This is a guest post by Melissa Marek, RD LD

Fiber is an extremely important part of your daily diet. Its best known benefit is its ability to help keep our bowels moving. Eating enough fiber will help prevent constipation. The added benefit is that it also plays a role in protecting against diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer. If that isn’t enough reason to get a daily dose of fiber, it also helps with weight management by helping to keep you fuller longer.

In order to make sure you are getting enough fiber, it helps to understand where it comes from and where you can find it. Fiber comes mainly from plant cell walls, the parts that cannot be digested by the enzymes of the GI tract. For that reason, fiber can be found in plant foods such as fruits, vegetables, and grains.

To best benefit from fiber, the recommended daily amount is 21-25 grams per day for women and 30-38 grams per day for men. This is not a difficult goal to meet, but remember that when adding fiber to your diet, you will need to increase your fiber intake slowly and more importantly, increase your fluids. If you don’t drink enough fluids you may suffer from constipation, the very thing that fiber helps alleviate.

To better comprehend the benefits of fiber and how to best meet daily requirements, it helps to understand that there are different types of fiber. They come from different sources and, accordingly, help with different things.

SOLUBLE FIBER may help lower blood cholesterol, especially LDL (bad) cholesterol. It also helps control blood sugar in people with diabetes. You can get soluble fiber from oats, oat bran, dried beans and peas, nuts, barley, flax seed, oranges, apples, carrots, and psyllium husk.

INSOLUBLE FIBER moves bulk through the intestines, which helps prevent constipation. It also controls and balances the pH in your intestines. Insoluble fiber can be found in fruit skins, root vegetable skins, dark green leafy vegetables, whole wheat products, corn bran, seeds and nuts.

Soluble fiber, as it name alludes, becomes a jelly-like mass when mixed with water and ferments in the intestinal tract, but insoluble fiber just absorbs the water and bulks up stool.

The term DIETARY FIBER, which appears on nutrition facts labels is merely a sum of the soluble and insoluble fiber content in a product, per serving.

A common source of fiber is whole grain. Whole grain refers to the entire grain seed (bran, germ, & endosperm).  Whole grain foods are an important source of not only fiber, but also of vitamins, minerals and other health-promoting compounds that you won’t find in a refined grain.

HOW MUCH SHOULD I BE EATING?

According to the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 3 or more ounce-equivalents of whole grain products per day is ideal. You can meet this requirement by adding barley, buckwheat, bulgur, corn, millet, rice, rye, oats, sorghum, wheat and wild rice to your daily diet.

What does a one-ounce equivalent of whole grains look like?

• 1 slice 100% whole grain bread
• 1/2 of a 100% whole grain English muffin or bagel
• ½ cup hot cooked oatmeal (Rolled oats or quick oats)
• 2 cups popped popcorn
• 1 ounce baked tortilla chips (About 15 chips)
• 1/3 cup cooked whole wheat pasta
• 1/3 cup cooked brown rice, bulgur, sorghum, or barley

TIPS TO INCREASE YOUR FIBER INTAKE:

• Sprinkle flax meal, wheat germ,  or nuts/seeds onto your cereal, cottage cheese, yogurt, or even frozen yogurt
• Add fresh or dried fruits to your cereal or yogurt
• Substitute whole wheat flour for at least 1/3 of the all purpose flour in baked goods
• Add frozen vegetables to soups or casseroles
• Add beans into a salad, soup, or stew
• Cut prunes into pieces and mix them into yogurt, cereal, or pancake mix

What to do at the supermarket:

Packaging for fiber rich foods now often contain a label promoting its fiber content. These labels make finding fiber-rich foods easy so shoppers don’t have to go through the hassle of checking out the food label or searching for the fiber content. But what do these regulated fiber claims mean exactly?

• 100% Whole Grain or 100% Whole Wheat: The product doesn’t have any refined white flour
• Good source of fiber:  There are at least 3g per serving
• Excellent source of fiber:  There are at least 5g per serving
• When reading the ingredient statement, a whole grain should be listed FIRST!

