·         Helps to retard the aging process

·         Improves muscle strength

·         Supports the metabolism of food into energy

·         Helps to burn fat more efficiently

·         Transports long chain fatty acids to the cells to produce more energy

·         Increases blood oxygen

·         Can help to alleviate depression

·         Contributes to the production of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine so may improve mental function (studies have shown that this chemical is depleted in the body in those with Alzheimer's Disease)

In short, the two are a powerful combination that can improve vitality and help protect against disease; studies have shown that they work together to “tune up” the energy-producing organelles that power all cells, the mitochondria - seen as the weak link in aging. As we age, the mitochondria decay both structurally and functionally, and the levels of antioxidants in the body fall, both Alpha Lipoic Acid and Acetyl-L-Carnitine protect mitochondria function and therefore help to preserve cell function and energy.

Why Is Alpha Lipoic Acid Such a Powerful Antioxidant?

Unlike other antioxidants which are either hydrophilic (water soluble) or Lipophylic (fat soluble), Alpha Lipoic Acid is both water and fat soluble, this universal solubility means that ALA is able to neutralize both hydroxyl and singlet-oxygen free radicals, two of the most dangerous types, wherever they are found in the body.  ALA works to prevent free radical damage regardless of whether it is in the brain fluids, stored in fat, the heart, pancreas, kidney, liver, bone, or cartilage. 

ALA’s protective effects extend to virtually every cell in every organ and tissue.  These characteristics enable ALA to easily cross the blood brain barrier and increase brain energy.  ALA has been shown in studies to improve long-term memory in laboratory animals, probably by preventing free radical damage to cell membranes.  Additional studies on ALA show it to have a neuro-protective role against various toxic chemicals. 

ALA – DHLA: Two Antioxidants in One

Alpha Lipoic Acid supplementation actually gives you two antioxidants in one.  As Alpha Lipoic Acid does its work, it is reduced to Dihydrolipoic Acid (DHLA), another important antioxidant that can deactivate peroxyl and other types of free radicals.  When DHLA is oxidized (gives up an electron to deactivate free radicals) it reverts back to Alpha Lipoic Acid.  This molecular change goes back and forth automatically in the body accomplishing many important and beneficial functions.  

DHLA Regenerates Other Antioxidants

In order to deactivate free radicals, antioxidants like Vitamin C & Vitamin E, must give up an electron and therefore their effective life is limited.  DHLA is able to restore the missing electron and extend the life of these other important antioxidants.  DHLA replenishes the antioxidant properties of Vitamin C and recycles Vitamin E in the body so that these antioxidants remain active longer.

Protective Effect of Alpha Lipoic Acid on the Liver

Burt Berkson, MD, Ph.D. believes ALA to be an excellent therapeutic agent for many types of liver disorders.  In his latest book he describes how administering intravenous ALA saved the lives of four patients who had severe liver damage.  Four weeks after the intravenous ALA therapy, the four patient’s liver function tests were “normal”.  Additional studies indicate ALA may have a beneficial effect on patients with acute and chronic alcohol toxicity.  ALA is also an effective detoxifying agent for mercury, arsenic, copper, excess iron, cadmium, excess calcium (a primary cause of premature aging), and lead.

Effects of ALA on Diabetes & Insulin Resistance

Alpha Lipoic Acid functions as a co-enzyme in sugar metabolism.  In a study of adult diabetic patients, Alpha Lipoic Acid increased cellular uptake and burning of glucose by approximately 50%.  This study showed that Alpha Lipoic Acid could be extremely beneficial to diabetics and those who are borderline diabetic (insulin resistant).  In other studies ALA significantly reduced symptoms of diabetic peripheral neuropathy (pain, burning and numbness) in the feet and improved cardiac autonomic dysfunction in non-insulin dependent diabetics.  Alpha Lipoic Acid increases insulin sensitivity and optimizes the use of glucose for energy and if glucose can be effectively used as cellular fuel, it will not be stored as fat.

In Germany, Alpha Lipoic Acid is an approved treatment for Diabetic Neuropathy where high blood sugar levels over several years cause long-term damage to the nerve fibres, in Diabetics, this normally first presents as reduced sensation in the feet and usually spreads further up the legs. The superior antioxidant properties of Alpha Lipoic Acid help to reduce events in the body that cause the reduced endoneural blood flow and oxygen tension that occurs in cases of Diabetic Neuropathy.

