Short Chain Fatty Acids: The Healthy Fats You Never Heard Of

Short chain fatty acids have always fascinated me with their amazing health benefits. Even their origin is so cool, since they are produced by the fermentation of dietary fiber in the colon, by gut bacteria.

Short chain fatty acids (SCFA’s) are so called because they are fatty acids with fewer than six carbon atoms. The most common types of SCFA’s are acetate, propionate, and butyrate, all of whom are quite beneficial to our health.

There is a direct relationship between your SCFA production and your fiber intake. It is quite simple, if you want to increase your SCFA’s then you must gorge on fiber, which your bacteria will ferment and produce them.

However, like most things, there is a catch here, the fermentation of different types of fiber leads to the production of different types of SCFA’s.

Acetate: is the most abundant SCFA produced by the body, and any type of fiber can be fermented into acetate. The reason for this is quite simple, acetate is used by the body as an alternative energy source (other than glucose).

As I have always said, the body is an amazing machine, and nothing is done by accident. Acetate can be made from all types of fiber simply to ensure an alternative energy source that any cell can use.

Propionate: This SCFA is produced by specific types of fiber, notably inulin and resistant starches. It is absorbed by the liver and used in the production of glucose (gluconeogenesis) and in the metabolism of lipids (fats).

Inulin is a prebiotic fiber that is produced by plants and is found in many foods such as Jerusalem artichokes, asparagus, bananas, garlic, leeks, chicory root, and wild yams.

Prebiotic means a food source for probiotic or good intestinal bacteria. Those same bacteria ferment the prebiotic fiber producing our beloved SCFA’s.

Resistant starch is a type of carbohydrate that doesn’t get digested in your small intestine. Instead, it ferments in your large intestine and feeds “good” gut bacteria.

Here again, the body digests as much of the sugars and starches as it can in the small intestine. What is left undigested enters the colon and encounters a whole new set of intestinal bacteria, that can ferment and utilize the remaining starches! Very cool.

Butyrate: Is made from the fermentation of resistant starches. Butyrate serves as the main energy source of the cells that line the colon (colonocytes), as well as having anti-inflammatory properties. More on that later.

KINKY FACT/NERD FOOD: Every cell in the body uses glucose for their primary energy source except the enterocytes or cells lining the small intestine, which utilize the amino acid L-glutamine. The cells lining the large intestine or colon are called colonocytes and they use either medium chain or short chain fatty acids for fuel.

I have utilized this many times to treat leaky gut syndrome and other intestinal disorders, as part of a larger regimen, with great success. I will write a Substack on leaky gut in the upcoming months.

HOW DO SCFA’s WORK THEIR MAGIC IN OUR BODIES?

Butyrate works by binding to and activating receptors known as G protein coupled receptors. Butyrate activates these receptors to perform these primary functions which are:

Immune regulation especially with how regulatory T cells differentiate or evolve. This helps maintain immune tolerance and thus prevents the autoimmune diseases that are currently an epidemic (especially after the Covid vaccines). However, I digress before I get started on this, let me return to the subject at hand.

Decrease inflammation: Don’t misunderstand me, some inflammation is essential to maintain good health, and is a normal healthy response to infection, injury, or an irritation of some type. Inflammation is a problem when it persists and becomes chronic; then it needs to be reined in or you will get chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, arthritis etc., or an autoimmune disease such as Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, rheumatoid arthritis, SLE (or lupus), type 1 diabetes, Crohn’s disease, or ulcerative colitis to name a few.

One of the other ways SCFA’s such as butyrate work is by controlling the expression of our genes! They do this via their effect on the proteins that envelop our genes known as histones. By acting upon histones, you affect the underlying genes, either turning them on or off. What butyrate does is turn off the genes for the body’s inflammatory response, thus putting out the fires of inflammation in your body.

Another action by which butyrate controls inflammation is via its effect upon the nuclear factor kappa B pathway. This pathway produces the cytokines which are involved in inflammation, such as tumor necrosis factor alpha, and inerleukin1 beta.

