An optimal plant-based diet delivers 60 to 100 grams of fiber daily.

J. Morris Hicks

Had to chuckle when I saw this article in the New York Times yesterday talking about the virtues of eating lots of fiber. Unfortunately, their idea of “high fiber” is nowhere close to optimal. We all know that fiber is important, yet many people joke about the fact that “absolutely no one” gets enough fiber.

Unfortunately, most people believe that 25 grams per day is enough. Little do they know that, while 25 g. is much better than 10 or 11, it’s well short of halfway to the daily fiber delivered by a mostly whole plants diet…the kind of diet that promotes vibrant health, reverses heart disease & diabetes and prevents cancer. From the article:

Specifically, subjects who ate a diet rich in whole grains, fruits and vegetables (adding up to 29 grams of fiber per day for men, 26 grams for women) were 22 percent less likely to die after nine years than those who ate the least fiber (13 and 11 grams per day), according to the study, in Archives of Internal Medicine.

With 400,000 people aged 50 to 71 in the study, they went on to say that 32,556 of them died during the nine-year study. I wonder how many of those people would still be living if someone like doctors Campbell and Esselstyn had told them that 26 to 29 grams of fiber a day was not a high fiber diet — it’s just got more fiber than the woefully inadequate typical western diet. More than 95% of Americans are eating some version of that diet and are getting less than 10 grams per day from the nutritious, health-promoting plants.

Eating primarily whole plants myself, I have gone to nutritiondata.com and measured my daily fiber intake. It averages somewhere between 60 and 100 grams per day.  That’s about three times more than what they called “high fiber” in this study. Try it for yourself. Click below if you’d like to read the entire article.

Diet – High Fiber Intake Linked With Longer Life – NYTimes.com.