Alpha Lipoic Acid and Cardiovascular Health

Because of its antioxidant capabilities and its ability to boost glutathione production and regenerate other antioxidants, ALA plays an important role in cardiovascular health.  Both ALA and DHLA are extremely effective in deactivating peroxynitrite, a particularly dangerous type of free radical that contributes to the development of atherosclerosis, lung disease, neurological disorders and inflammatory diseases.

Alpha Lipoic Acid and Immune System Function

In a pilot study, supplementation with 150mg of ALA 3 times per day was shown to increase plasma ascorbate, glutathione and T-helper cells and to optimize the ratio of T-helper cells to T-suppressor cells.  Other studies have demonstrated the ALA helps to inhibit HIV replication by decreasing the activity of reverse transcriptase and to delay apoptosis (programmed cell death) of Thymus cells – the immune system’s number one line of defense.

Alpha Lipoic Acid and Alzheimer’s / Heavy Metals

Alpha Lipoic Acid is particularly helpful for removing mercury and cadmium, which it binds to and neutralises. Neuropharmacology Laboratory, Department of Pharmacology, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi 110029, India carried out a study on rats and those treated with Alpha Lipoic Acid showed significantly less cognitive impairment. There was also an insignificant increase in oxidative stress in the alpha lipoic acid treated groups. The study demonstrated the effectiveness of Alpha Lipoic Acid in preventing cognitive impairment, which indicates the usefulness in the natural treatment of Alzheimer's disease.   There is overwhelming evidence that this disease is focused around heavy metal toxicity in the brain and that there have been cases of reversal from Alzheimer’s using a heavy metal detox programme. Alpha Lipoic Acid can remove mercury from brain and nerve cells, but to transport it out of the body, and stop it depositing elsewhere Sea Greens are required. In addition, clinical studies have seen the slowing down of progression, and improved cognitive ability of Alzheimer’s patients when an Acetyl-L-Carnitine supplement is introduced, so the two products together should be seen as an essential supplement for Alzheimer’s cases.

Alpha-Lipoic Acid & Acetyl-LCarnitine - New Evidence for Rejuvenation Potential

University of California - Berkeley [press release, 2002.Feb.18]

Two dietary supplements straight off the health food store shelf put the spark back into aging rats, and might do the same for aging baby boomers, according to a study at the University of California, Berkeley, and Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute. A team of researchers led by Bruce N. Ames, professor of molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley, fed older rats two chemicals normally found in the body’s cells and available as dietary supplements: Acetyl-L-carnitine and an antioxidant, Alpha-Lipoic Acid. In three articles in the February 19 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ames and his colleagues report the surprising results. Not only did the older rats do better on memory tests, they had more pep, and the energy-producing organelles in their cells worked better.

“With the two supplements together, these old rats got up and did the Macarena,” said Ames, also a researcher at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI). “The brain looks better, they are full of energy - everything we looked at looks more like a young animal….“The animals seem to have much more vigour and are much more active than animals not on this diet, signalling massive improvement to these animals’ health and well-being,” said former UC Berkeley post-doctoral fellow Tory M. Hagen, now an assistant professor at the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University, Corvallis. “And we also see a reversal in loss of memory. That is a dual-track improvement that is significant and unique. This is really starting to explode and move out of the realm of basic research into people.”

Based on the group’s earlier studies, the University of California patented use of the combination of the two supplements to rejuvenate cells. Ames, through the Bruce and Giovanna Ames Foundation, and Hagen founded a company in 1999 called Juvenon to license the patent from the university. Juvenon currently is engaged in human clinical trials of the combination. One of the three PNAS articles probes the reasons behind this rejuvenation, concluding that the two chemicals “tune up” the energy-producing organelles that power all cells, the mitochondria. Both chemicals are normally used in mitochondria.  Ames calls mitochondria the weak link in aging.

” Evidence has been piling up, he said, that deterioration of mitochondria is an important cause of aging.”

A significant cause of this deterioration, he believes, is the accumulation of destructive free radicals — by products of normal metabolism — that disable enzymes and other chemicals. The combination therapy targets mitochondria to get rid of destructive radicals and to boost the activity of a damaged enzyme, carnitine acetyltransferase, which plays a key role in burning fuel in mitochondria. The researchers hoped that the anti-oxidant alpha-lipoic acid would do the former, and that flooding the cell with acetyl-L-carnitine, one of two proteins that the enzyme acts on, would achieve the latter.

