Could a simple diet change prevent a heart attack? A Mount A prof is using fish to find out

A New Brunswick biochemist says fish and humans have something in common — and it could change how we look at promoting heart health.

Tyson MacCormack, a professor in chemistry and biochemistry at Mount Allison University, says his research shows an amino acid called taurine plays a critical role in helping fish endure extreme conditions.

He discovered this while studying cuttlefish in Portugal and found they have a lot of taurine in their bloodstreams and hearts.

“When we looked into what it was doing in cuttlefish, we recognized that it was actually a really potent regulator of heart function,” said MacCormack.

“We found that taurine was protecting cuttlefish hearts from things like high calcium levels, which would be toxic to human hearts, and it allowed them to regulate the volume of their heart muscle … that’s really important in facilitating the pumping of blood.”

Humans have smaller amounts of taurine in their hearts, which is found in their diets from eating fish and red meat. So, MacCormack wondered how this discovery might be applied to human heart health.

He brought that knowledge back to his lab in Sackville and began testing on New Brunswick-native fish, such as brook trout. MacCormack manipulates their diet and monitors their heart rate with the help of swim tunnel respirometers.

Kind of like a treadmill, fish are placed inside a tank where water flow can be manipulated to make them swim at different speeds. The fish’s oxygen consumption is then tracked.

“We're experimentally manipulating the concentration of taurine in their hearts to figure out why it's important to function,” said MacCormack.

“It's becoming apparent that a small change in diet that has an effect on how taurine gets into your heart can change the capacity of your heart to deal with stress.”

He said taurine is pumped up to the human heart with the help of a specific protein, which is responsible for moving other amino acids into the heart.

“The interesting thing about this is that if you increase the amount of those other amino acids that you're taking in your diet, you can block taurine influx into your heart,” said MacCormack.

He said this research is leading his team to understand that even small changes in a human’s diet, with a focus on adjusting protein and amino acid intake, can either predispose someone to a heart attack or help to mitigate one.

MacCormack said the goal is to create a nutritional guideline to help people ensure their diet is helping their heart and to create a supplement pill for people who can’t get taurine from their diets.

“Vegans and vegetarians have the capacity to synthesize their own taurine, so that in itself is not a problem," he said. "But if those individuals were to eat a diet rich in beta-alanine, [which] is a common pre-workout supplement, that could predispose them to taurine deficiency."

The research project is being funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, Research New Brunswick, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of New Brunswick and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation.

MacCormack said the next step in research is to take a non-invasive approach with testing this theory on rodents, by manipulating their diets and examining changes in behaviour.

He said this research could also help provide a solution to help fish cope through rising water temperatures because of climate change.

“What we've seen in our studies so far is that having the capacity to move taurine around is really important for those animals to support cardiovascular function and to tolerate those environmental stressors,” said MacCormack.

He said the idea is to create a feed formulation that could be supplied to the aquaculture industry.

“They could perhaps give it to their animals before a heat wave is predicted to come to better allow those cultured fish to survive.”