Dietary Fiber: A Feast for Your Body
Dietary Fiber: A Feast for Your Body
Today, more than sixty years later, similar high-fiber diets are being advocated as capable of preventing or curing everything from constipation, hemorrhoids, and colon cancer, to heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and schizophrenia. Although many researchers have been studying fiber for years, the current fad was triggered in 1970 by Dr. Denis Burkitt, a British physician.
He reported that countries where large amounts of fiber are regularly consumed had low rates of colon-rectal cancer, benign diseases of the colon (such as diverticulosis), appendicitis, varicose veins, gallstones, and heart disease. Popular books and articles soon followed, vastly exaggerating the health claims for dietary fiber.
Now supermarkets offer a wide range of high-fiber breads and cereals. People who once described bran as the closest thing to cattle feed are happily eating like their four -legged friends. In the mid-seventies the fiber fad resulted in a shortage of bran in the United States. High-fiber breads and cereals continue to push the overly refined, pasty white stuff off the shelves as millions of Americans discover that those coarse, nutty flavored grains rejected a century ago in the name of lily-white gentility may actually be good for you.
With the fiber fad in its second decade, scientists and physicians continue to discover healthful new facts – and cautionary refinements on some old facts – about this “nonnutrient.” All the necessary data are by no means in, but the available facts show that fiber can have important health-promoting effects and that many of these effects are more prominently associated with the fibers in fruits and vegetables than with those in bran and other cereal grains. At the same time the findings demand that fiber be treated with intelligence and discretion, and not sprinkled indiscriminately on everything you eat.