The first clue was blind cats. About 50 years ago, K.C. Hayes, a professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, took on the mystery of why some cats experienced rapid deterioration of their vision.
The problem, Hayes figured out, was that some brands of cat food lacked an amino acid called taurine, something cats don’t produce themselves. In a 1975 paper, published in Science, Hayes and his colleagues definitively established that taurine deficiency was to blame for retinal degeneration in cats, a landmark discovery that forever changed feline nutrition and eventually launched the Garfield-endorsed Alpo cat food.
Five decades later, another Science publication has found that a lack of taurine could be to blame not just for bad feline eyesight but for a wide array of age-related symptoms in multiple species, suggesting the amino acid could help slow the process of aging. In a series of studies conducted over 11 years, researchers reported Thursday that they had looked at mice, worms, monkeys, and humans, finding over and over that supplementing taurine led to measurable improvements in bone density, muscle function, body weight, immune health, and other hallmarks of getting older.
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