What these cytokines do is act like light beacons, after they connect to a site of injury of some type, they send out a signal like a bright light attracting immune cells like moths to a fire.

They especially attract macrophages (large eaters in Greek), for they eat up all the debris and dead cells, cleaning up an area. Macrophages are like giant octopus’ like cells that have long tentacles and draw in bacteria, viruses, fungi, damaged cells, pus, and debris, like vacuum cleaners cleaning up a site of inflammation.

Butyrate also helps the cells lining the small intestine (enterocytes) and the large intestine (colonocytes) produce energy for all their cellular needs, this also helps those cells maintain the barrier function of the intestine, hence preventing Leaky Gut Syndrome.

Butyrate helps to maintain a healthy Gut lining/barrier with its tight junctions. Tight junctions are the connections between the single layer of cells lining the gut helping them fit together. The tight junctions have a layer of protein like glue holding the two enterocytes together.

This acts to prevent bacteria, toxins, and undigested food from entering the portal blood (blood coming from the intestines) and triggering all the horrors of Leaky Gut Syndrome. It also helps with inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

Butyrate helps promote the production of those glue-like proteins which hold together the tight junctions of the intestinal cells.

Butyrate also helps to produce the mucus layer which lies on top of the intestinal cells, which helps stools pass by lubricating it as well as making a fine home for good intestinal probiotic bacterial species.

NOTE: Currently, we have no way to measure SCFA’s such as butyrate.

Propionate works to regulate the production of glucose and fatty acids in the liver. That in turn helps prevents the all-too-common metabolic disorders Americans suffer with such as diabetes and obesity.

Acetate helps to regulate your appetite, curb food cravings, reduce food intake, these all work to help with obesity.

Overall, the SCFA’s are all wonderful for our health, albeit in different ways, with butyrate overall having the most health benefits. Butyrate acts more like a signaling molecule that helps regulate the immune system, inflammation throughout the body, and maintains overall health.

Finally, but most importantly, butyrate also helps reduce rates of colorectal cancer. When analysis of the gut bacteria in patients with colorectal cancer, they are severely lacking in butyrate producing bacterial species.

BUTYRATE AND OBESITY

Butyrate has many metabolic benefits. It has the odd effect of increasing the energy production of many of our organs. For example, after being absorbed in the gut, butyrate increases the energy output of our muscles, liver, and even our fat deposits (of both brown and white fat), which increases our metabolism of foods and leads to weight loss.

Butyrate works its magic on our fat deposits by increasing their oxidation or breakdown, as well as decreasing fat accumulation in the body. In addition to which it has an effect on the brain, decreasing your appetite as well as food cravings. This too naturally helps with weight control.

In muscle, butyrate increases the activity of the mitochondria, our cells powerhouses, which in turn increases ATP production or energy production.

Butyrate helps obesity by improving glucose handling by the body, thus lowering insulin levels and improving insulin resistance, also lowering triglyceride levels in the blood. All of this contributes to weight loss and prevention of prediabetes and ultimately diabetes.

HOW YOUR GUT FUNCTIONS AS AN IMMUNE ORGAN

Incredibly, over 70% of your immune cells reside in your GI tract, in tissue know as GALT or gut associated lymphoid tissue.

The way GALT works is so fascinating. What it does is it takes samples of the proteins that are inside the intestine and actually is able to differentiate between good probiotic bacteria and food proteins from microorganisms that are pathogenic (disease causing).

When it detects those, it presents the antigens (foreign proteins) to the body, so it can make antibodies to help eradicate any of these infectious organisms. GALT is able to do this via what are known as regulatory T cells.

Butyrate modulates those regulatory T cells preventing them from getting themselves too excited, hence controlling the immune response, helping prevent chronic inflammation and their diseases, as well as autoimmune diseases that are caused by the body attacking itself because it does not recognize itself.

