The next wave will be "fiber-maxxing", with the increased rate of colon cancer in millenials and gen z. Seriously guys, get your fiber intake.
The next wave will be "fiber-maxxing", with the increased rate of colon cancer in millenials and gen z. Seriously guys, get your fiber intake.
I work in the grocery industry and can say fiber era is already here. It maybe hasn’t reached most consumers yet but food companies are making the products and trend forecasters called it years ago. It’s going to be a tsunami. And not necessarily a bad one bc it’s an easy sell. Lots of ppl really do need more fiber.
A lot of the fiber they are putting in foods so they can call them high fiber don’t have the positive health benefits generally associated with fiber. e.g. I researched Benefiber years ago and the studies I found at the time indicated it had none of the benefits to heart health or colon health. But it dissolves basically into nothing while still technically being fiber.
Lots of people = almost all people in the USA, according to research I’ve seen. I’m not sure of exact numbers, but I recall it being somewhere close to 95% of people being deficient to some degree, with the majority of that group being quite deficient.
Wild that people can't just cook and eat more vegetables.
Is it? They’re pricier, they’re not available in food deserts, they go bad much more quickly, and they require more skill to cook into a delicious meal.
Disgree except with the food desert thing. Theyreactually way cheaper than some chemically-generated-fiber cookies n cream bar bullshit. Its just that they take some effort and time to make and everyone wants convenience
Not the worst trend, but especially comical since so much of food processing is about removing fiber to make foods faster to eat and less satiating.
Thankfully I think demand will have to grow a lot for legumes to rise in price much since legumes are basically a byproduct required for growing other more valuable crops.
It's great that beans look kind of gross because otherwise people would learn they taste really good and are healthy at the same time.
Taste is very individual. I personally can't stand the taste of dry beans, to the point where I have a strong aversion just to the texture itself. Fresh green beans can be fine (usually has a sweet or acidic taste), and beans used in Asian food like glass noodles or soy source don't taste like beans at all to me.
When people talk about eating more beans, or when people talk about using it as an ingredient, it usually only mean dry beans.
Beans look gross?
Not dry but they don't exactly look appetizing when cooked and covered in bean juice if you don't already like them.
Most of the world disagrees and eats/enjoys tons of beans.
I think the problem with beans is not looking gross, it's that they cause you to contribute a lot of methane to climate warming (you fart a lot).
Now I have to go to the lab and check (we have a ringdown sensor tuned to CH4/CO2/H2O precise into single digit ppb).
Some humans have methanogens in their gut and these people exhale methane (gut->bloodstream->lungs) and they can emit quite a lot, at least enough to completely fuck up our lab work. Our lead scientist is such a person, and the effect is so bad that he exhales into a bin liner when setting up an experiment.
Or he did: this was so inconvenient that we automated all our instruments, valves, etc so we could run experiments from the kitchen or even at home (lots of RPis which I wouldn’t normally use for anything important). Fortunately this also automated all the data collection.
But now I have to run a trial to see if my diet modulates anal CH4 emissions. Thanks HN!
Let me know how it goes, I have a home sensor I'm married to for that (and she is very loud with alerts)
The sensor she likely uses is only good in the hundreds of ppm. Fortunately the LFL for methane is roughly 50,000 ppm so there’s no need to give up smoking when a bout of methane-heavy flatulence occurs.
The methane quantity from human legume consumption is negligible, and beans are just about the most greenhouse-efficient source of protein there is.
Cow “farts” (actually rumen belches) are something else entirely.
Wooosh
That's only if your not acclimated to a high fiber diet.
That was last wave. Personally, I’m wary of products with added fiber, but always choose whole wheat or whole grain. If needed, you can supplement with psyllium.
They take the good fiber out with extreme processing and replace it with more palatable fiber like wheat dextrin that doesn’t have the same benefits.
Getting your fiber from whole food products is definitely the way to go.
Related, the healthiest sources of protein are very affordable and typically come with a ton of fibre. You can have both very easily
Are there studies showing the increased cancer rate is caused (or at least correlated with) reduced fiber intake? Or is this just a guess of yours?
Low fiber intake is very heavily correlated with an increase in all cause mortality.
Every 10g per day is correlated with a 10% reduction in all cause mortality (up to 30g). Mostly from a reduction in cardiac and cancer deaths.
I don't doubt it's healthy, perhaps via reducing insulin spikes. But the question is if it is the cause of the mysterious increase in colorectal cancer.
I can't find it specifically, but I do remember studies of the Hadza tribe and their lower incidents of cancer.
Just something I randomly found in a search.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4654
There’s an enormous amount of data on this topic. So much I’ll just tell you to do a web search rather than pointing to some papers in is response: it’s just so pervasive and going back for decades.
Use a conventional search not an ai-generated summary as that will have influencer slop mixed in. Though oddly, I’ve never seen an anti-fibre influencer, but have seen lots of pro-fibre influencer posts!
> There’s an enormous amount of data on this topic.
FWIW, the evidence demonstrating that fibre is protective against colon cancer is limited, and when studies try to adjust for behavioural differences, the colon cancer reduction disappears.
