Dietary Fiber and Antiaging

Dietary fiber is one of the most important aspects of eating for continued health, and even appearance. It is a given that most Americans do not get enough of it, and can suffer various health problems because of that.

Why is a high fiber diet healthy? Why is colon cleansing important? To answer these questions, it is necessary to understand the role of fiber in your digestive system and why it’s inclusion is necessary for your system to function properly.

The Role of Evolution

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, humans hunted animals and foraged for what grew in the wild. There was no farming so we evolved with a digestive system adapted to eating raw whole foods, full of various kinds of dietary fiber.

Even with the invention of farming, things did not change drastically, because modern milling techniques were still many thousands of years away. Thus we continued to eat food high in dietary fiber, close to the way our bodies were designed to eat.

With the introduction of modern food processing, this changed in a big way. This is especially true with regard to grains. When grains were eaten many years ago, they were “stone milled” which is to say stone ground, but still in a relatively rough form with much of the dietary fiber in the grain still intact.

This was important for two reasons. First, in a high fiber diet, your digestive system takes much longer to break down the carbohydrates in food and thus slows their entry into the bloodstream.

Rapid elevations in glucose levels which in turn produce rapid elevations in insulin are thus avoided. Research shows a correlation between lower insulin levels and longer life spans in laboratory animals. This leads me to suspect that it may be true for humans as well!

The second reason is that soluble fiber creates a bulking action in the colon, as it absorbs water and helps the process of eliminating waste from the body. A high fiber diet binds things like cholesterol, bile, and toxic residues and helps eliminate them from the body.

Types Of Fiber

There are two types of fiber, soluble and insoluble. Soluble fiber, which is found in oats, beans, and fruit. It binds cholesterol and removes it from the body, effectively lowering your levels in a safe, non toxic way. This helps ensure the health of the cardiovascular system.

Soluble fiber also provides fructooligosaccharides which are a prebiotic that supports the beneficial bacteria in the colon. Apples are an especially good source of water soluble fiber and the old adage that an apple a day keeps the doctor away would seem to be grounded in fact.

The other type of dietary fiber is called insoluble, or roughage, is found in whole grains and vegetables. A high fiber diet thus ensures that waste moves quickly through the small and large intestine and does not collect in one spot and cause irritation of the intestinal lining.

The Importance of Elimination

For more information and list of high fiber foods click on this link