The broad answer to this question is…maybe. While there have been a number of studies conducted globally about the effectiveness of certain nutrients in improving various aspects of health for COPD patients and other pulmonary conditions, it would be a significant stretch to say there is consensus in the medical community about their usefulness.
Most often, respiratory care professionals point to the lack of multiple, large studies confirming effectiveness of certain supplements as their primary objection to advocating a particular supplement. This is a reasonable objection that is the primary weakness of the vast majority of the research done in the nutritional supplement field.
Since nutritional supplements are by and large commodity products, individual supplement manufacturers/marketers are generally not willing to fund large studies on their own when positive results published from their studies can be immediately used by their competitors to market competitive products. There are exceptions of course. Some ingredients can be patented, and some uses of combined ingredients can be patented, but for the most part there is no intellectual property protection for commonly found ingredients in food. Hence, investments in large scale supplement studies generally does not happen – at least on the scale physicians are used to seeing invested in pharmaceutical studies. As a result, the supplement studies do not carry the same credibility as pharma studies within the pulmonology profession. That all said…
In our opinion, it is worth your investment of time to learn about some of these supplement studies because some of the results are impressive even though the studies are small. We give you one example here and we will write of others as we find ones worthy of your attention:
In 2006, a group of Brazilian researchers investigated whether adding the nutritional supplement L-Carnitine would provide a noticeable benefit to COPD patients undergoing a pulmonary rehabilitation exercise program.
L-Carnitine is an amino acid used in the human body to facilitate energy production (it acts as a carrier of fatty acids to the mitochondria in muscle cells where energy to move muscles is produced). It has been shown in other studies to produce a noticeable effect in exercise tolerance in populations with nutritional or muscular deficiency but had never been previously studied in COPD patients to the best knowledge of the researchers. The free full text of the study can be found by clicking here.
In this study, the researchers split 16 moderate to severe COPD patients into two groups – a carnitine group that received 2 grams of L-Carnitine daily for 6 weeks, and a placebo group that received a placebo pill for the same period of time. During this six week period, both groups exercised on a treadmill for 30 minutes a day, three days a week at identical workload levels. Both groups' physical conditioning and vital health statistics were evaluated before and after the six week period.
While both the placebo group and the carnitine group experienced notable improvements in their physical conditioning and vital health statistics due primarily to the benefits received from the exercise program, the carnitine group's improvement notably outstripped the placebo group.
The researchers concluded the carnitine group's higher level of improvements in conditioning and vital health statistic measures were driven by the addition of L-Carnitine, "The main results of the present study show the beneficial effects of L-carnitine supplementation in enhancing physiological responses at identical levels of exercise, reducing lactate concentration, improving exercise tolerance and inspiratory muscle strength in COPD".
The study measured relative performance between the two groups in distance walked at peak speed, distanced walked in six minutes, heart rate at peak speed & same speed, blood pressure, blood lactate production, and other physiological measures. In all cases, the carnitine group outperformed the placebo group.
The researchers acknowledged that one of the weaknesses of their study is its small sample size (16 subjects). Does this invalidate the results? No, but it doesn't get American Thoracic Society to offer an endorsement of L-Carnitine (rightly so, until others can replicate the findings, hopefully in larger studies).
Despite this, should you try L-Carnitine if you are a COPD patient and are trying to start or maintain an exercise program? Read the full study at the link provided above and judge for yourself. Presuming you've checked with your doctor to ensure that there are no counter-indications with medications you currently take, we think it is worth considering.
If instead you'd like to find food sources containing high amounts of L-Carnitine, the highest sources are found in the meat of lamb and sheep (mutton) but you'd have to consume a lot of lamb/mutton each day to yield 2 grams of L-Carnitine…2 lbs. of mutton or 5.6 lbs. of lamb each day!
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