Yes, you need fiber in every meal. Fiber creates "bulk" in food which helps you feel fuller...
True to an extent. Since your body has no way of breaking down dietary fiber it adds volume to your meals that is never reduced. This means that the stomach is stretched - which sends signals to the brain regarding satiety..but this is only a component of the equation, not the whole thing. Fat consumption is ultimately the overriding variable that signals long lasting feelings of satiety.
...and also gives your body the raw materials to create stool, enabling you to better eliminate waste and therefore use the other nutrients in your foods more efficiently/effectively.
Kind of? Not really. Your body doesn't need raw materials to create stools. In fact, stools aren't "created".
Think of digestion similarly to how you would trim chicken for cooking. First, you trim off everything you don't need and leave it in a little pile. Before you know it, what you can use is cooked and used. However, the rest of the crap remains untouched...in this same little pile. This little pile is the stool. You didn't "create" this pile, its just kind of there.
A diet without fiber will be a small, dense stool since there is very little that is left over and unused.. A diet with fiber will be a larger, loose stool since there is much more that is left over.
Maybe I am nitpicking? Sorry if I am. Just seems like a small conceptual error
I apologize if you already understood this, i just wanted to be crystal clear.
I'm sure it does other things too (like positively affect blood cholesterol chemistry, etc.) that I don't know about/understand, so I am not the right person to go into that explanation with you.
Fiber does much more than what you stated, but thats a good start. Here's some other things fiber does:
--Positively affects blood cholesterol.
Your liver creates bile for use in emulsifying fats. A main component of bile is cholesterol. Fat is an evolutionary treasure trove for our bodies. Nowadays, we try to limit our cholesterol and fat intake. When you had to hunt and gather, though, fat and cholesterol was not so prevalent. As such, we have evolved to preserve our bile to help with the uptake of fats. This means that when you do not use bile in your GI Tract (intestines, essentially) your body reabsorbs it and circulates it back into the body for storage again into the liver. This means the liver does not have to create more. When you ingest soluable fiber, the bile is absorbed into the fiber and excreted forcing your body to create more bile - using more cholesterol. The more cholesterol you use, the lower your cholesterol levels in the blood the lower risk of all things associated with high cholesterol such as vulnerable plaque formation in the coronary arteries.
-- Reduces the effective GI of Carbohydrates
Fiber (as well as fats and protein) acts as a buffer between your intestinal walls (where absorption occurs) and sugars (as well as fats and proteins). This slows the absorption of sugars. Therefore, carb sources that were once high in GI take longer to absorb into the blood. This is why it is OK to eat high GI fruits like bananas with a well balanced meal high in fiber, fat and protein.
I know there are two types of fiber, soluble and insoluble, but again that is about the limit of my knowledge on that so someone else will have to explain what that means in terms of your body and nutrition.
Soluble fiber absorbs water. When put into water, soluble fiber looks and feels like jello.
Insoluble fiber does not absorb water. You know fiber is not soluble when it is excreted and appears pretty much the same as when you ingested it (asparagus, lettuce, peppers, corn kernels, etc).
You need both. A diet with many vegetables makes this a non-issue.
Fiber and carbs tend to go hand in hand, in that they show up in the same types of foods. The more processed your carbs are, the less fiber is in them. In some cases, with processed foods, the label says there is a lot of fiber in it, but whether or not it's usable by the body is a different story.
Yup. Fiber actually is a carb. Just a carb that we cannot break down. All fiber, however, is "usable" by the body since no fiber is actually "used" it just lingers there in your GI tract.
IF you read the Nutrition Information, you will see three things regarding carbs every time:
1) Total Carbs
2) Dietary Fiber
3) Sugars
Total carbs is the amount of carbohydrate including fiber.
Dietary Fiber is the amount of those carbs that your body cannot use.
Sugars are the simple sugars.
Total Carbs - Dietary Fiber = Net Carbs, or, in other words, the actual carbs your body will be using. This is important to keep in mind when watching your carb counts. Fiber does not add any calories to your food intake.
Your best bet is to choose natural, unprocessed (or minimally-processed) carbs for each meal. This means vegetables and fruits for the most part. Occasionally you can include whole-grains like quinoa, buckwheat, flaxseed, brown rice, etc; but these should be "accents" for variety with vegetables still making up the bulk of your carb consumption. The reason for this is that if you are eating carbs in this form, the fiber that is naturally occurring in them should be sufficient for what your body needs, and will be readily available/usable by the body.
True!
Special K bars and similar products fall into the category of processed carbs and IMO are not good choices for lunch. A "regular" lunch would definitely be better. As has been discussed in many threads here, each meal (including snacks) should include lean protein, complex unprocessed carbs, and fat. The ratios of each of those things vary by person, but I have listed them in descending order of quantity.
Awful choice. If you need a bar of some sort as a meal stick with South Beach Diet Bars, Zone Bars or certain bars by MetRx.
Was great posting with you today muse
EDIT: Spelling errors and mis-types. Meant coronary arteries, not carotid.
