Lipoic Acid and L-Carnitine as Diabetic Fat Burners

If there's anything diabetics all over the world can agree on, it's that it's nearly impossible to lose weight while keeping blood sugars in check.

The problem for diabetics has become even worse since the late 1990's and the introduction of thiazolidinediones (TZDs), a class of drugs that includes commonly prescribed drugs like Actos (pioglitazone) and Avandia (rosiglitazone).

TZDs are terrific for lowering blood sugars. The problem is, they do this by stimulating molecule called PPAR-gamma. PPAR-gamma makes insulin far more efficient at taking glucose out of the blood stream so it can be stored in fat. Unfortunately, it also makes the same fat cells more efficient at storing fatty acids, and it even encourages the transformation of bone and heart cells into fat cells, contributing to, as you might imagine, osteoporosis and congestive heart failure.

What diabetics need is something that takes glucose out of the bloodstream without increasing the size or number of fat cells. And a research team working out of the University of California at Irvine and Shanghai's Institutes of Biological Sciences may have found it in lipoic acid and L-carnitine.

As most diabetics know, lipoic acid, usually taken in the form alpha-lipoic acid, reduces the rate at which hemoglobin combines with glucose in the bloodstream to form glycated hemoglobin, or HbA1C.

Alpha-lipoic acid isn't actually the best form of lipoic acid for diabetes. Alpha-lipoic acid is a mixture of two isomers, only one of which, R-lipoic acid, is readily available to the body. The body can sort the R-lipoic acid out of alpha-lipoic acid, however, so about 50 per cent of the relatively inexpensive alpha-lipoic acid does a diabetic good.

L-carnitine is better known by body builders. There's a growing body of evidence, however, that up to 2,000 mg of L-carnitine a day might protect diabetic brain tissue.

And it was brain researchers who discovered the application of the combination of these two supplements in burning fat.

Since this was a relatively preliminary study, the researchers took fat cells from lab rats and cultivated them under "test tube" conditions to see how they would react to lipoic acid and L-carnitine used singly and together.

Fat cells didn't respond very much to either lipoic acid or L-carnitine used without the other. When the fat cells were exposed to a combination of R-lipoic acid and L-carnitine, however, some astonishing things happened:

• The mitochondria, or energy makers of the cell, began to activate their DNA so they could grow.
• Larger mitochondria took up more oxygen so they could in turn
• Burn more glucose and fatty acids.

And the combination of antioxidants had another interesting effect. Like the well-known TZDs, they increased the activity of PPAR-gamma. They stimulated the fat cells' ability to clear glucose and fatty acids out of the bloodstream (or, in this case, the cell culture medium).

What was different from Actos and Avandia, however, is the fact that these fat cells not only could take up more glucose and fatty acids, they burned them instead of stored them. This experiment seems to suggest that possibly diabetics, in particular, could benefit from lower blood sugars (as they already do with high levels of lipoic acid supplementation) as well as increased metabolism and lower weight, if lipoic acid and L-carnitine are taken together.

If you decide to give this supplement combination a try, remember that lipoic acid depletes biotin. Be sure to take 125 micrograms of biotin for every 200 mg of lipoic acid. Also, be sure to tell your doctor you're taking the supplements. While lipoic acid protects you against some of the effects of high blood sugars, notably in the nerves and heart, it also masks long-term high blood sugars as measured by HbA1C.

No one knows how many pounds this combination might help you lose--but please note your results in the comments section here.

Source:
Authors: W. Shen, K. Liu, C. Tian, L. Yang, X. Li, J. Ren, L. Packer, C.W. Cotman, J. Liu. R-alpha-Lipoic acid and acetyl-L-carnitine complementarily promote mitochondrial biogenesis in murine 3T3-L1 adipocytes.Diabetologia
2008, Volume 51, Pages 165-174, doi: 10.1007/s00125-007-0852-4.