Fiber for Healthy Living
By Rebecca Jaiden at 5 April, 2009
For an individual to stay healthy, it is not enough to just do exercise on a regular basis. It is also important that you take note of your food intake. Aside from staying away from eating fatty foods, it is also beneficial to consume foods with high dietary fiber content.
Highly refined and processed foods—loaded with white flour, sugar, chemical additives, and so forth—are totally deficient in fiber. The result is the so-called civilized diseases: constipation, hemorrhoids, hernia, diverticulosis, colorectal cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and others. “Men with a low intake of dietary fiber had a three times higher risk of death from all causes than men with a high intake,” says one reference.
Dietary fiber plays its role in two ways. It absorbs water as it moves through our digestive system, and it passes through our digestive tract quickly. Health experts feel that it takes with it many of the harmful agents and speeds up their removal from the body. Some soluble fibers are found to hold down the sugar and LDL cholesterol levels in the blood—a boon for diabetics and heart patients. Simply put, dietary fiber helps in flushing out unwanted toxins from the body.
How can you benefit from this knowledge about fiber? If possible, increase the proportion of fruits, vegetables, and whole-grain products in your diet. Switch from white to whole-wheat bread and add whole-grain cereal to the breakfast table. Beans are also an excellent source of fiber. And starch—potatoes and rice—may have anticancer properties.
There are, of course, many other aspects of your diet that affect your health. However, cutting fat and increasing the fiber are the two areas in most people’s diet needing urgent attention.
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