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Literally grind up 2 tbps of Hulled Barley, take 2 mins to boil it in a microwave with a bunch of water, drink your barley water and call it a day.
Humans effectively co-evolved with Barley drink, it's insane we try all this other stuff.
The benefits of barley and beta glucan are well established.
People don't seem to appreciate that it aids in more thorough digestion while protecting your digestive tract.
Eat roughage and greens all you want, but barley in a spice grinder is 100% the base layer for everything else and it takes 3 mins a day to microwave and drink.
Incidentally this also helps regulate the water content in your colon, so hydration curves improve as well.
Bulking with greens without laying down a soluble fiber base is why people get the salad shooter expierence, the greens don't stay in your digestive tract long enough.
All these lesser grains have to have ad campaigns and health fads, barley is the goat and always in demand and so people over look it.
Oh, way to bury the lede.
> You can’t improve what you don’t measure. If you’re trying to get more fiber—or to optimize other heart health nutrients like saturated fat, sodium, and potassium—Empirical Health is designed to make tracking very easy.
You can’t improve what you can’t measure and our product coincidentally helps you measure this.
That's good that they "buried the lede", isn't it? Better than the product being mentioned early and often throughout the article.
No, because then you'd have wasted time reading what turned out to be ad copy.
I don't know about my physical health, but mentally I feel more calm / content when I eat fiber rich food. I partly understand that this is because fiber rich food ensures slower release of sugar, from the food you eat into your blood, preventing the sudden spike and fall you get in sugar levels from food with low fiber (most retail snacks and junk food). I can also assert that bowel movement does feel "good" with fiber in your diet. And you feel satiated faster, and for a longer period of time, with it.
Yep! Lustig has a book, Metabolical, that goes into kind of a simple explanation of the underlying mechanism here, and it's roughly like this: fiber-rich foods contain a combination of soluble and insoluble fiber, the insoluble fiber basically forms a sort of "net" of chunks and strings and such that you can't digest, and the soluble fiber forms a "gel" which gets stuck in the net and traps other foods. This gel is infused with various enzymes to break down foods in the duodenum, and then passes to the first and second half of the "zig-zag" parts of the small intestine -- the jejunum and the ileum.
The combination of fibers then leads to a given packet of calories traveling further down the jejunum as it gets absorbed, which makes more of the bacteria living along the length of the intestine happy with you, as well as protecting from blood glucose spikes that come with concomitant "crashes".
I am not saying that is wrong, but there are many mysterious claims in that book. I especially found the claim that "the most expensive burden to society is sugar" by a large margin was pretty astonishing. It lacks wide support in literature. As do many other claims in the book. Like refined carbohydrates being the main cause of weight gain through a rise in insulin. That is - at best - generally disputed, but is touted as fact.
I mean, what he prescribed is fine. Eat "real food". But how he comes to that stance is rather opaque to me. He is obviously literate, but checking some sources in the book very few of them strongly supported the claims he made with that reference.
> You can’t improve what you don’t measure
I hate the way this saying is commonly used today. I think a literal interpretation is untrue, but many people feel that a literal interpretation is true. For instance, humans get better at speaking whatever language they are surrounded with, even though that is not being actively measured by some metric. It is probably being measured by some implicit cycle in the human brain, but that is not the kind of explicit measurement that people would demand based on this saying. Some other examples that you can improve without an explicit measurement:
- Camera stability (you can usually "see" it immediately, without an engineering metric)
- Large changes in customer satisfaction (for fine tuning you probably need a metric, but for large changes, it will be obvious)
- Kindness
I'm not saying that measurement is purposeless. Just that it is not always necessary. Not everything needs to be measured. Also, why do generally smart people buy this platitude, when others will obviously not be taken as law? I don't see engineering orgs living by "closed mouths don't get fed", or "tidy desk, tidy mind", or "if momma ain't happy ain't nobody happy". But somehow "You can't improve what you don't measure" became law.
I realize this is only tangential. I guess I've been saving this rant for a while.
I agree with what you're saying; in the most extreme scenario you end up with the McNamara fallacy, and it's bizarrely common on e.g. HN. But I also think the platitude is appropriate in this case – I probably eat a decent amount of fibre, but is it enough? I don't really know. I'd need to measure it (and it's very possible I could be vastly under- or overestimating some things about my diet).
Super interesting to read! I have noticed a huge benefit from just adding Metamucil to my diet. The following lines from the article really resonate.
>Insoluble fibers have fecal-bulking characteristics that may promote regular bowel movements and avoid constipation.
>"Specifically, soluble fiber binds to bile acids in the intestine"
I have started to take Metamucil more frequently because I was taking an algae supplement, Spirulina & Chlorella, and it was moving through me so fast because I noticed I had no bulk from a low fiber diet. It made a huge improvement in bulking and slowed my bowel movements.
I also noticed before adding the fiber that I just would feel acidic, rude, or short-tempered in a different way, and my stomach was really acidic. Adding the fiber really did help, and it's cool to see articles and research backing it up.
I kind of wonder what the best form of added fiber should be.
The thing about metamucil is that it has either added sugar or artificial sweeteners. the main ingredient is psyllium husk.
