Öйú365betÖÐÎĹÙÍø

Sodium butyrate—more properly sodium butanoate—is a salt of butyric (butanoic) acid. If it comes into contact with even a trace of moisture, it emits a faint odor of its foul-smelling conjugate acid.

The butyrate ion, along with the analogous propionate ion, is purported to enhance gut health in humans and many other animal species. But you don’t have to take it as a supplement. Bacteria in the gut produce butyrate from dietary fiber, especially the fiber from legumes and nuts.

Two recent reports illustrate the benefits of butyrate. Yanfen Bai and Thomas J. Mansell* at Iowa State University (Ames) wrote, “The short-chain fatty acid [anion] butyrate plays critical roles in human gut health, affecting immunomodulation, cell differentiation, and apoptosis, while also serving as the preferred carbon source for colon cells.� To assist in studies of butyrate for therapeutic applications, the researchers developed that responds to intracellular concentrations.

In another account, Sanne Verhoog at the University of Bern (Switzerland) and collaborators there and at other institutions in Switzerland, Turkey, Germany, and the United States reviewed 29 studies about how dietary factors influence the populations of two beneficial gut bacteria, Akkermansia muciniphila (11 studies) and Faecalibacterium prausnitzii (25 studies). The studies involved a total of 1444 participants. Supplementation with several substances, including sodium butyrate, , whereas diets low in fermentable saccharides that produce butyrate lowered the quantity of the bacterium. (Butyrate was not considered in the case of F. prausnitzii.)