Effects of L-carnitine supplementation in diets of broiler chickens

L-carnitine is a nutritional supplement having fat-burning property and plays an important role in lipid metabolism, energy release, and also improve the production yield, immunity and blood constitute. This paper reviews the effects of L-carnitine on quantitative and qualitative characteristics of broilers. According to the reviewed literature, the application of L-carnitine (50-200 mg/kg) has no significant effect on the growth performance, however, using L-carnitine as much as 300-800 mg/kg resulted to an improvement in the body weight (2226.00-2575.00 g) compared to the control chicks (1998.40-2338.75 g). The feed conversion ratios of the chickens fed the same amount of L-carnitine were 1.66-1.86 kg/kg, which was improved in comparison with the control chicks (1.87-2.09 kg/kg). Abdominal fat of the broiler chickens fed 50-900 mg/kg L-carnitine was 0.98-1.75%, which is lower than the control chicks (1.79-2.16%). For immunity, the antibody titers against the Newcastle virus in the chickens fed 250 mg/kg L-carnitine was between 4.6- 5.5 which is more than control chicks (4.3-5.2). The antibody titer against the influenza virus in the chickens fed the same amount of L-carnitine was between 5.6-6.3, which was more than the control chicks (4.3-5.8). The use of 100-600 mg/kg L-carnitine could reduce triglyceride (90-104.4 mg/dL) compared to the control chicks (125-104.7 mg/dL) and also reduced the cholesterol (109-115 mg/dL) compared to the control chicks (129.25-131 mg/dL). The application of 100-600 mg/kg L-carnitine also could reduce low-density lipoprotein (LDL) from 19.1-72.2 mg/dL to 16.5-49.0 mg/dL. However, the application of 100-900 mg/kg L-carnitine had no significant effect on the sensory characteristics of broiler chicken meat. In general, it can be concluded that L-carnitine can be used as a dietary supplement on the health of broiler chickens without any negative effect on growth performance.