To Your Health

Q: My cat, Freya (named after a Norwegian goddess), has become very irritable. My vet thinks she needs more taurine. I get irritable every once in a while too (especially around my period). Do I need taurine?

A: Taurine is an odd amino acid. It isn't needed to make protein, but it is essential to transport electrolytes (such as magnesium and potassium) into body cells. It is also one of only four calming neurotransmitters that balance dozens of stimulating neurotransmitters in the brain.

Taurine is an essential nutrient for cats. Unlike most mammals, they cannot make their own. Taurine is usually provided by the meat that wild cats live on, but today's cat foods sometimes don't have enough meat. The situation is much like our need for vitamin C, which is essential for us but not for most animals.

Although taurine is only essential for humans in infancy, there are times when taurine can help calm adults down, both by its direct effect as a calming neurotransmitter and by helping magnesium get into cells to do its job. Magnesium outside the cell really does us no good at all, so having enough taurine to move magnesium to the inside of the cell has about the same effect as taking a magnesium supplement.

You can safely try a taurine supplement of 1,000 mg per day (500 mg twice daily, always taken with food) to see what happens. Any excess taurine is easily excreted in the urine and will not induce an imbalance among the amino acids that make protein.

Q: I've heard of some kind of "cell suicide" that sounds like science fiction. How could it be beneficial?

A: Programmed cell suicide (also known as "apoptosis") is beneficial to the body as a whole, since it reduces the need for anti-inflammatory nutrients. Like humans, a cell can die either peacefully or violently. When a cell dies a violent death, as it would if attacked by a virus, it releases a lot of inflammatory substances. These help the body fight off the invader, but are also damaging to surrounding normal cells.

When a cell dies, it needs to do so without disturbing its neighbors. Programmed cell death is the response of a cell to signals from neighboring cells that its services are no longer needed. When this happens, the cell simply shrivels up and disappears. This happens often during our early development -- else we would all have webbed fingers and toes -- but it also continues through our lives as cells outlive their usefulness.

Another domain that requires constant cell destruction is our bones. We must take out old bone cells in order to have room for new and stronger bone cells. One of the causes of osteoporosis seems to be an excess of bone-destroying cells in relation to bone-building cells, and one of the ways to correct this imbalance is to promote apoptosis in the bone-destroying cells. Two essential fatty acids have been demonstrated to do this: EPA from fish oil and GLA from borage oil. Of course, it is not enough to just stop the destruction of old bone cells. We need to encourage the formation of new bone cells, which requires a host of nutritional resources.

If we could understand and harness the process of apoptosis, we might have a potent weapon in the battle against cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and AIDS. Apoptosis seems to be involved in the final stages of AIDS and Alzheimer's disease. If we could decipher the signal for cell suicide and use it against cancer cells, they would simply "dry up and blow away," without a commotion that would burden an already strained immune system. Even though the idea of demolishing our own cells does not sound inviting, in the end it may help us to live longer, healthier lives.