Why can’t you be healthy with super low body fat %, let’s say 2%? If the body still gets energy through metabolism, I don’t see how there’s a problem.
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There are vitamins which can only be absorbed by fat, so if you don’t have enough fat, you don’t absorb enough of those vitamins. In addition there’s a correlation between low body fat and increased heart disease and lowered immune response. I don’t know enough about it to explain why so I only called it a correlation but for all I know the experts could explain a direct causation.
Basically:
Explains way better than off the top of my head:
“A But there comes a point when shedding fat isn’t healthy. According to Pennsylvania State University, the average guy’s body fat is 15-20, 3% of which is “essential,” meaning you’d die without it.
“A body-fat percentage below 5% is regarded as a warning sign of poor health, even in elite athletes,” says Georgie Fear, R.D., author of Lean Habits for Lifelong Weight Loss. “Male bodybuilders typically go below 5% for competition, but don’t stay there in the off-season.” That’s because body fat is integral to keeping your entire body—including your cardiovascular, endocrine, reproductive, skeletal, and central nervous systems—in check. Without enough body fat, they all go haywire.”
In the most simple terms, when you get to 2% you are past the levels of fat that your body uses for extra energy and you have actually lost functional fat. Functional fat is fat that is necessary for your body’s structure and function and is not primarily an energy reserve. For instance, the fat under the skin has an essential role in protecting the underlying tissue.
Your body fat doesn’t only serve as a store of energy. Your body fat also produces and regulates hormones.
This is why severely obese men can have lowered testosterone and lowered sperm counts. This is why the bare minimum fat to be healthy is higher than women for men.
Storing energy is indeed one important function of adipose tissue, but not the only.
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