Experiments showed that this regimen worked. Associate researcher Jiankang Liu of CHORI, UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow David W. Killilea and Ames demonstrated that the enzyme carnitine acetyltransferase is less active in old rats than in young rats, and that it binds less tightly to acetyl-L-carnitine in older rats. Supplementation with acetyl-L-carnitine or a combination of acetyl-L-carnitine and alpha-lipoic acid restored the enzyme’s activity nearly to that found in young rats and substantially restored binding to acetyl-L-carnitine.

“The acetyl-L-carnitine is protecting the protein and the higher levels are enabling the protein to work, while alpha-lipoic acid knocks down oxygen radicals,” Ames said. “Each chemical solves a different problem — the two together are better than either one alone.”

Ames and Hagen have long had an interest in mitochondria as they relate to aging, and they were intrigued by a 1999 Italian study that showed acetyl-L-carnitine, when fed to old rats, improved mitochondrial activity. The two thought this might be a way to reverse the effects of aging on mitochondria, and in various trials found it to work to some degree. Free radicals were still damaging the cell, however, so they decided to pair it with one of the few antioxidants that gets into mitochondria, alpha-lipoic acid. Lipoic acid is produced by mitochondria and boosts levels of other antioxidants. In the second of the PNAS studies, Hagen, Ames and colleagues compared 2- to 4-month-old rats to 24- to 28-month-old rats, all fed acetyl-L-carnitine in their water and alpha-lipoic acid in their chow. After as little as a month on the supplements, the old and lethargic rats became more peppy, Ames said.

“We significantly reversed the decline in overall activity typical of aged rats to what you see in a middle-aged to young adult rat 7 to 10 months of age,” Hagen said. “This is equivalent to making a 75- to 80-year-old person act middle-aged. We’ve only shown short-term effects, but the results give us the rationale for looking at these things long term.”

They found also that the combination of lipoic acid and acetyl-carnitine improved mitochondrial activity and thus cellular metabolism, and increased levels of various chemicals known to decline with age, including ascorbic acid, an antioxidant.

In a third study, Liu, Hagen, Ames and colleagues fed old rats a similar diet of the two supplements and looked at memory function as measured by the Morris water maze test and a peak procedure for assessing temporal or time-based memory developed by Seth Roberts, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley.

They found that supplementation improved both spatial and temporal memory, and reduced the amount of oxidative damage to RNA in the brain’s hippocampus, an area important in memory. In electron microscope pictures of cells from the hippocampus, mitochondria showed less structural decay in old rats that had a supplemented diet.

“We did two different tests for cognitive activity in rats, and in both it made a big difference to feed them this mixture,” Ames said. “Memory degenerates with age, and this makes them better.”

The analysis of nucleic acid damage in the brain was performed with post-doctoral researcher Elizabeth Head and Carl W. Cotman, professor of neurobiology and behaviour, at the Institute for Brain Aging and Dementia at UC Irvine. UC Berkeley psychology graduate student Afshin M. Gharib worked with Liu to conduct the peak performance tests. “In aging, you’re oxidizing the proteins in mitochondria and they lose activity,” Ames explained. “If some of that lost activity is due to binding for substrate or coenzyme — like binding of acetyl-L-carnitine by carnitine acetyltransferase — and you can raise the level of those, then you can reverse some of the loss”.

“We showed, in fact, that that is what’s happening with acetyl-L-carnitine. Aldehydes from lipid oxidation are glomming onto that protein, and that is what appears to cause the reduction in binding activity. But if you raise the level of acetyl-L-carnitine, now it works.” Hagen added,  “With aging, we see so many different things that are occurring to mitochondria that then lead to consequences in the cell. If you tune up mitochondria you may have a means of at least delaying the onset of a number of age-related problems that we encounter, or we can in some ways, hopefully, reverse what has already taken place.”

The work was supported by grants from the Ellison Foundation, the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health, the Wheeler Fund of the Dean of Biology at UC Berkeley, the Bruce and Giovanna Ames Foundation and the National Institute of Environmental Healt