This is episode 52 of Sigma Nutrition Radio. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to the show today.

I'm going to talk a bit about dietary fiber. And this is a kind of shout out to one of our listeners,

Colin Matthews, who gave me the suggestion as a topic for the show. And I think it's worth covering for a number of reasons.

Now, because there are a few different areas

that I'd like to explore on this topic,

and as some of you may know,

I hate being overly brief

for fear of leaving out something important or useful,

I'm going to focus on one area related to dietary fiber today and then perhaps talk about some of the other topics that I think are important on it next week.

So when we talk about fiber, I think everyone knows that it's good quote unquote for us.

But many of us rarely think about the various different types and

their effects and then what that means for the foods we actually consume. So from a broad point of

view, when we look at large prospective cohort studies, for example, there seems to be a strong and consistent evidence that

diets rich in fiber, that higher fiber intakes can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease,

type 2 diabetes, and then a host of other chronic illnesses usually related to the gut.

So when we're talking about fiber,

we're basically talking about a type of carbohydrate that resists digestion.

So say we take in some dietary carbohydrate,

then that will usually get down to the small intestine

where we digest it, use it, take the calories from it and create energy.

Now with fiber, because it resists digestion, it gets past the small intestine and makes its way down to the large intestine.

And there it can go one of two ways.

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