It’s been a while since I curated taurine research. Read at least a week’s worth of 2022 papers last weekend.

Let’s start with two studies that didn’t supplement with taurine, but found it was a biomarker. The first was a rodent study that treated a high fat diet with blood pressure medicine:

“Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a main form of chronic liver disease, and has been the leading cause of liver transplantation. Epidemiological evidence uncovered bidirectional and causal relationships between NAFLD and hypertension.

Evidence suggests that gut dysbiosis can be a driving force for NAFLD and hypertension, despite pathogenesis of NAFLD and hypertension fundamental differences, as they often present similar aberrant microbiota. We found that amlodipine besylate and amlodipine aspartate:

• Exerted their hepatoprotective activities through modulating fatty acid metabolism without influencing oxidative and endoplasmic reticulum stress;
• Decreased serum transaminases, hepatic fat deposits, and liver inflammation, and showed improvements in plasma lipid profiles; and
• Gut microbiota had higher abundance of functional genes involved in taurine and hypotaurine metabolism.

Overall, these results led us to propose that targeting gut microbiota and the taurine and hypotaurine metabolism pathway may be a feasible preventive strategy for patients with NAFLD and hypertension.”

https://bpspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bph.15768 “Amlodipine, an anti-hypertensive drug, alleviates non-alcoholic fatty liver disease by modulating gut microbiota”

A second rodent study investigated garlic compounds’ effects on a high fat diet:

“Garlic organosulfur compounds (OSCs) have been shown to be major components responsible for garlic’s health benefits. However, the composition and function of garlic OSCs are damaged due to various processing and cooking methods during food preparation.

In this study garlic alliinase was deactivated to obtain stable garlic OSCs. We made two preparations of alliinase-free garlic powders based on their OSCs and fructan contents. OSCs concentrations of alliinase-free garlic powder 1 (G1) and alliinase-free garlic powder 2 (G2) differ by approximately 2-fold, 20.889 mg/g and 43.869 mg/g, respectively.

Mice fed with lipid and glucose metabolic disorder-inducing Western diet (WD) revealed that stable garlic OSCs prevented the disorder by increasing relative abundance of gut Bacteroides acidifaciens. Both G1 and G2 significantly increased fecal levels of taurine, with G2 being significantly better than G1.

Garlic OSCs inhibited dyslipidemia and fatty liver by increasing taurine and subsequently promoting hepatic fatty acid β-oxidation. Results of this study demonstrate that the preventive effect of garlic OSCs on WD-induced metabolic disorder is attributed to enhanced growth of Bacteroides acidifaciens and consequent increase in taurine.”

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jafc.2c00555 “Natural Garlic Organosulfur Compounds Prevent Metabolic Disorder of Lipid and Glucose by Increasing Gut Commensal Bacteroides acidifaciens” (not freely available) Thanks to Dr. Hisham R. Ibrahim for providing a copy.