Why Recent Nutrition Studies are Showing Negative Effects of Consuming Dietary Fiber
Let’s Look at the Context Behind the Headlines
Dietary fiber is something that most nutrition professionals would recommend as being important for our gut health and that most of us are not consuming enough of. Fiber is essentially all the “non-digestible” carbohydrates that we obtain from food, such as from fruit peels and grain hulls. Dietary fiber is known to benefit human health by adding bulk to stools, which can improve the regularity and consistency of our bowel movements and feed our gut bacteria. However, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. To really understand what happens to fiber after we consume it and how it affects us, we must delve deeper into the physiology of how the fiber we consume is transported through our GI tract and how it interacts with our physiology and gut bacteria.
Fiber can be divided into two main categories: soluble and insoluble fiber. Insoluble fiber is particularly interesting to nutrition scientists because after being consumed, it travels to our colons where it can be fermented by our gut bacteria. This is important for two reasons:
A) Fiber consumed by microbes helps them grow and proliferate. As a “thanks” for eating something beneficial for them, these same microbes can help keep…
