Dr. A explains why people on keto diets sometimes need carnitine supplements. Your body uses carnitine to shuttle long-chain fatty acids into mitochondria for energy, a process that becomes critical when carbs are low. Depleted carnitine stores can cause fatigue, pain, and flu-like symptoms.
Hi, it's Dr. A. I had a couple of good questions about people on ketogenic or low-carb diets and why sometimes they're asked to take carnitine, which is an amino-like acid supplement, and so I just thought I'd answer that. The basis for the use of carnitine in usually a supplement form Is to help someone who's on a low-carb, especially a keto diet, have the fatty acids that get to their cells. And obviously there's going to be more fatty acids available and less carbohydrates. So when it gets to the cell, if you have carbohydrates, they're the first kind of choice to go in and to the mitochondria and create energy. But if you're shifting towards more fatty acid energy metabolism, there's a different process for getting fatty acids to the mitochondria and burning them for energy. The process is a 3-step process that requires carnitine as a transport cofactor. So carnitine is normally found in the diet. You can look up online, you know, dietary sources of carnitine. It was first isolated in meat, hence the name carne, carnitine, and it's in other foods as well. Again, you can look that up. But a lot of times what happens is when people have been used to being on a more standard diet with a lot of carbohydrate available, their body isn't used to metabolizing fats for energy quite like this. And so what happens is when you do the shift over, you can actually use up a lot of your carnitine. Now, you don't become truly deficient normally, but it can be a problem. And the symptoms people usually get are fatigue-oriented because they're having trouble shunting those fatty into the mitochondria for energy, and they don't have as many sugars as they used to. So often people will be told to take carnitine or acetyl-L-carnitine as supplements. Now, again, none of the things I talk about are medical advice. If you're going to think of this or do it, work with your healthcare provider. Don't take advice from YouTube for your healthcare. This is just information. But the The purpose is, as opposed to carbohydrate, which gets into the mitochondria fairly simply, remember fatty acids are real long and they have to be transported. There's not a natural gradient for them to go into the mitochondria. So what happens is there is a shuttle opening on the outside, and on the inside there's 2 membranes on the mitochondria. Mm-hmm. And so on the outside, there's this transport called CPT1, carnitine palmitotransferase 1. And then in the middle, there's CAT, which is carnitine acyltransferase. And then on the inside, there's CPT2 that shoves the fat in. Well, the operator of the movement through there and into the mitochondria is an attachment of carnitine to your fatty acid. So if you start to run low on carnitine, again, you're not going to get terribly deficient usually, but you run low, the transport of the fats in slows down and you can become quite fatigued. You can have pain, flu-like symptoms, other things. So usually practitioners, that would be the first thing that they try if you've switched to, say, keto or very low carb and you're having fatigue or other types of symptoms, would be to put you on a form of carnitine. Again, it's usually either L-carnitine or acetyl-L-carnitine that are available in supplement forms. There are some semi-drug versions of carnitine, but those are usually used in hospitals and with particular genetic disorders, so that's a little bit different. But that's why carnitine is so important, and if you really want to look at it, the other factor which is A factor as all fat movement is vitamin B5, pantothenic acid. So pantothenic acid is involved at the step before the fat gets to CPT1, and pantothenic acid is another one sometimes they will give you a bit extra if you're in keto or, or a very low-carb diet. Well, that's the answer to the question about low-carb and keto and why carnitine is sometimes used to help with Fatigue, etc. Basically, it is the shuttle molecule that helps to get the fats in so that they can be metabolized and give you energy. As always, if you like this, like, share, subscribe, notifications, all of those things, and I will see you all back here sometime soon.
