The Benefits Of Increasing Fiber In Your Diet with Brenda Davis R.D.

so step three we need to boost fiber intake and you know I’m not going to go through all of this in great detail because I think you know the benefits of fiber but a lot of people don’t understand that not only does it do all the good things for our God and good things for our microflora but it also enhances immune function it lessens hormonal imbalances it does things that a lot of us don’t even recognize that it does the RDA or the recommended dietary allowance is 38 grams for men and 25 for women and in fact average intakes are about half that I think to really enjoy optimal health we probably need at least 35 to 50 grams a day and this is what’s really interesting estimated Paleolithic intakes ranged between 70 and a hundred and fifty plus grams a day and 70 at the low end of the the range this was people who were eating two thirds of their calories from animal products from meat and fish and so forth only a third of their calories were from plants and they were still getting 70 grams the people at the other end of the spectrum where they were getting two thirds of their calories from plants were eating 150 plus grams a day and and this may not make a lot of sense but I’ll explain it this way wild plants contain four times the concentration of fiber that are conventional or commercially grown plants do so they were just much more concentrated in fiber so the human body I think is designed to handle quite a lot of fiber but our gut microbiome gets messed up when we’re not consuming a lot of fiber

so what are the best fiber sources will beans without a doubt are the number one source of fiber they’re the most concentrated fiber foods with about 10 to 20 grams per cup of bee avocados this threw me for a loop when I saw this on you know the you the the nutrient database the USDA nutrient database I was looking at various things about avocados and I saw 13.5 grams of fiber in a 200 gram piece of fruit not including the skin it’s quite shocking you wonder where the fibers hidden because it doesn’t seem very fibrous but it’s a very high fiber food then grains then berries and then other vegetables fruits nuts and seeds are all sources but of course only plant foods contain fiber I had someone ask me the other day but even if you cook animal even if you cook meat doesn’t it contain fiber if you cook it and so people don’t realize plants have fiber to to give them their shape and structure animals have bones we don’t have fiber so we get very little fiber from refined carbohydrates fast foods processed foods we get no fiber from animal foods dairy products fat oil or sugar so we want to be aiming for at least 10 to 15 grams of fiber per meal from a variety of whole plant foods because there a wide range of types of fibers and foods there are gums and hemi cellulose and samuel cellulose and pectin they all do different wonderful things in the body so we want to be consuming a variety of them

what some people do is just sprinkle bran on everything and think it’ll solve the problems and there are two two reasons why we shouldn’t be doing that one is we don’t just want insoluble fiber like you’re getting from bread we want a variety of fibers but second is for people eating plant-based diets bran is a huge source of phytates it’s like a little phytate bomb and it inhibits the absorption of minerals that we already have a little bit of a challenge absorbing sufficiently like iron and zinc so we don’t want to be sprinkling bran on our food that having been said I think it’s important to know that phytates are not all bad sort of Paleolithic world wants us to think that phytates are all bad and they’re not as a matter of fact moderate intakes of phytates have huge health benefits there’s powerful antioxidants they help us to repair DNA protect against amyloid amyloid plaque formation in the brain they inhibit tumor growth inhibit bone loss they lower cholesterol they improve glycemic response they reduce risk of kidney stones they do all sorts of beneficial things for the body and of course they’re reduced by many traditional methods of preparation like soaking sprouting fermenting blending juicing all of these things help to reduce phytates in food