Fiber – Soluble fiber packs the benefits.

 Total fiber intake is essential to our health.  Authorities throw around the number “30 grams” as optimal.   It is well-established that people eating the lowest 20% of fibrous foods have statistically more cancers and cardiovascular disease and diabetes than people eating the top 20% of fibrous foods.  But what kind of fiber is so essential?

 There are 2 kinds of fiber; soluble and insoluble.

 Insoluble fiber is the stuff that is just the roughage of the food.  Insoluble fiber is in found in the husk of a whole grain and the skin and seeds of a fruit or vegetable.  It does not get absorbed and does not absorb water, thus the name insoluble.  If you ate an ounce of sand, that would equal about 32 grams of insoluble fiber, representing your optimal daily intake.  Obviously sand sounds like an absurd dietary supplement, but it is not far from the habit of eating 15 grams of bran fiber in a breakfast cereal each morning.  There is no surprise that recent studies have provided light that it is the soluble fiber that packs the benefits.

 Soluble fiber absorbs water and like insoluble fiber it does not get absorbed.  Soluble fiber is found in beans, the inside of fruits and vegetables, and the inside of grains.  Notice that white rice and white flour still has some fiber, this is the soluble fiber that remains.

 A recent study (Am J Clin Nutr. 2009;90:664-671.) soluble fiber was the fiber that provided people decreased breast cancer risk.  The researchers summarized the benefits of soluble fiber as it relates to breast cancer, “Soluble fiber has been shown to be more effective in controlling blood glucose, insulin, and insulin-like growth factors, which have been positively related to risk of breast cancer.”  They went further to find that total fat intake was not a risk factor for cancer risk.

 Throughout my nutritional training, I have been struck by the contradiction of nutritional recommendations in America.  I was told that if one ate refined grains they would suffer ill health.  But the same professor would quote the impressively low breast cancer rate in Thailand, and the low diabetes and heart disease rates in countries like Japan, France and Mediterranean countries.  If you were to travel to these countries you would see what I saw, white rice, white flour and white pasta.  Brown rice in Asia is virtually unheard of.  On a recent trip to France, I was slicing-up a pear for the hors d’oeuvre plate, when my French host said, “We peel those here”, and by “here”, she meant in this country.  The ample intake of vegetables marks the healthy component in these countries.  Throughout Asia, vegetables are eaten at lunch, usually in a nutritious soup and at dinner.  In the Mediterranean, fresh vegetables and beans are a major part of most meals in conjunction with traditional fats and meats and fish.