Why do you need calcium and fat to be fit and healthy
Calcium and specifically, a certain acid called Butyrate, found in full fat dairy, is what is needed to keep you healthy, fit and living longer.
The Health Benefits of Butyrate: Meet the Anti-Inflammatory Fat (from the article):
" Butyrate is a type of fatty acid that helps your gut work right, and it might be important for gut-related diseases from autoimmunity to obesity to colon cancer. Here’s what it does, and how to make sure you’re getting enough of it.
You can get butyrate from food or supplements, but your gut flora can also make it out of fiber. Healthy gut flora digest food by fermenting it. When they ferment certain types of fiber, they create butyrate.
Your digestive system needs butyrate to function properly. Butyrate helps control the growth of the cells lining the gut, to make sure there’s good balance between old cells dying and new cells being formed. It’s also the most important source of energy for those cells.
Powering the lining of the gut would be important enough, but butyrate also has powerful anti-inflammatory effects that go beyond the gut. Ultimately, the anti-inflammatory benefits are helpful for…
Cancer Protection
Butyrate is most famous for protecting against colon cancer. The protection comes from its anti-inflammatory effects, which reduce oxidative stress and help control free radical damage. This review connected colon cancer risk to a lower amount of bacteria that produce butyrate.
Immunity And Autoimmunity
This review goes over the effects of butyrate on the immune system. The overall anti-inflammatory effects are already an immune benefit – inflammation is an immune response, and controlling inflammation helps keep the immune response properly regularly. Butyrate may also have some other immune benefits. For example, it helps regulate the production and development of regulatory T-cells in the colon.
Regulatory T-cells help your body distinguish between itself and everything else. If that ability breaks down, your immune system might end up mounting a full-blown attack on your own pancreas (Type 1 Diabetes) or your own thyroid. It’s a pretty important job, and butyrate helps the T-cells stay on track.
In rats, butyrate also helps maintain healthy gut barrier function and reduce abnormal intestinal permeability (“leaky gut”). Gut barrier function is huge for immune health and avoiding autoimmunity. We also have some evidence that the butyrate-autoimmunity connection exists in people. For example, people with autoimmune (Type 1) Diabetes have a lack of butyrate-producing bacteria in their gut.
Therapy For Inflammatory Gut Diseases
Butyrate problems are also tied up with inflammatory gut diseases (like Inflammatory Bowel Disease, including Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis). For example, people with IBD have a reduced ability to metabolize butyrate. That might contribute to their inflammatory symptoms.
But there’s also good news! A recent study found that oral butyrate supplements (4 grams per day for 8 weeks) improved symptoms of Crohn’s Disease in 9 out of 13 patients: 2 significantly improved, and 7 actually went into remission. The researchers’ explanation was the anti-inflammatory effect of the butyrate.
Weight Loss
Speaking of autoimmune, inflammatory conditions, you know what else is on the list? Obesity (yes, obesity has an autoimmune component).
This review goes over the role of short-chain fatty acids, including butyrate, on weight and obesity. There are actually some conflicting data on this. Some studies show that obese humans have increased amounts of butyrate in their feces. But other studies suggest that people with obesity have a lower ability to ferment carbohydrates into butyrate. Normal-weight people have more butyrate-producing bacteria in their gut than obese people. If you take the gut flora from a normal person and transplant them into the colon of someone with metabolic syndrome, the recipient’s insulin sensitivity improves along with their ability to ferment carbohydrates into butyrate.
There are also some other ways that butyrate might affect body weight. There’s some evidence that it suppresses appetite by affecting the levels of hormones in the gut. In mice, it also influences metabolism and energy expenditure, and pushes the body towards burning more fat for energy.
It’s not totally clear what exactly all the relationships are – there’s probably a whole tangle of adaptations and counter-adaptations and overcompensation going on. But the takeaway seems to be that butyrate is one more reason why you need a healthy gut for sustainable weight loss."