New Research - Health Benefits of Fiber Expanding (this is not an ad)

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

Two insightful science articles recently came out that are worth sharing, one on diet and the other on exercise. I will share the diet article first.

The link here and below is to an article about dietary fiber. There is an expanded understanding as to how fiber contributes to human health. As many of us know, fiber helps regulate our bowels which may play a role in lowering colon cancer rates. Fiber may reduce cholesterol, perhaps by absorbing and thus eliminating certain fats the body uses to make cholesterol in the body. And it might help reduce inflammation which helps prevent heart disease, etc. We know there is both soluble fiber and insoluble fiber that isn't digested in the body.

The BBC article linked here summarizes the latest research on how fiber actually works in the body to benefit our health. The biggest takeaway for me was the discovery that indigestible dietary fiber is the primary food source for our gut bacteria.

A diverse and balanced intestinal flora is essential to good health and that disrupting that balance can lead to diseases as well as infections like Merca, Sepsis, and death. It turns out that our gut bacteria act like miniature chemical factories producing all sorts of exotic substances that our body relies on to maintain our health, substances that our body cannot make on its own.

The recent trend has been to toss back a copious amount of probiotics, which contain large numbers of just a few of the thousands of strains of active gut bacteria. A regular regiment of ingesting these little buggers never made much sense to me. It does make sense to re-seed your bowels during or after a course of antibiotics that kills off these good bugs, but if the environment down there is healthy, few probiotic capsules containing live bacteria should be all that is needed. Flooding the gut with just a few strains of bacteria doesn't seem like a good way to achieve a balance.

Now I realize that feeding the bacteria that live in our intestines is a much better strategy to maintain a healthy digestive ecosystem, and dietary fiber is their food of choice for that purpose. The article goes on to talks about how much fiber we need and how to get it. It's worth reading.

Now the unanswered questions for me include; Are there high-quality fibers more inducive to good health and low-quality fibers that aren't as good for our intestinal flora? For example, is the psyllium fiber Metamucil less edible for gut bacteria than say, the fiber in an apple?

The link: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46827426