Actual RCTs that randomly assigned subjects found no difference in polyp rates between high and low fibre diets.
For decades it was indeed widely observed that the people who ate a lot of fibre tended to have a lower incident rate. But the sort of person who has a high fibre diet almost always has a lot of other protective habits and norms: They're less likely to smoke, less likely to drink to excess, they tend to eat less red meat, they eat less sugar and UPFs, and so on.
As is often the case, these habits don't tend to happen in isolation, and this is where observational studies fail. So if you take someone with a lot of bad habits and supplement fibre, they'll have better cholesterol control, glycemic benefits, and of course regularity benefits, but it won't measurably move the needle on colon cancer rates.
This is all just conversational, but the current consensus is that fibre, or lack thereof, is not a contributor behind the rise in colon cancer among younger subjects. There are many suspected causes, all moving the needle enough that incidence rates jump.
> Actual RCTs that randomly assigned subjects found no difference in polyp rates between high and low fibre diets.
As far as I know the only RCT that fits that description is one looking at people who had already developed adenomas and then tested for reoccurrence.
An RCT actually designed to answer the question would need to last decades and just isn’t feasible.
There are a large multitude of studies that show a negative correlation between CRC and fiber intake even when adjusting for diet, exercise, BMI, income, alcohol consumption etc…
> but the current consensus is that fibre, or lack thereof, is not a contributor behind the rise in colon cancer among younger subjects.
There’s not good evidence to say it’s the sole or primary factor, but saying there’s consensus that is not a contributor is way too strong.
> but saying there’s consensus that is not a contributor is way too strong
In most cause hypotheses, fibre just doesn't rank at all. I mean, of course everyone should eat more fibre so that's good, but it isn't a credible cause for the rise of colon cancer rates among the young.
Most destructive to the fibre hypothesis is that fibre intake has actually increased over the past few decades, at the same time that youth colon cancer rates crept up[1]. I don't know what notion people have about common Western food practices decades ago, but in the 1980s, for instance, fibre was basically non-existent in the common diet: No one ate multigrain anything. Everything was loaded with sugar, trans fats and simple carbs (we literally considered that healthy, with hilarious products like Snackwells).
[1] Twice as many young people, per capita, are facing colon cancer now than in the 80s. Overall colon cancer rates are down significantly now, however this is most certainly due to the massive reduction in smoking and other behavioural issues that catch up to you after many decades, but kids today are in no way eating less fibre than kids in the 1980s.
> There are a large multitude of studies that show a negative correlation between CRC and fiber intake even when adjusting for diet, exercise, BMI, income, alcohol consumption etc…
Not really. Take any behaviour or practice that is common among the healthier cohort and it's easy meat for bullshit study results. It's why the nutrition field in particular is full of contradictory studies because "adjusting for" is carrying a lot of unmerited credibility.
Thanks!
In Germany they already started. There's protein XYZ everywhere, but I've recently seen ads for high fiber drinks.
I think there are two main philosophies at play. Either you give the gut bulk through eating fiber, or you eat foods to maintain a fast transit time. I lean toward the transit time approach by eating plenty of easy to digest simple carbs. Personally I've never felt better.
I think eating hard-to-digest, crappy proteins(like all the protein added to shakes, bars, etc)... paired with fermentable bulk fiber... is actually the recipe for inflammation, irritation and colon cancer.
No studies show protein has anything to do with colon cancer and in fact it could even have protective effects.
But we do have endless studies showing not eating enough fiber increases your chance of having colon cancer, and we also know a lot of people today don't have nearly as much fiber as people did in the past.
mainstream science literally links heavy meat consumption to colon cancer all the time.
There are other sources of protein.
I’m pretty puzzled honestly at how many people are fiber deficient.
I once did the calculation for my daily fiber intake and it was well beyond the daily recommended minimum.
What are people eating (or not eating) that leads to a fiber deficiency?
If you don't eat legumes or whole grain bread it's not hard to be fiber deficient.
Of course. These things are cyclical. Some might remember the f plan diet or similar.
I know no one asked but if you're a gym bro and looking for easy fiber intake, get the carb balance tortillas from mission. 17g of fiber per tortilla.
that "fiber" is chemically modified resistant starch
the FDA allows it to be called fiber, but it acts differently in the body to the soluble and insoluble fiber that most people are familiar with
IMO, it's a mistake to treat fiber as a single, fungible food component, rather than as a family of different substances with different health effects
if you're looking for "easy fiber intake", there is much more and stronger evidence for psyllium-based soluble fiber, widely available in cheap and convenient drinks like metamucil (I prefer formulations without the dye and maltodextrin, but that's getting into the weeds)
Metamucil (and it's unbranded brethren) are decidely un-cheap
Really? I think my no-name psyllium husk is ~$0.40/day.
> that "fiber" is chemically modified resistant starch
So basically toss a shovel of potato starch into your protein shake and be done with it. It's flavored so strongly to make whey protein palatable that you won't even notice.
Just eat real food.
Stop substituting and finding short cuts. Just eat a balanced meal with vegetables.
