Fibre in the Diet

I rectified my mistake from Friday and did a proper scholarly search. Much better results. Very happy with this first paper I'm going to discuss, as it provided relatively simple answers, all were logical/plausible/based on fact and not some dude's rantings.

The paper was a review article by Slavin and Green, published by the British Nutrition Foundation, entitled "Dietary fibre and satiety." The first, and one of the best things about it, was that they provided a table with examples of foods of different fibre content. Some examples:

• High fibre: kidney beans, baked beans, and most bran products (Raisin bran, corn bran, bran buds)
• Decent fibre: the skin of most tree fruits, lentils, veggies like broccoli, carrots, brussels sprouts, and corn
• Low fibre: bread, rice, pasta, (and here are the real surprising ones) lettuce, bell pepper, asparagus, green beans, celery (I would've thought celery especially was high in fibre, since you can see/feel the strings in every bite)

Next they listed how "fibre acts as a physiological obstacle to energy intake"

• providing bulk, therefor reducing caloric intake
• prolonging chewing, which increases saliva and gastric juices, and therefor expands the stomach more to make you feel full
• reduce the absorption of food (and therefore calories) in the small intestine

Ok, I'm going to stop my review here, because even though I've only summarized the first 2 out of 11 pages, the rest is pretty unnecessary for my purpose. The article describes studies going back to the 70s that looked at how fibre content and food refinement (which usually decreases fibre content) affect appetite, satiety, weight changes, etc. Then they have a big section on engineered fibre additives, etc.

Here's what I'm going to run with for now, for myself and immediate use with the people I work with: how much fibre is in my diet currently? How can I increase it? If i increase it, do I start meeting my goals? If yes, hooray! I'm done. If not, it'll be back to the research to find something else besides fibre to start chipping away at my hunger.

Article reference:
Slavin, J, & Green, H. (2007) Dietary fibre and satiety. Nutrition Bulletin, 32(suppl 1), 32-42.