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)

This is a guest post by Lisa Cain, PhD, a.k.a Snack-Girl.

We all love to snack. And we love convenience too. Unfortunately that comes with a price – unhealthy additives meant to preserve packaged pastry for months, artificial and cheap ingredients, and unreasonable amounts of sugar, sodium and fat.

I write about about healthy snacks made with real food.  Here are 5 of my junk food “makeovers”.  The idea is to eat something nutritious and delicious without breaking your wallet. You will have to invest a few minutes in the kitchen though…

1. Great tasting banana bread. Low in sugar and butter free. The key is that the bananas are sweet so you don’t have to add a lot of sugar to make it taste really great, and you use buttermilk which is a great low calorie substitute for butter.

2. Quick and healthy pizza. Here is a really simple suggestion to satisfy a pizza craving and it is an excellent snack size serving.

3. Homemade energy bars (less calories and no packaging). For the price of a bag of flour, oats, and raisins, you can have 24 bars for about the cost of 2 packaged energy bars. Is this savings worth your time? If you make $100 an hour, probably not, but the rest of us could use the money.

4. Homemade microwave popcorn – You CAN make popcorn in the microwave without the prepackaged products from the supermarket. All you need is popcorn, lunch bags, tape, and some flavorings.

5. Yogurt dip with much less fat – a yogurt and dill dip that is truly tasty and has very little calories. The secret is a substitute of the fat filled sour cream that goes into regular dip – Greek Yogurt. It has a thicker consistency than regular yogurt which makes it feel and taste more luxurious.

Lisa Cain, Ph.D., is an avid snacker, foodie, published author, and mother of 2. An evolutionary biologist by training, she has become obsessed with how food contributes to our overall health. Check out snack girl for other healthy snack ideas.

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

Popcorn, the quintessential snack of the movies, is a long standing tradition.

The Good: it’s a healthy, low calories snack – very filling due to its fiber content, and less than 100 calories per 3 cups of air popped popcorn.

The Bad: Problems start when pop corn is bathed in oils and butters and serving sizes balloon to double, triple, and higher of the the 3 cup portion size.

The VERY BAD: Popcorn served in movie theaters, in conjunction with soda pop. The Center for Science in the Public Interest just published a report on this matter, and some of the finding were outrageous – Regal theaters largest size popcorn and soda are the caloric equivalent of three McDonald’s Quarter Pounders PLUS 12 pats of butter. The 1600 calories are almost a whole day’s worth, while the 60 grams of saturated fat are supposed to get you by a long weekend (that’s 3 days!). It’s got 20 cups of popcorn, or almost 7 times the recommended portion size.

“Regal and AMC are our nominees for Best Supporting Actor in the Obesity Epidemic,” said CSPI senior nutritionist Jayne Hurley

Oh well, at least that combo is quite expensive, $12.00. That should give some people pause, if not the nutritional atrocity.

Compare to the innocent serving sizes of the 1950’s drive-ins in the clip above.

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

Frito-Lay, a subsidiary of PepsiCo has figured out just the thing women need more of.

Not fruit, not exercise, not water.

You guessed it – snacks:

Last month the US firm launched its first snack – Smartfood Popcorn Clusters – targeted specifically at women.

Following their premise that the majority of women snack more than men, [PepsiCo] said at the time of the roll out that it seeks to cash in on an estimated $650m in additional sales from women consumers.

John Compton, CEO of PepsiCo Americas Foods, presented the ’smartfood popcorn clusters’ in the context of PepsiCo’s move to ‘Introduce new products for her’.

Listed by PepsiCo in the general criteria for ‘new products for her’ are: make it convenient/portable, ‘help me control my portions’, ‘take away the guilt’, ‘take out the negatives’, make it nutritious, and make it taste ‘great’.

Read more…

What you need to know:

We took a look at the nutrition label of the Cranberry Almond SmartFood Popcorn Clusters to see how smart this snack is.

First, the ingredient list: Cranberries are listed as the #10 ingredient in the list, and almonds are #3, although their placement on the packaging is much more prominent. The #1 ingredient is Brown Rice Syrup – a type of sugar. Popcorn is only the 4th ingredient, just ahead of – sugar! Wasn’t the rice syrup enough?

The nutrition panel is actually OK. Each serving is only 120 calories, and packs 5 grams of fiber through the addition of chicory root to the fiber in popcorn. The 10 grams of sugar are equivalent to 2 teaspoons of sugar, and contribute only 40 calories. And, squarely aiming at women, this product has 20% of the daily value for calcium.

All in all, this snack seems reasonable compared to other greasier, sweeter, fattening alternatives that PepsiCo manufactures.

What to do at the supermarket:

If you have tried out this new snack, we’d love to hear your take on it. Is such a small serving filling enough? How does it taste? Would kids and men like it too?

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

flickr photo: sglickman

Great article in USA Today, with some hope and advice on reducing sodium in our diet:

Salt is being siphoned from soups, banished from breads, channeled out of chips, even bumped from baby foods.

Big foodmakers, from Campbell to ConAgra, have companywide plans to cut salt. Lower sodium is “our top strategic priority,” says CEO Douglas Conant of Campbell, which has cut sodium in everything from soups to Prego sauces to V8 juices.

Read the article…

What you need to know:

Too much salt raises blood pressure. Americans are consuming nearly twice as much daily than the recommended amount. Estimates are that 150,000 deaths a year are the result. For consumers, it’s hard to reduce salt intake because most of the salt in our diet comes from packaged foods and fast food meals. The good news is that manufacturers are introducing more low-sodium alternatives than ever.

What to do at the supermarket:

Look for lower sodium options in the bread aisle, canned soups, chips and popcorn, and babyfood. If you see a product with more than 600mg (25% DV) per serving, that’s a high amount of sodium. Steer away.

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription