What Taurine Can Do To Your Liver

The liver is a remarkably regenerative organ, to the point that if you cut away anything up to nearly half of it, it’ll simply grow back (in the absence of some other disease preventing it from doing so of course).

This makes its name very appropriate! And yet, there are many ways we can mess it up, if we’re not careful.

You probably know already that alcohol isn’t the best drink for liver.

Even if you don’t drink enough for liver poisoning, there are still such issues as: Occasional Drinking? 3x Risk Of Liver Scarring

It turns out that your poor liver cannot even catch a break with soft drinks: Soft Drinks & Your Liver: Sugar vs Sugar-Free Sweeteners

Nor are drinks the only culprit! We’ve written, for example, about: The Household Cleaner That Triples Liver Disease Risk ← here we are talking about using the household cleaner to clean things. We can confidently assert that drinking it would be even worse.

And even things that are taken to help our body, can harm our liver: Before You Reach For That Tylenol… ← respectable painkiller for some things, very high hepatotoxicity though

It seems everything is out to get our liver!

So what part does taurine have to play in this?

The dose makes the poison

Researchers (Dr. Lixian Chen et al.) have found that high-dose taurine can increase liver-to-body weight ratio, liver triglyceride accumulation, steatosis, ALT and AST levels, hepatocyte death, macrophage activation, and inflammatory gene expression.

That’s a lot of big words to say that it’s very bad for the liver.

As to how this happens, it seems that the gut-liver axis gets disrupted. In the lab, high-dose taurine altered the gut microbiome, reduced microbial diversity, increased hydrogen sulfide-producing bacteria including Prevotella, and was associated with greater hydrogen sulfide production, intestinal epithelial damage, reduced Cldn1* expression, and impaired tight-junction function.

^{*Cpt1a is a key enzyme involved in mitochondrial fatty-acid oxidation.}

All this adds up to leaky gut and resultant dysbiosis, including such nasties as E. Coli roaming free.

However! That’s for high-dose taurine supplementation.

So what about low-dose taurine supplementation?

At a more modest dose of 0.2 g/kg/day, taurine reduced liver-fat accumulation, liver-injury markers, and Fasn* protein expression, while increasing the ratio of taurine-conjugated bile acids to total bile acids.

^{*Fasn promotes fatty-acid synthesis. That’s good.}

You can read the paper in full, here: High-dose taurine supplementation exacerbates alcohol-associated liver disease by inducing gut microbiota dysbiosis and bile acid dysregulation

Want to do better for your liver?

If you’d like to give your liver a helping hand:

N-Acetyl Cysteine For The Liver & More

And as for MASLD as it is nowadays called (metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease*, used to be called NAFLD, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease), see: How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver

^{*Attentive readers may have noticed that there appears to be a D missing from the acronym. We noticed that too, and were not able to find any explanation of why it’s not MDASLD. However, you can read about why the change itself was made, and how the decision was agreed upon, here: A multisociety Delphi consensus statement on new fatty liver disease nomenclature}

Or for a purely dietary approach, enjoy: Top Diets & Fasting vs Fatty Liver: What’s Best?

Take care!