As is readily evident from the description of GALT activity, that enhancement of it, has many benefits, hence the beauty of butyrate, SO ELEGANTLY SIMPLE, A FAT THAT HEALS. AMAZINGLY, THE BODY PRODUCES A HEALTH ENHANCING SCFA FROM PREVIOUSLY UNUSABLE FIBER BY USING GUT PROBIOTIC BACTERIA. A VERY INGENIOUS SYSTEM.

HOW THE MEDICAL UNDERGROUND USES SCFA’S

FOLLOW THE NATURAL RHYTHMS OF THE EARTH
There are different ways I approach healing the gut, or to treat leaky gut and all its horrible manifestations of inflammation, allergies, skin conditions, and autoimmune diseases.

A Functional Medicine analysis quickly demonstrates that man evolved in a tropical environment, and his diet was loaded with plants, fruits, and vegetables of all kinds, supplemented by meat and fish when available.

Hence, our health is predicated upon a diet that our bodies evolved to recognize, returning to that type of diet and lifestyle produces the greatest benefits in the shortest time.

Mimicking nature is part of the Functional Medicine approach, that includes making your diurnal (daily) life rhythms match as closely as possible to the Earth’s. That involves awakening at dawn, spending a significant amount of your time outside in the bright sunlight that helps the biological clocks that all our organs follow.

It also involves sleeping in complete silence and more importantly complete darkness. This allows your pineal gland in your brain to produce the health enhancing melatonin, which is suppressed during the day by sunlight, and surges when it should at night, helping your body rest and repair itself.

Adapting that lifestyle of following the sunrise and sunset and spending time outside is difficult for any people, but if you do it for a short time, you will be amazed at how good you feel.

I did it for an entire summer in Greece with my friend Steve Cowan. We had no tents just two shabby sleeping bags, we camped outside all summer touring the Greek islands. We had no lights, and no shelter, we went to sleep when it got dark and arose to the glaring Greek sun, frying us alive in our sleeping bags.

We had very little money, we were as poor as you could get and still travel between islands, so we ate very lightly and spent all our time outside in the sun, and swimming in the beautiful Mediterranean Sea.

Our bodies were nourished by Greek yogurt and lean Mediterranean food. We had very high vitamin D levels from the sun and ate a lot of fiber with all those vegetables and fresh fruit we ate. After a few months of this we were tanned Greek gods, muscular, fit, and in robustly good health. A good respite from our grueling medical school schedule in Italy.

FIRST OPTIMIZE YOUR INTESTINAL FLORA OF GOOD PROBIOTIC BACTERIA

The healthiest way to increase your SCFA’s levels is by optimizing your intestinal flora (your good probiotic bacteria) and giving it all the prebiotic food that it lives on, essentially resistant starches and fiber that they can in turn ferment into SCFA’s.

This method will produce all the butyrate and other SCFA’s that you need if done right. Doing it right encompasses eating a variety of organic fruits and vegetables, taking a probiotic supplement. My favorite and strongest in the world is VSL #3. VSL #3 is a potent mix of a variety of excellent probiotic species, with the highest CFU (colony forming units) count on the market. As I was about to copy a photo of the VSL #3 bottle, I discovered an even more potent form from the makers of VSL#3 wittingly named VSL #4.

Using a strong probiotic will go a long way to rebuilding your gut probiotic population and heal what many Americans suffer from known as intestinal dysbiosis resulting in SIBO or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. This means the bad pathogenic or disease-causing bacteria have overgrown, crowding out the good probiotic bacteria. One sign of this is a very foul-smelling stool.

There are two main types of SIBO, with a different array of symptoms. See the excellent chart below:

Once I optimize a patient’s microbiome of good probiotic bacteria, then we have to immediately feed those bacteria with prebiotics, which are the food they live on. Keep in mind, probiotics are alive and like all living organisms they need to be fed and nourished, this is where the high fiber intake diet comes into play.

