1. Home
2. Blog
3. Lab Testing
4. How to measure carnitine to increase fat burning

How to measure carnitine to increase fat burning

Written by Christopher Kelly

Oct. 29, 2014

Hey, everyone! It's Christopher Kelly here from Nourish Balance Thrive. I've got a little mini video here for you all about "carnitine."

Now, you should care about carnitine because you want to be a better fat burner, right? So nearly everyone I talk to, they're interested in better utilizing fat for athletic performance -- because you've got lots of fat and not very much glycogen -- or they're looking to lose weight, so carnitine is a micronutrient that could stop either those two things from happening. So that's why you care.

In this little infographic here that my wife lovingly prepared -- I hope you like it -- you can see that there's an analogy. On the left-hand side, we've got this boat with these little butter packets and you can -- that's the fat. That's what you're trying to burn. So the fat is offloaded from the boat into these little, tiny baby boats which are much better able to get from the big boat all the way over to the power station -- which is on the right-hand side -- where they actually get burned.

So the big boat, that's your blood supply. That's where the fat is coming from. The power station on the right-hand side, those are the mitochondria inside your cells. That's the powerhouse. That's where you're actually producing energy. The little baby boats, that's the carnitine.

So you can see here that without carnitine there would be no energy produced, or at least less energy is produced. You can imagine a situation where there's not enough carnitine and you'll still get some shuttling of the fatty acids into the mitochondria but not as much as you would like. So that's how carnitine fits into the big picture.

So a little bit more detail; this slide looks a teeny bit more technical but it's actually not that scary. If you look at the bottom, you can see that there's a lipoprotein. Lipoprotein is delivering the fatty acid to the outer membrane of the cell, and what's supposed to happen here is the fatty acids, they make their way into the mitochondria.

You can see that little jelly-bean-shaped organelle is a mitochondria and you can think of that like the powerhouse in the cell. That's what's actually producing the energy. There's a number of ways it can do it, but I would recommend that most of the time, fatty acids are the source of fuel for this little mitochondria.

Now, if there's insufficient carnitine -- so there's not enough boats to shuttle the fatty acid into the mitochondria -- then we start to see the buildup of some organic acids that I can measure in a urine sample. So we have this test that's made by Genova Diagnostics. It's the Organix Comprehensive Profile. It's a simple urine sample that you collect at home, you send it into the lab, and they measure the amount of these organic acids adipate, suberate and ethylmalonate in the urine sample, and that tells how well you are utilizing fatty acids inside the mitochondria.

So you see there are two places the fatty acids can come from. If you look over to the right, you'll see adipate and suberate and they build up when the fatty acids are unable to be burned when they've come from the blood supply. So you see them, they start to go into these peroxisomes. These are alternative organelles and it's much less efficient. So when you see these two organic acids build up, not very much fat burning is happening.

Then on the other side we've got ethylmalonate, and ethylmalonate comes from a carnitine deficiency that's derived from a butyrate source. So the good gut bacteria, they produce this fatty acid called butyrate, which is then supposed to be burned by the mitochondria. But when that doesn't happen, you see ethylmalonate start to build up in the urine sample.

This is a snapshot from my own Organix profile. This is quite old now. This is about two years old and this is the very first test that I ever ran. One thing I was noticing at the time I did this test was my ability to burn fat really sucked. I was absolutely hooked on the carbohydrate gels and I couldn't go for more than 40 minutes without taking another one of those gels.

So I found an alternative called UCAN SuperStarch, which has since proven to be wonderful, but the first time I used it, it didn't work at all. I should say more carefully it did work but it didn't allow me to burn fat, or at least not that I noticed. So I had to use it as a gram-for-gram replacement for the carbohydrate gels that I'd been using up until that point.

[0:05:09]

So this result for me was extremely interesting. You can see that in all cases, adipate, suberate and ethylmalonate -- the bullets are on the right-hand side, that's the fifth quintile -- so you're seeing a very high buildup of these organic acids that show that I'm not burning fat very well. So when I saw this result, I was able to choose a carnitine supplement and calculate the precise dose of that supplement that I needed in order to meet my carnitine requirements, and when I did that, suddenly the magic started to happen on the bike.

So the SuperStarch, I still continued to use it at first, but what I found was that I needed less and less of it over time. So I got to the point where basically I would forget to take it and it didn't make any difference. Now, at this point I'm such a good fat burner, I'm able to use it just for races. So this one test or just this one part of this test has proved to be really, really important for me.

Now, I should stress that the point of this video is not to persuade you to take carnitine as a supplement. Each person is unique to an extent and you need to figure out what your limiting factor is. For me, this was just my one stupid thing. There's going to be something else for you, no doubt.

I think the other thing that's really important to ask when you find these types of problems is, "Why should this be?" So this is what makes my approach different from that of your conventional doctor. I'm always asking why. I never settle for, "Oh, that's just the way it is." I always dig deeper.

So where the hell does carnitine come from? The answer is mostly red meat. So that's where the words come from, "carnum." It's like "carnivore." Red meat muscle is particularly dense in carnitine and so you should be getting a good amount from your diet. Hopefully, you're eating red meat. The other source it can come from is endogenously, so this just means that your body is making carnitine out of these two amino acids which are lysine and methionine.

So if you had a problem with your digestion, say you had small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or you had some kind of other bug present, you didn't have the best digestion, then it's conceivable that you would also not have the carnitine because you're just not breaking down the protein in the way that you should.

So that's two important things to investigate. A third is stress. When you look at stress, the stress response is designed to save the day. So you could be eating the very best grass-fed protein that has tons of carnitine in it, or at least tons of the amino acid precursors to carnitine, and none of them will be used to make carnitine because all of that protein is going into a gluconeogenesis cycle in order to raise your blood glucose and get you away from that chasing tiger that never seems to go away. So there's three areas you need to investigate.

There's actually one more thing that I should probably throw in is riboflavin, vitamin B2, is also a really important cofactor for fat burning, or beta-oxidation, as it's called. So you could be deficient in vitamin B2 and you would also have the same problem.

So hope this has been helpful. If you'd like to know more about the Organix Comprehensive Profile, head over to my site. It's NourishBalanceThrive.com. You can see some packages that include this test as part of a more complete service. So go ahead and check that out, and I'll see you next time.

[0:09:10] End of Audio