You’re grossly underestimating how much fiber a person needs to eat.
How much fiber does a person need to eat, as measured in weight or volume of common vegetables?
Millions of people have gone years without fiber intentionally or not
I wouldn't sweat it - just focus on eating unprocessed food fiber or not
Men around 40g per day, it's like 2 pounds of a balanced mix of legumes, beans, vegetables, whole grains and fruits.
That is a lot of food. Even if I’d eat just that, I’d have to very consciously force myself to eat one kilo of that, unless it’s something like watermelon.
I don't think it needs to be nearly that much food.
A single bowl of oatmeal with chia seeds gets you about halfway there. 2-3 tbsp of chia seeds has ~10-15g of fiber, mostly soluble fiber. Soluble is what you want for lowering cholesterol because it binds to bile acid, which means your liver has to use cholesterol from your body to make more bile. The oatmeal adds another ~4-5g and is largely soluble too.
After that you don't have far to go. Besides lentils and many beans, whole grains are really fiber dense, e.g., having wheat bread on a sandwich can get you another +6 just from the bread. Brown rice instead of white gets you 3-4 more. Weird grains like barley and bulgur have a bunch and go well in things like casseroles, chilis, etc. You'll also get at least some from whatever fruits/veggies you were going to eat anyway.
I’ve mostly seen the 14g of fiber per 1000 calories recommendation.
It is a lot compared to what most people take, but it’s not hard. Banana, orange, some broccoli, and you are close. Lentils, beans (lupini is great because it also has protein) here and there, oats, an extra fruit (pear is nice), berries, avocado, so many options.
But you need to be conscious. Most people need less starch and sugar and fat.
I poop 2-4 times a day. I know some people have a real problem going to the bathroom once a day… just eat more fiber folks.
And OliPops have 6 to 9g per can.
That’s the difference between protein and fiber though. You can essentially spam the amount of protein you take in and the excess just gets expelled. The same is not true of fiber too much fiber has downsides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bezoar
presumably is what you allude to?
That doesn't happen magically, and "spamming" protein can definitely damage your kidneys.
This is really only a concern for people that already have damaged kidneys.
> spam the amount of protein you take in and the excess just gets expelled.
Not true? It becomes fat if you are above your caloric intake.
Fiber on the other is just undigestible, so you always expel it, though I agree that too much fiber will cause issues.
> It becomes fat if you are above your caloric intake.
Uh what? No. LOL.
I eat crazy amounts of protein, it's almost all of my diet outside of fibre and I've lost 120 pounds and now sit in the bottom of my BMI bracket.
Fiber is indigestible and not required for human health. It's also a cause of bloating, constipation and gas... because it's indigestible. Fiber does have the benefit of slowing sugar digestion, but you can and should just eat less sugar. Some forms of fiber can be converted to fatty acids by bacteria in your colon, while also producing other byproducts. You can get those fatty acids by eating more meat without the added stress on your digestive system.
Compare the human digestive system of a human being to a wolf (carnivore), a pig (omnivore) and a gorilla (herbivorous hindgut fermenter). The human gut by proportions sits somewhere between wolf and pig.
Look up the actual studies on fiber rather than pop science articles, and examine them critically. They'll do things like assume that pooping more often and having a greater volume of poop is healthier, with no basis. Things like how easy it is to poop or feelings of being bloated are harder to quantify, so they're typically ignored.
Or you get the extrapolating cancer risk based on some vaguely understood biomarker, which is one step below "in mice" as far as science goes.
My theory is that the only reason we need indigestible carbohydrate is to push out the indigestible carbohydrate that is already stuck in the colon. Therefore we need it either all the time or not at all. Does this make sense?
My LDL numbers beg to differ.
Please expand on this. Cholesterol is a useful biomarker, but lower cholesterol could be worse. Cholesterol is used to repair the body. If your cholesterol is lower because you've inhibited your ability to produce it (malnutrition or by taking statins), that's bad. If your cholesterol is lower because your inflammation is lower and fewer repairs are needed, that's good. There are also two forms of LDL, one is harmless and the other is oxidized.
If you're feeling good, looking healthy and your body does what you need it to then I'd have to agree that whatever you're doing is working for you, numbers or theory be damned.
I know people are big on the whole fiber fad, but the bulk of benefits which come from eating more fiber are from eating fewer calories. If you're eating high fiber you physically cannot shovel as many calories into your belly. It is a viable strategy since most americans eat way too much every day, but fiber simply isn't essential to health or weight loss. If you like, explain to me a theory on why fiber is somehow essential.
Won't happen.
The main reason protein is highly sought after is that it's an ego/prestige thing associated with excessive self care.
Our diets are very heavily connected to our social status. Being able to consume that level of protein is all about excessive self care.
Fiber is cheap and viewed as a poor person thing. Nobody is holding up their expensive grass fed fiber to brag about the environmental toll it takes, like folks do with their meat and whatnot.
A lot of the protein fad can be traced back to dairy farmers pushing whey into every product they can.
Not the farmers; the producers, distributors, and everything on the way to the consumer. Research labs and marketing agencies construct fads and push it through their magazines and media IP.