NOW BRING ON THE PREBIOTIC FIBER TO FEED THOSE HORDES OF GOOD PROBIOTIC BACTERIA

The actual bacteria that are responsible for the production of butyrate are known as the Sentinels of the Gut, due to all the gut enhancing actions of the butyrate they produce. The primary bacteria responsible for butyrate production belong to the Clostridium cluster of the phylum Firmicutes, such as Faecalibacterium, Roseburia, Eubacterium, Anaerostipes, Coprococcus, Subdoligranulum, and Anaerobutyricum.

Most of these are anaerobic bacteria that can produce butyrate in the absence of oxygen, thus ensuring almost any prevailing condition in the gut will still produce the all-important butyrate the body so desperately needs. They in turn produce an oxygen depleted or anaerobic environment in the gut that is deadly for many pf the disease-causing bacteria such as Salmonella and E.Coli, both of which cause many gastrointestinal infections.

This helps treat the SIBO and the dysbiosis (overgrowth of bad bacteria) in the colon and helps establish healthy intestinal probiotic colonies.

To increase butyrate production in your gut, consider incorporating the following types of prebiotic fiber:

1. Chicory Root: A good source of inulin that stimulates the growth of butyrate-producing bacteria.

2. Jerusalem Artichoke: Contains inulin that selectively nourishes butyrate-producing bacteria.

KINKY FACT/NERD FOOT: The Jerusalem Artichoke is not an artichoke despite the name which was derived from Italian immigrants who described this native American sunflower in Italian as Gira Sole, meaning following the sun in Italian or sunflower. Sunflowers are so named because they continually face the sun and turn all day to maximize their sun exposure. When the Americans heard this, they mistook it for Jerusalem and hence the name that sticks to this day.

By the way, they are very easy to grow and will produce many delicious tubers that can be eaten like potatoes. However, they have the nickname “Farty Chokes” because they cause so much flatulence (farting). So eat them at your own risk and keep the windows open!

They are a great survival food for Preppers to plant because they proliferate quickly and more importantly are not recognized as a food source by starving marauders. However, once again I digress.

1. Oats: Excellent source of beta-glucan that promotes butyrate production.

2. Barley: Another fiber-rich option that feeds good gut bacteria.

3. A Mediterranean diet with diverse fruits, vegetables, nuts, meat, and fish, as well as abundant fermented foods.

NOTE: If you are not already on a high fiber diet then you should do so slowly, always drinking a lot of water with it. Fiber without enough water will actually constipate you.

Fiber in your gut acts like a sponge drawing in fluid. If there is not enough fluid, it will dry out and become a thick plug. Trust me, you don’t want this to happen. It will result in bloating, constipation, and when you do have a bowel movement, it will be hard and dry and potentially painful to pass.

Here are some good foods that act as prebiotics full of soluble fiber that butyrate producing bacteria love to gorge on:

HOW YOUR LIFESTYLE AFFECTS YOUR BUTYRATE PRODUCTION FIBER INTAKE

Besides eating a diet high in organic foods such as whole grains, fruit, vegetables, and beans there are other ways you can enhance your butyrate production.

Keep this in mind, FIBER SUPPLEMENTS ARE NOT THE SAME AS EATING WHOLE UNPROCESSED FOODS, which are loaded with vitamins, minerals, trace elements, and phytonutrients (plant derived nutrients) and as such are better for you than taking fiber supplements. However, some of us are just not going to eat all those healthy foods and for them a fiber supplement is fine.

AVOID SEED OILS
Avoid seed oils, which contain large amounts of PUFA’s or polyunsaturated fatty acids. (Look back two weeks and see the article I wrote recently on the Horror of Seed Oils). PUFA’s are rich in linoleic acid, which creates an environment within the intestine that is harmful for the good probiotic bacteria that we need to produce SCFA’s such as butyrate. Hence, you should avoid these seed oils such as Canola oil or rapeseed oil, corn oil, cottonseed, soy, safflower, sunflower, grapeseed and rice bran oils.

