Hey what’s up guys.  In this article I’m going to give my fiber recommendations and I want to share my opinion on how many grams of fiber you should eat per day.  But before that I want to digress for a moment and just sort of talk about how it’s not just the overall amount of fiber that you get per day that matters but the type of fiber and where that fiber is coming from. So it’s not uncommon to see dieters set a target fiber goal for themselves like 30 to 40 grams of fiber and they try to reach that every day and then you’ll see people going out and using supplements like Venna fiber or foods like quest friars and fiber one butters just to reach their fiber goal.

And this generally isn’t problematic because typically in a high fiber diet the dieter is essentially forced to eat a ton of micronutrients because generally high fiber foods are also micro nutrient rich foods.

However, when you use a ton of supplementation or functional fiber sources just to reach a fiber goal, it can be problematic in the sense that fiber has been shown to decrease nutrient absorption and so while this does mean that less calories will be absorbed it also means that less micronutrients will be absorbed, so it’s important to use high quality dense micronutrient rich sources of fiber and not just a bunch of these supplements simply just to reach our daily goal.

Another reason why it’s important to consider the type of fiber, has to do with satiety or how full you feel after a meal. And one of the most frequent things that you’ll hear touted by proponents of a high fiber diet is that it makes you feel fuller. Now this sounds pretty uncontroversial and we’ve all sort of this effect that fiber has on us. However, in looking at the actual literature I was surprised to find that this isn’t actually as well founded as people would have you believe. In a 2011 systematic review that looked at 104 randomized controlled studies, they found that only 43% of the studies that they looked at were able to detect an effect of fiber on appetite by as little as 10%. And then in a later 2013 review these results were corroborated and that 59% of studies showed no effect of fiber on satiety at all.

Now granted there are definitely some methodological issues in assessing something as subjective as appetite in an objective way and the results of these studies in no way show that fiber has no effect on satiety conclusively. However, what was most interesting in my opinion about the 2011 study specifically was that they found that in the studies that did show an effect of fiber on satiety those studies consistently fed the subjects more viscous forms of fibers or in other words more viscous fibers were able to reduce appetite or increase satiety more so than less viscous fibers.

One of the proposed mechanisms to why they can actually blunt appetite in the way that they do is because they have a water or holding capacity in the stomach they hold on a bunch of water and in this causes stomach distension, which doesn’t sound very good, but stomach distension is a known signal to the brain to reduce hunger. So what are some sources of viscous fibers? I was sort of surprised to find that passion fruit, at least in my searches, showed the highest proportion of viscous fiber per gram and a hundred grams of passionfruit gives you 10 grams of fiber in something like five or six grams of those are viscous fibers.

Another really good source of viscous fiber is oats and I think that this is why in my experience when I switched back to eating oats, after I ate pancakes or toast through most of my prep, I felt a lot fuller for a lot longer. Another good source of viscous fiber is beans, specifically black beans and lima beans which have a little bit more than the other varieties and so now with all of that out of the way I will get my recommendations, but first I just want to say that you don’t have to get any amount of fiber in your diet, since it’s not an essential nutrient, just like any other type of carbohydrate.

So unlike something like vitamin C for example, which you have to get in your diet or else you will get scurvy and die, you don’t have to get any fiber in your diet and you would be just fine. That’s not to say it’s not a good idea and there aren’t health benefits to getting a lot of fiber in your diet there definitely are. Without further ado the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics recommend a minimum of 20 to 35 grams per day for adults and for children they recommend their age plus 5 in grams of fiber per day. Now my personal recommendations are that you get 10 percent of your daily carb intake from carbs or from fiber.

So if you eat 500 grams of carbs per day and you should get 50 grams of fiber per day as a minimum. But I set a bottom minimum for everyone at 20 grams so even if you only eat 100 grams of carbs per day your minimum should still be that minimum of the A and D which is 20 grams. I also encourage you take at least two servings of green veggies per day or one green veggie in one orange or red veggie and then also two servings of fruit per day. And this is just to encourage that fibre is coming from micro nutrient rich sources and that’s for the reasons that I mentioned earlier.