Dietary Fiber

Eating foods high in dietary fiber can make you a "regular guy." These foods help insure that your colon isn't the stopping place for the other food you ate during the day and helps to escort the waste out of your system in a "non-violent" orderly fashion. Insoluble fiber adds bulk by binding water and making your stool softer so the amount of straining you do in the privacy of your bathroom is limited.

Keeping you regular can help in a number of ways. Besides the obvious reduction of bloat, a diet high in fiber also reduces the problems that come from constipation. Of course, the first thing most people think of is hemorrhoids. Even though hemorrhoids aren't a life threatening disease, they're uncomfortable and itchy at best and painful at worst.

Constipation also causes the food you ate yesterday, or the day before that...or the day before THAT, to remain in your colon. While there's no scientific proof that leaving toxins in your colon for extended periods can cause colon cancer, it does make sense that food sitting around in the colon waiting for its ticket out tends to ferment and rot. Scientific proof or not, that can't be good. At one time or another, everyone has had a problem with evacuation. The feeling is uncomfortable and cancer risk or not, most of us would rather not endure it. Insoluble fiber helps prevent that from happening.

Diets that are high in fiber are also a boon to dieters. Fiber absorbs water as mentioned before and provides bulk in the diet. The more bulk, in the form of low calorie, high water content food, the less the dieter consumes. They feel full with few cravings. Of course, if the cravings come from a need for chocolate, fiber won't help that.

The fiber foods are also those that take longer to eat. Consider how long it takes to eat an apple compared to a bowl of pudding. The pudding goes down easily with little need to chew but the apple takes some effort and a lot longer to consume. This also slows the dieter down when eating and allows the brain to realize the body's had enough to eat, thus allowing the dieter to have a lower intake of calories.

Insoluble fiber accomplishes all these tasks, but there's a second type of fiber called soluble, meaning water-soluble. Soluble fiber helps lower the cholesterol. The body requires bile acids for fat digestion. The liver uses cholesterol to help make the bile acids. Fiber binds to bile acids so they never make it back to the liver and require the liver to use more cholesterol for more bile acid. Some studies show that fiber also helps lower the amount of cholesterol manufactured by the liver. The most effective fiber for this seems to be in rolled oats. Apples, with their high content of pectin, also can help lower cholesterol levels in the blood.

Fiber also helps normalize the levels of blood sugar in your body. Since it delays the rate that food leaves the stomach, it also delays the absorption of the glucose. Not only that, the soluble fiber also plays a role in increasing insulin sensitivity. This means that your body responds quicker to insulin and it takes less to offset the effects of sugar. This may mean that a diet high in fiber can also prevent type 2 diabetes.

So whether you eat that apple or high fiber bar to help reduce your weight, fight diabetes, lower your cholesterol or simply provide little colon scrubbing bubbles, there's a lot to be said for fiber. We no longer relegate it just to the very old that simply want to enjoy the cleansing of a good bowel movement but now proves its value to people of all ages. There's no doubt that dietary fiber should be part of everyone's daily food intake.