Linoleic acid is an omega-6 fatty acid and as I have mentioned in past articles it is essential, meaning you have to get it in your diet, your body cannot make it. However, that being said, it depends on the ratio of omega-6 fatty acids to omega-3 fatty acids, you want it low like 2:1 ratio. Currently, most Americans have diets that are heavily laced with omega-6 fatty acids like linoleic acid producing a very unhealthy 20:1 ratio.

In order to maximize your butyrate production, you have to drastically limit your intake of seed oils of all types.

SLEEP, MEDITATION AND STRESS
As I have written about many times in the past, sleep is an amazing tool that you should utilize to optimize your health. Sleep positively affects our health in so many ways, lowering your stress levels, allowing your body the chance to rest and repair itself, giving your brain a chance to process the avalanche of incoming information and store it in your memory.

Meditation also has many benefits similar to sleep, if done correctly. Once again in absolute silence and darkness is the best environment for meditation.

You should try to get a minimum of seven hours of uninterrupted sleep a night, without any light in the room, no electronic devices charging in your bedroom, nothing electronic, preferably in complete silence. Darkness is the most important element due to the need for darkness for proper production of the all-important melatonin.

Immersing yourself in a good book in a completely silent room will also have its benefits, as will immersing yourself in some hobby that you truly love.

EXERCISE
We have been told our entire lives of the wonderful benefits of exercise, yet the vast majority of us ignore that advice completely or do very little of it.

How many of us have started with good intentions and have either joined a gym, or bought exercise equipment that eventually gets covered in the basement with hanging clothes.

Exercise involves self-discipline, something most of us are sorely lacking. However, once you get into a habit of exercising you will begin to feel the benefits almost immediately, JUST STICK WITH IT.

It doesn’t have to involve joining a gym or buying expensive equipment. Start slowly with long walks, then slowly increase the distance and the speed. Do some jumping jacks, knee bends, and my personal favorite pushups.

Pushups only take a few minutes and produce an entire host of benefits. The key is to have a pushup regimen that you can stick to. For example, I do my one hundred pushups every morning but Sundays. That works well for me, giving me one day off. Even with a day you are not feeling well factored in, this still results in me doing on average 31,000 pushups a year! In fact, I feel better on days I do them and I am at the point where I look forward to them immediately after my morning prayers.

Daily exercise is associated with a much more diverse microbial community in your gut, along with the proper fiber for food, will nourish a very healthy butyrate producing colon.

One other benefit of exercise for your gut health is that it decreases your intestinal transit time. The intestinal transit time is the time it takes for food to go from your mouth to your anus. You want that to be relatively fast to avoid constipation as well as limit the time any noxious materials will have in contact with your intestinal lining.

On the other hand, you don’t want it to be too fast since this will lead to malabsorption and diarrhea resulting in water and electrolyte losses, especially potassium. A healthy intestinal transit time is between 12 and 18 hours. Exercise will keep it optimized.

BUTYRATE SUPPLEMENTS
Once again, through the absolute wonders of capitalism, it fulfills anything a consumer needs and then some. In this case, the marketplace steps up and produces butyrate supplements. As with everything these days go on to Amazon and you can see several different types. Be careful, many are just products that do not contain any butyrate but rather just contain nutrients that support good gut health and consequently increase SCFA production.

This is not the ideal way to raise your SCFA levels, using the methods I outlined above is the preferred method. However, supplementing is expensive but for some patients, especially those with intestinal diseases such as Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis will greatly benefit from additional butyrate.

There are several brands on Amazon which look good, above is one, here is another that I like.

So, there you have it, another masterpiece of entertainment and education. I truly hoped you enjoyed this week’s exciting episode of the Medical Underground on SCFA’s.

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Until the next exciting edition of the Medical Underground, May God Bless You and Your Family and The United States of America. And for those of you who, like me, are believers in Jesus Christ, always remember, for us Miracle Shall Follow Miracle and Wonders Shall Never Cease!

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