#483: What are the Effects of Very High Fiber Intakes?

Sigma Nutrition Radio

Danny Lennon

Nutrition, Health & Fitness

4.8 • 633 Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2023

⏱️ 78 minutes

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Summary

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About This Episode:

The benefits of consuming a higher fiber diet have been consistently demonstrated in nutrition research. Epidemiology clearly shows that higher intakes, compared to lower intakes, leads to a risk reduction for a range of diseases, including cardiovascular disease and colon cancer.

And based on this epidemiological evidence, most dietary guidelines recommend dietary patterns that provide adults with 30-35g of dietary fiber per day.

However, what do we know about intakes beyond this?

Do we continue to see benefit in a linear fashion? Is there a ceiling to benefit? At what level would we see "optimal" benefit or the greatest magnitude of risk reduction?

The ability to answer such questions is hampered by the fact it's difficult to find cohort studies where the "high" fiber level is high enough to relate to this issue. However, there have been some controlled studies looking specifically at "very high" intakes, i.e. those far above current recommendations. In addition, there are some populations where habitual dietary intake gives a fiber intake far above the typcial intakes in Western cohorts.

So in this episode we go through this data to try to see what we can conclude about this fascinating question of 'what are the health effects at very high fiber intakes?'

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Sigma Nutrition Radio.
0:16.8	This is episode 483 of the podcast.
0:24.6	My name is Danny Lennon and here with me is Dr. Alan Flanagan. Alan, how are you today?
0:25.6	I'm very well. I'm very well, sir.
0:27.6	Okay, so on today's episode we are attempting to address the question of what are the effects of very high fiber intakes? And we'll explain more about some of the
0:40.2	specifics there in a moment. But I think this is an interesting question because it relates to
0:45.3	many issues, hypotheses and questions that we could also come up with. It gets into things like
0:51.7	some of the published research that we may mention that have looked
0:56.5	at aspects of very high doses.
0:59.2	It gets into this question of thinking about what do we know about any potential dose response
1:04.5	with fiber intake and different outcomes.
1:07.5	It gets into questions that people may hypothesize about. Is there a point at which we might
1:12.6	see a ceiling to benefit for fiber? Or even is there a point where the benefit starts coming
1:20.0	down and becomes harm? So there's lots of interesting questions that we hear in different places
1:24.6	that will get tied into this question. But really what we want to see
1:28.3	is, is there some sort of understanding we can come away with of what happens with very high fiber
1:34.9	intakes? Now, of course, with that term, if you are a regular distance as podcast, hopefully
1:39.3	there are alarm bells in your head going off saying, well, what do you mean by very high? And maybe there's different ways that we could categorize this.
1:47.2	But I think probably what we're referring to here is very high intakes, i.e., those that are
1:53.5	beyond where we typically see fiber recommendations.
1:57.6	And in different guidelines, we have these recommendations of anywhere between
2:01.6	like 30 to 35 grams per day, depending on the country you're looking at. And then again,
	...

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