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Comment by dudisubekti

1 day ago

> not generalizable

But there's already a general advise on this: eat more fiber.

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2017/08/hunter-gather...

We're a great ape, our body evolved to process a lot of fiber from fruits and starches. It's the modern fiber-deficient diet that's really weird.

90g/day of fiber is similar to the Hadza tribe diet, where they can consume 100-150g of fiber per day.

18 comments

dudisubekti

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paimapi  16 hours ago

a starch is not fiber and generally not broken down the same way in digestion afaik

fiber is great and under-consumed (especially soluble) and is very well-studied on modern populations [0]. we don't really need to make mechanistic reasonings about evolutionary adaptations that occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago or rely on studies of a small, homogenized population whose lived realities are far from yours and mine

plus, following the the hierarchy of evidence, mechanistic guesses are considered extremely low quality, only ranking above things like mouse studies [1]

[0] https://www.uptodate.com/contents/healthy-diet-in-adults#H61... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_evidence

  • dudisubekti  15 hours ago

    Fair but resistant starch that we're speaking of behave more like soluble fiber:

    https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/carbohydrates/fiber...

    > Resistant starch – Soluble fermentable fiber found in legumes, unripe bananas, cooked and cooled pasta, and potatoes that acts as a prebiotic. Adds bulk to stools but has minimal laxative effect. May help to normalize blood sugar and cholesterol levels.

    For stronger studies, these guys have you covered: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK559033/

  • adrian_b  15 hours ago

    "Fiber" is a vague term that is used for the carbohydrates that cannot be digested by humans, so they reach the large intestine, where they are fermented by bacteria.

    This includes a part of the "resistant starch", which is poorly digested by humans, so a big part of it reaches the large intestine.

    So yes, the "resistant" starch counts as "fiber", but not all of it, because some part of it is hydrolyzed into glucose, which is absorbed.

    • paimapi  14 hours ago

      this is bordering on pedantry but aren't there classifications by different regulatory and medical institutions of what fibers are and aren't? as far as I'm aware, a starch isn't a fiber unless a special exemption is carved out for it and only if that starch meets certain criteria for how it behaves

      looking into RS's in general, it seems like there is a special carve-out after a lot of industry lobbying for very specific forms of RS's to be classified as fibers and only if they have physiological effects similar to the classic definition of fiber: https://www.fda.gov/media/113663/download

      for practical reasons, I suppose I'm just not understanding why you don't eat more 'classical' fibers. psyllium husk, for eg, which is cheap and effective and has been utilized as a digestive aid in Chinese traditional medicine for centuries (one of the few to survive rigorous empirical evaluation, naturally)

amanaplanacanal  19 hours ago

We shouldn't assume that because we are a great ape that we eat the same as other great apes. Humans spent two million years away from the jungle evolving in the savanna, with very different food sources. Our guts changed quite a bit in that time, and our digestion doesn't work the same.

  • dudisubekti  18 hours ago

    Good thing we're not just assuming, we're actually studying it too: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK559033/

    Also savannah human diet is chock full of fiber too: baobab pulp, grass seeds, tuber plants, etc

    • adrian_b  15 hours ago

      Their is no doubt that for millions of years the humans have eaten much less fiber than their ape ancestors.

      You just have to look to the belly of a healthy, non-obese human and compare it with the bellies of the apes. The bellies of the apes are much bigger, despite not having the fat of humans, because they have much longer intestines, which are packed in there, which are required for the fermentation of the large amount of fiber included in their diets.

      The intestines of humans are not so reduced as those of the obligate carnivores, but they are still much shorter than of most apes or monkeys.

      Our health is still dependent on eating a decent amount of "fiber", but the amount we need is not comparable with what an ape needs.

      2 replies →

iamacyborg  21 hours ago

Fiber’s the new fad supplement.

  • preg_match  17 hours ago

    Fiber is not a supplement, or at least it’s not just a supplement. It’s the primary thing that makes fruits and vegetables healthy.

    We’ve already known fruits and vegetables are healthy. Fiber is the reason why eating an orange is good, but drinking a glass of orange juice is about equivalent to a bottle of coke. That’s not an exaggeration, by the way, it’s about the same sugar content.

    If you want to eat the recommended 35g of fiber a day, you won’t be able to reach it with just supplements. You need to be eating fruits and vegetables at every meal. For my entire life, everyone has been saying to eat fruits and vegetables at every meal in large quantities.

    • halJordan  9 hours ago

      I think there's more to an orange than just fiber. And it's disingenuous to say there isn't, and hurts your credibility to say it. And you absolutely are saying that, no dithering or hem-hawing needed

  • arcanemachiner  21 hours ago

    I thought we were onto protein now?

    • adrian_b  14 hours ago

      Eating enough protein is also important, especially for older people, to prevent the loss of muscular mass, but that does not change the fact that the food must also include enough "fiber".

      The US had for a long time a much too low recommendation of around 0.8 g of protein per kilogram of body weight per day.

      That has been discredited by various studies. It is an amount that is sufficient to keep you alive, but it is not sufficient to keep you in good health until an old age.

      It is not known with any certainty which is the optimum amount of protein intake. On certain lab animals protein restriction lengthens life, but for now there is no evidence that this also works for humans. Too much protein is known with certainty to be harmful for humans.

      I believe that it is likely that the optimum protein intake is somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5 grams of protein per day and per kilogram of body weight, for a person with no overweight. For an overweight person, the protein needs do not increase proportionally to the total mass, i.e. the extra fat does not need much protein.

      I wonder whether the so low protein recommendation of USA was actually intended for average Americans, which are likely to be overweight, in which case that number might provide an adequate protein intake.