L- Carnitine A Potential Dietary Supplement
November 12, 2008
Dietary supplements are becoming a popular remedy for the improvement of bodily functions, enhancing the lean body mass, loosing body weight using dietary means and improvizing on the beneficial effects of existing diet. Here we will have a look in one such dietary supplement viz. L-carnitine.
What is L-carnitine?
Carnitine is a non-essential amino acid, produced from the essential fatty acid methionine in the brain and liver. It is termed as non-essential because it is not required to be synthesized by the body on a regular basis. As a nutrient carnitine is responsible for the transport of long-chain fatty acids to the mitochondrion which are the storehouse of energy.
Carnitine and its functionality
As a non-essential amino acid carnitine plays a critical role in metabolism of the body which assists in regulating numerous metabolic functions. Carnitine acts a major chain for taking the fats to the cellular levels and making the mitochondrion energy rich, thereby improving the metabolic rate.
Dietary sources of carnitine
Carnitine is not found to be present in vegetarian food and most of the dietary sources include animal meat. The major sources of carnitine include foods of animal origin, such as meat and dairy products, the sources of carnitine include products such as red meat (particularly lamb) and dairy products. Fish, chicken, fermented soybeans, wheat, asparagus are the other major sources of l-Carnitine. Although, products rich in methionine are also supposed to enhance the synthesis of carnitine in the body.
Carnitine and weight loss
L-carnitine has been implicated as a major dietary weight loss supplement and a lot of hype has been given to its ability to enhance metabolic rate. Although, not much ha been researched in this regard still the amount of data available clearly demonstrates that l-carnitine supplementation helps in improving the rate of burning fat by the body, hence improving the rate of body weight loss.
In conclusion, it would be befitting to state that L-carnitine holds a lot of promise and potential as a weight loss supplement of future.



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