pick one amount and report whether it worked. This one tested three, and at 2 grams nothing reached significance against placebo.
That matters for us, so here is the plain version. Each four gummy serving of Vybrance Labs creatine gummies delivers 500mg of taurine, alongside 5g of creatine monohydrate and 120mcg of B12. The lowest dose tested here, the one that did not separate from placebo, was 2 grams, which is four times our serving. The doses that did move power were eight and twelve times it.
So this study is not evidence for the taurine in our gummies, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What it is evidence for is a shape worth knowing: taurine's acute power effect, in this trial, lived at gram level doses taken an hour before an all out effort. That is a sports performance protocol, not a daily wellness dose, and they are different things doing different jobs.
If you want the wider picture on what each of our three ingredients is actually doing, why creatine, B12 and taurine work together in The Lab covers it, and the cognition question is handled in do creatine, B12 and taurine actually improve cognition. On this shelf, the trial that tested one gram of taurine in sixteen physically active young adults and found no significant difference is at one gram, sixteen adults, no change.
see you in the wild!
-Lawrence
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Nothing on this page is medical advice. Reference: PMID 37024995, DOI 10.1080/15438627.2023.2198129.
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Creatine first: a full 5g, with B12 and taurine alongside. Four gummies. Built for your whole day, not just your workout.