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taurine and beta alanine

vision blue

Senior Member
Messages
1,877
.My taurine had been elevated on urine amino acids for a few years. Finally got it together to test serum AA on the same day as urine AA to compare them. I wondered: Would taurine be low on serum suggesting I had the so called "taurine wasting" or would it be high suggesting high taurine levels? or would it be normal leaving me more confused/another blind alley. Answer is it was low! Not even low normal, but bonafide under the cutoff range, and none of the other amino acids were.

Ok, so unraveling causes, my urine beta alanine is also high, as is anserine. This may suggest anserine built up because of the high beta alanine (supposedly when b alanine gets too high, it send a signal to keep anserine and carnosine from being broken down since that would produce even more b alanine- but i'll come back to that). In another thread on this topic, others have noted that beta alanine causes taurine to be lost in urine since they compete for same receptor.

and further, studies have shown that when beta alanine causes taurine to be lost, the organ hardest hit is the liver. next hardest is the heart and brain and eyes (which also use taurine) are mostly not affected. the depletion of taurine in the liver then has been shown to lead to liver damage in the presence of toxins since they cannot be detoxified. Depleted taurine leads to detox problems.

this all seems to describe me, so I will pause for a brief self pat on the back to have put together a little piece of the puzzle.

but of course, its so much more complicated and its still not at all clear what to do about this.

first note another possible cause of depleted taurine is when its needed in a hurrry to as a rescue against too much sulfer (sulfite)? I wonder if this contributed too because on sulfite urine test strips am usually elevated. So was thinking about this when on a hunch I checked the chicken broth on some chicken i boiled for soup for 2 hours (I eat alot of this chicken) with the sulfite strips. and oh man! That strip sure turned pink/peach. was at the 50 ppm (?) mark. Tried not having the chicken, and lo and behold my urine sulfate is now under 10 ppm.

ok, so back then to the taurine and b alanine. Why would my beta alanine be elevated? I know people say gut dysbiosis, and i certainly have gut issues. But... ok, more specifically, is it candida albicans that produces the beta alanine? i think. but here the answer not so clear. I took an OAT urine test, and my arabose level is 25 and the upper limit is 29. its in about the 90 th percentile and was much much higher than any of my other pathogen markers on the oat. Arabose (I didn't spell that quite right) is supposted to be a marker of candida albians. But is that high enough to give a high beta alanine? does not seem like it, but don't know.

I do not know what other causes there are for elevated b alanine, but have found studies showing its a bad sign, perhaps because of the taurine depletion. as just one example, people with sudden sensory neural hearing loss who don't respond to cortisone have high beta alanine levels.

Now to quickly go back to the anserine and carnitine (intermediate peptide products in the digestion of chicken/salmon/turkey (anserine) and carnitine (meat)); while its said that these accumulate because of high b alanine, why can't it be the other way around as well? since both answerine and carnitine are broken down to beta alanine, could that also cause a high beta alanine level? but then it would mean I have trouble digesting protein? not sure.

There's so much more to tell- its not the only thing which is deranged and its hard to know if the other stuff follow from this, causes it, is all caused by the same thing, or are independent.

but this is a good starting point, so i'll stop here for now. I know there's a thread on taurine and beta alanine. its in the treatment section from several years ago.

If anyonne wants to chime in, would love to hear comments. If by chance anyone knows causes of the high beta alanine, please share.

oh, forgot one thing- how do i know that beta alanine isn't high because i have "beta alanine depletion". I have no idea if that's even a thing, but if my taurine can be up in urine, but low in serum, why can't that be true of beta alanine? Can i be certain my beta alanine is really high? ore could that actually be low too.

i'm not sure taking taurine is the right approach here or not -

btw, taurine depeltion is bad for all sorts of things, not just the detox i mention above.

ok, i'll stop now...
 

vision blue

Senior Member
Messages
1,877
Thanks. So far, i appear to be an overmethylator based on sps (and usually a low homocysteine), but I do have high oxalates in urine/. Am also allergic to sulfonimide and there's a difference of opinion on whether this sulfer compound is or is not related to difficulty with sulpher metabolism. Will look at thread to see if i've missed anything on the topic.
 

vision blue

Senior Member
Messages
1,877
p.s. if you do find anything, let me know. by the way, i'm also a professional patient, so I guess that makes us colleagues.
There's other stuff in the biochem analysis and related, but very hard to now how to fit the pieces together.
high dopamine, low serotonin, high tyramine, high oxidative stress, high secretory IgA in stools, tyramine intolerance, plenty of chemcial allergies and intolerances, low MAO-A it would appear. My money is on allergic or other chemical reactions setting eveything in motion, perhaps with an underlying mild mast cell issue that made me more prone to overreact to chemicals