Here’s a handy list of fiber rich products:

• Oats
• Oat bran
• Grains (Barley, bulgur, Kasha, Amaranth, Quinoa, Couscous)
• Polenta
• Brown rice
• Whole wheat breads and pastas
• Fresh fruits (Oranges, pears, dried figs, apples, berries, raisins)
  —> Choose whole fruits (fresh, frozen, or dried) over juices, which have most of the fiber removed
• Fresh vegetables (Winter squash, peas, eggplant, beets, cabbage, broccoli, artichoke hearts, corn)
• Potatoes & sweet potatoes
• Dried beans
• Nuts

Melissa Marek is a graduate of Texas A&M University with degrees in both Nutritional Sciences and Food Science & Technology.  She has experience with recipe analysis for magazines and restaurants as well as with nutrition facts labeling for large corporations and private label companies. She is a registered dietitian at Axxya Systems, makers of Diet Analysis and Food Labeling software products. Contact her at mmarek [at] axxya [dot] com.

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Sara Lee Corporation announced late last week that it plans a sodium reduction in many of its products over the course of the next five years. The reduction is in “key categories” of fresh bread, hot dogs, lunchmeat, breakfast foods and cooked sausage. Brands included in the initiative are  Jimmy Dean, Ball Park, Hillshire Farm, and Sara Lee.

What you need to know:

This is good news. Sort of.

It would have been better if the reduction would become effective immediately and not planned for such a long term. Right now the press release is more about marketing than nutrition. Sara Lee would gain much more credibility if it announced the reductions as they were being executed, not in advance.

We Americans are consuming way too much salt in our diet.While the daily maximum is 2300 mg of sodium (5 grams of salt, the equivalent of a teaspoon) the average consumption is over 3,500 mg. Excess salt intake results in high blood pressure, hypertension and additional health risks.

over 70% of the salt we consume comes from processed foods. In many cases, the sodium comes in surprising places. Bread products, Cereals, and even sweet snacks contain high levels of salt.

Take Sara Lee’s Plain Bagel. It contains 590 mg of sodium – more than 25% of the recommended daily maximum. And this is before the lox, eggs, or cheeses!

What to do at the supermarket:

We could all do with less sodium. Look at products’ nutrition facts panel where sodium content is mandated both in milligrams and percent of daily value. Grains will always contain some levels of salt but choose those with lower numbers. Many manufacturers are reformulating their products to reduce sodium levels, so it makes sense to compare similar products and choose the one with the lowest count.

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flickr photo: Edgar Zuniga Jr.

1. A bagel starts its  life as a ring shaped doughy ball, roughly hand-sized. It is boiled for a short time in water, and only then  baked.

2. A trademark of bagels is a dense, chewy, doughy interior with a browned exterior.

3. Bagels are often topped with seeds baked on the outer crust, with the traditional ones being poppy or sesame seeds. Some also may have salt sprinkled on their surface, and there are also a number of different dough types such as whole-grain or rye.

4. The bagel was invented in Poland sometime in the 17th century. In the late 19th century, the bagel immigrated to the US along with Eastern European Jews, and New York became the bagel capital of the world.

5. The hole in the middle of the bagel was a practical solution to the need of European street vendors to loop bagels on a pole or string.

6. The US bagel market today is a $600 million industry, or about 5% of the $13 billion bread industry. Leading brand are Thomas’ (40% market share), Sara-Lee (15%), Lenders, and private label store brands.

7. The top three bagel variations are plain, everything (lots of seed variations) , and cinnamon raisin.

8. Unfortunately, bagels are not a very nutritious bread form. Made with processed wheat and containing 25% of the recommended daily sodium intake, a single bagel holds 290 calories.

9. As a result, whole wheat bagels have become very popular in the last few years. So have mini-bagels and 100 calorie bagels. Fortification with various vitamins and minerals is also trendy as of late.

10. Despite the disappointing nutritional attributes of the bagel, we find it irresistible on Sunday mornings, when, freshly baked and spread with cream cheese and lox, every bite is heaven.

What to do at the supermarket:

If buying frozen bagels, check the nutrition panel for the serving size and make sure the data refers to a whole bagel and not a slice (which is half a bagel). Choose the smaller bagels (around 3-4 oz, not 5oz). Whole wheat bagels are a better option because of the added fiber, but calorically they are similar to the processed flour bagels.

If buying fresh, ask the bakery for nutrition information before committing yourself to a dozen.

Instead of cream cheese, try avocado, tuna, or just eat plain, freshly baked.

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