This past year I heard about a study that showed saturated fat helps in calcium absorption. I was trying to explain to a friend just now why low-carbing makes more sense nutritionally than a low-fat diet, and wanted to bring up that point. I couldn’t find anything about saturated fat specifically right off the bat (I don’t want to sit here all day, I’ve sat here too long already), but I did find this:
Factors associated with calcium absorption efficiency in pre- and perimenopausal women
I love articles like this. They’re from peer-reviewed journals, so nobody’s going to call me a wacko for linking to them. Not to say that everything coming out of a peer-reviewed journal is going to be worth the pixels it’s taking up on the internets, but a lot of it is.
Worth repeating:
Interestingly, at the time of the calcium absorption measurement, the women who had been randomly assigned to the intervention group had significantly lower mean fractional calcium absorption values than did the women who were assigned to the assessment-only control group (0.34 compared with 0.36, P < 0.001). This was the direction of difference we expected, because we found lower dietary fat intakes to be significantly associated with lower calcium absorption values, and the women in the intervention group had significantly lower dietary fat intakes than did the women in the assessment-only control group at the time of the calcium absorption measurement.
More and more, low-carb advocates question the conventional wisdom about dietary fiber intake. This is yet another data point in support of that:
We speculate that a potential link between a low-fat, high-fiber diet and poor calcium absorption is related to intestinal transit time. We showed previously that a faster mouth-to-cecum transit time is associated with poorer efficiency of calcium absorption, suggesting that gut motility has a large effect in healthy subjects (6). Fat intake may alter gut motility and affect absorption by slowing transit time and increasing the duration of contact with the absorptive surface (21). Increased fiber intakes may inhibit calcium absorption by increasing the bulk of intestinal contents, speeding the transit time of the stool, and in theory allowing less time for absorption to occur (21). Future studies are necessary to enable us to better understand the physiologic mechanisms for the interaction between dietary fat, dietary fiber, calcium intake, and calcium absorption in the gut.
They don’t think the type of fat in the diet really matters, but this study was from ten years ago and I think new data have arisen since then. I just need to take the time later and dig it up.
If calories were all that counted in a person’s diet (i.e., way of eating), no one would ever suffer from a nutritional deficiency disease. This is just as important as beriberi or scurvy, it just doesn’t happen as fast or as spectacularly. But just because something’s not flashy or fast doesn’t make it any less devastating when it finally kicks in. So yes, watch what you eat, and don’t just eat for energy intake.
