#480: How Much Fiber Do We Need for Good Health? – Prof. Joanne Slavin
Sigma Nutrition Radio
Danny Lennon
4.8 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 2 May 2023
⏱️ 70 minutes
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Summary
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About this Episode:
The beneficial impact of a high-fiber diet is something that has been promoted in nutrition for a long period of time. But there remain a variety of interesting questions to researchers, practitioners and the general public alike.
How much fiber do we actually need? What are current fiber recommendations based on? What outcomes have the strongest evidence for benefit? Should we have targets for fiber sub-types? Are some types of fiber "better" than others? Do functional fibers added to food products still retain the benefits we see with dietary fiber?
To help get to some evidence-based answers on these issues, our guest in this episode is one of the researchers at the forefront of dietary fiber research for decades, Professor Joanne Slavin.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Sigma Nutrition Radio. This is episode 480 of the podcast. I'm your host, Danny Lennon. You are very welcome to the podcast, |
| 0:24.4 | either as a returning listener, or maybe that's the first time you're listening in. If so, |
| 0:28.5 | you are very welcome and I hope you enjoy the discussion today. Yet again, we are getting |
| 0:33.2 | into the depths of nutrition science and talking all about evidence-based nutrition. |
| 0:38.9 | And with particular focus today on fiber and some of its impacts on health outcomes, |
| 0:44.6 | and also how we get to certain dietary fiber recommendations that are typically given |
| 0:50.9 | and that maybe many people here are familiar with, how they actually came about, |
| 0:54.7 | what evidence they are based on. And then what are the gray areas or unanswered questions in |
| 0:59.5 | relation to fiber and how we should think about that. So to get into some of this, I'm going to be |
| 1:04.4 | talking with Professor Joanne Slavin, who is a professor at the University of Minnesota, and she |
| 1:09.9 | has an active research group there |
| 1:11.3 | currently working in a range of areas related to gut health, satiety, overall health outcomes |
| 1:18.2 | in diet disease relationships, and of course much of that has been rooted in things like |
| 1:23.4 | dietary fiber, whole grains, plant foods, and so on. And indeed Professor Slavin is a very |
| 1:29.2 | highly respected researcher and is well known for her work in the area of dietary fiber, |
| 1:34.2 | whole grains, and impacts on human health. She has a wide range of scientific publications |
| 1:40.7 | on this topic. She was a member also of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines Committee in the |
| 1:46.4 | US, and that has familiarity with how some of these numbers and targets come about. So we're |
| 1:52.3 | going to dive into that as well. And I think you will get a good sense of the evidence base, |
| 1:58.1 | hopefully, from this conversation. If you are a Sigma Nutrition Premium |
| 2:02.7 | subscriber, then you will be getting detailed study notes that accompany this episode in the show |
| 2:07.6 | notes wherever you're currently listening right now. You can also get a full transcript to |
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