Butyrate, dietary fiber offer variety of health benefits

Fiber is one of the most poorly understood and under appreciated of all essential health nutrients. The confusion surrounding this super important nutritional substance could be because it is not really a single component.

Fairly inert, fiber has some important benefits for our body. It can deter, if not actually prevent, obesity and many chronic diseases of aging. This is because it slows the rate at which food enters your bloodstream while speeding up the rate at which food exits your body.

This can help you maintain healthy blood sugar levels naturally and reduce appetite. This certainly is a benefit to keeping ourselves from gaining too much weight, and for taking it off.

Fiber also has the ability to eliminate toxins from our gut on a daily basis. It has very tiny net like molecular structures that act to trap poisons which are then removed from our body through the large intestine.

Our liver produces bile and as it passes through our digestive system it picks up waste material such as hormones, dead cells, food toxins, bacteria and medications. Fiber adheres to old bile and gets it out of our body.

Our typical western diet certainly doesn’t emphasize fiber, even though the benefits are clear. Soluble fiber can lower cholesterol, blood sugar and insulin, remove excess estrogen thus reducing the risk of breast cancer, and assists our body in making vitamins and minerals.

Lately, I’ve been taking a deeper look at a short-chain fatty acid molecule called butyrate. This is made in your gut as certain bacteria feed upon, or ferment, the foods that contain adequate amounts of dietary fiber. Butyrate feeds the cells lining our colon and without it these cells would digest themselves and die.

That’s why the bacteria, Colstridium butyricum, that live in our digestive tract and manufacture butyrate are called beneficial bacteria, otherwise known as probiotics. The energy that is derived from this process benefits the cells of the colon by helping them proliferate.

Butyrate is considered a critical mediator of inflammation in the colon. It can both prevent and have a potential therapeutic effect on ulcerative colitis and colorectal cancer. The research on butyrate is very impressive. It can also prevent toxins from crossing the gut barrier and improve insulin sensitivity.

Low amounts of butyrate producing bacteria in the gut can lead to inflammatory bowel disease. One study showed a 53 percent improvement in Crohn’s disease patients. Butyrate has been shown to be effective at treating traveler’s diarrhea.

Other research is showing brain and nerve cells can also be affected by levels of butyrate. The quality of the barrier between the brain and blood has been improved, as well as anxiety and depression.

Lately I’ve been reading reports about impressive improvements with headaches, autism and Alzheimer’s, but these are early and still very tentative studies. This makes sense to me as there is such a close relationship between our gut and brain, called the gut-brain axis.

Eating is the best way to get fiber into your diet. Definitely eat more veggies. Butyrate though is mostly derived from the fibers of grains, beans, onions and bananas. Studies are showing that eating more fiber increases butyrate production. There is also a positive association between a higher intake of plant foods and increased levels of short-chain fatty acids.

Interesting enough, butter is also a source of butyrate and that is where it gets its name. There are certainly many ways to supplement fiber in your diet as well.

Larch arabinogalactan is one fiber that has well documented support for improving our immune system and can increase butyrate production.

If increasing fiber causes you gas and bloating it may be that you’ve consumed too much too fast. It may also be a sign of other imbalances in your digestive system that need to be explored, like small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) or h pylori.

Scott Porter, a functional medicine pharmacist, is the medical director at the Center for Functional Nutrition at Sandpoint Super Drug.