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.

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription

Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/fooducate

New! Choose a better breakfast with CerealScan™ by Fooducate (It’s Free)

1. If you live in the US, there’s a good chance you know someone diabetic. A full 24 million of the adults aged 20 (8% of the population) are diabetic, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

2. Once you become a diabetic, your life revolves around careful meal planning, blood sugar measurements, and insulin injections several times a day.

3. Sadly, 1.6 million new cases of diabetes are added to the count each year, according to the American Diabetes Association (ADA).

4. That’s because 57 million people have prediabetes, where blood sugar levels are high, but not as high as in diabetes. In many cases, a prediabetic still has a chance to turnaround and avoid the full blown disease. For many people, this requires a substantial change in lifestyle. It includes daily physical activity and a more balanced healthy diet, leading to a reduction in body weight.

5. Diabetes is the #7 cause of death in the United States.

6. The total cost of diabetes per year in the US is $174 Billion. Diabetes is costly for individuals, who have to spend up to 10% of their income for treatment.

7. Diabetes is a world wide epidemic. In 1985 only 30 million people around the globe suffered, but a decade later that number ballooned to 135 million. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that by 2030 over 360 million people will be afflicted with diabetes.

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription

Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/fooducate

Help us test our new food comparison tool: alpha.fooducate.com

Diabetics, like air force pilots when flying, need to be slightly paranoid. Always on the lookout for potential danger. But whereas a flight ends after several hours in the skies, a diabetic must be in constant awareness of blood sugar levels.

An article in the New York Times touts vinegar, of all foods, as a potential aid in the battle for low blood sugar. Adding vinegar to your dinner

… seems to help slow the absorption of sugar from a meal into the bloodstream, apparently because vinegar helps block digestive enzymes that convert carbohydrates into sugar. read more…

What you need to know:

The word “vinegar” derives from the Old French vin aigre, which literally means sour wine. It is made by fermentation of wine/beer/cider/fruit juice/other and creates a highly acidic liquid that has been used in kitchens across the globe for ages.  The acetic acid in vinegar is what gives vinegar its pungent smell and strong acidic flavor.

A study in Italy found that healthy people who ate a meal with an addition of said acetic acid versus a control group that did not, had a lower level of glycemic response. The 4 teaspoons of vinegar was added as a salad dressing together with olive oil.

Diabetics can try for themselves to see if vinegar helps, according to Sue McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the American Diabetic Association.

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription

Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/fooducate

Help us test our new food comparison tool: alpha.fooducate.com

The LA Times runs an excellent article about low glycemic foods and diets:

Add one more label to the list consumers are increasingly being asked to parse: This one declares food items as “low glycemic,” and refers to a food’s effects on blood sugar levels. Low-glycemic diets have become popular in England and Australia, based on studies that suggest they could help manage diabetes and prevent heart disease and obesity, and they’re now making headway here in the U.S.

Read full article…

What you need to know:

The diet, based on stabilizing blood sugar levels, may help diabetics but its effect on weight loss is harder to determine.