I like benefiber better - no taste, just sprinkle on food. But I don't know how wheat dextrin compares to psyllium husk (or other fibers)
A nurse I talked to takes psyllium husk by itself, and I wonder if that is better than metamucil.
I avoided Metamucil for a long time, because "only old people use that."
Contempt without prior investigation and denial of my mortality is the true reason.
But once I started taking it I was sorely disappointed in myself that I did not start at least 10 years sooner.
Perhaps un-branded supplemental fiber is unburdened by the old people connotation? I probably still would have resisted.
I've tried various fiber supplements, mostly for avoiding constipation, but what I found really worked is bran flakes.
Did you have heartburn? I’m curious if adding Metamucil would help with that after hearing you feel less acidic.
I've started eating more avocado for its good oils, turns out it is high fibre too. My cholesterol readings have improved marginally, HDL slightly higher, LDL slightly lower.
The meta-analysis is of epidemiological data, which shows association, but since there is no intervention, cannot show causation and does not claim to. It does not distinguish an effect of fiber from healthy user bias.
Unfortunately, this is a limitation of nearly all nutritional studies.
Partly we use mechanistic evidence to separate cause from effect--that's part of why the article goes into detail about, e.g., how soluble fiber binds to bile in the liver. If there's an association between A and B, and a known physiological mechanism where A causes C which causes B, it makes it more likely that ultimately A is the cause of B.
It doesn’t, but we do have plausible mechanisms to explain the effect.
Fiber lowers LDL cholesterol, slows digestion, makes you feel full longer, and helps with regularity, so increasing your fiber intake is probably worth it anyway.
To be slightly obtuse, I've never understood these studies because overall mortality is 100%.
Yes, here "overall" is being used as a synonym for "from all causes" not "over the full length of your life," and there's this frustrating thing for those of us with physics educations where people frequently leave off a unit of time: so like if it's a 5 year study, and your all-cause mortality is lower by a factor of 20% over those 5 years, that means 80% survived and you should compute the fifth root 0.8^(1/5) to find that 95.6% survived per year on this account, and then you can say "reduces mortality by 4.4% per year," and that sounds much more reasonable.
This happens all over the place. You're just supposed to know in investment that a price-to-earnings ratio is measured in years, or people will say "the Buffett indicator is 200%" not "the Buffett indicator is 2 years."
Relatedly, microdosing with lactulose (which is very cheap) has a probiotic effect.
I personally macrodose on lettuce. Real cheap and easy to source.
Some of the most beautiful turds ever made, some would even the most beautiful
Just eat lots of beans and lentils. No need for an app or 'fiber gummies'
anything leafy as well, though those won't have the protein boost of legumes
I like to pair those with rice so their amino acids compliment each other.
Lettuce because I am lazy
It was only about five years ago I realized that pectin is a soluble fiber. My entire childhood is a lie. All that lovely jam and jelly was a delivery mechanism.
Does eating fiber by itself reduce mortality?
Or do healthy and wealthy people with active lifestyles and excellent healthcare happen to also eat more fiber?
Oh wow, I'm sure the authors of the meta study never considered that...
This is honestly a limitation of nearly all nutrition research -- it's based on observational data.
Part of the reason we expect fiber to reduce mortality, rather than simply being a marker of other factors correlated with mortality, is that we can identify physiological mechanisms. For example, for cardiovascular mortality, fiber reduces LDL cholesterol / ApoB which lowers heart attack and stroke risk.
Ask your doctor.
Fiber internet? Much happier outcomes, less stress, probably less death? :)
Funny how the first suggestion is supplements, the second whole foods.
what do I need to get my mortality up to 123%? I'm deadmaxxing
For who? The Inuit? The Chinese? Europeans? People with my ice age genetics? (Nope)
I despise studies that do not take genetics into account. Fiber made my cholesterol worse! The only thing that lowered my LDL and riased my HDL was a seafood only diet. Fiber flares my IBD, most likely from my NOD2 genetics[1][2].
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/35079107
[2] https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/22/4775
"IBD patients show that microbiota dysbiosis and diet, especially dietary fiber, can modulate its composition. These patients are more at risk of energy protein malnutrition than the general population and are deficient in micronutrients"
If you don't mind telling us, what fiber-rich food did you consume?
> Fiber made my cholesterol worse!
Interesting: what is the evidence for causality there? Might you have antibodies/allergies involved, for instance?
Nice anecdote, don't believe it for a second.
I mean, if you click on the first link you will open the paper they are summarizing[1]. It's a meta analysis of 64 studies, so you could certainly go through the studies and look at each population.
However, the actual answer is that all population studies are only gross generalizations that may not apply to you. They are often quite useful because the odds are generally good that they do apply...but it's never certain. Even if you are a member of the studied population your specific circumstances may overwhelm your populations norms.
Olipop ad?
(OP here) - no affiliation with Olipop. But we've tried all the fiber supplements around the office, and we found Olipop is a pretty palatable option compared to, say, psyllium husk (which forms a gel when combined with water).
am I the only one who thought this article was about fibre internet (from the title)?
No but I was hoping it was. Then insurance would pay for the roll out.
Back to the Dotcom bubble instead of AI?
yes
And here I am, stuck with only cable modem connectivity.
that's unfortunate since fiber has better bandwidth, congestion control and large packet support.