It all started with a boring, egg-head study about helping diabetics get more fibre. And it ended up as a breakthrough for us all. Scientists have discovered there’s a ‘right’ time of day to consume our re-commended dose of fibre…
We’ve been bombarded lately with mes-sages from the medical community to ‘up our daily fibre intake’. It’s now con-firmed to help with metabolic and gut issues, support hearth health, and – particularly – help control blood sugar. That’s pure gold for diabetics, whose entire problem is blood sugar control.
The problem with getting our fibre is, most of us don’t get enough in our daily diets – dominated as they are by Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs).
A new approach
But even those of us who consume ad-equate fibre may not be getting its full benefit.
A new study published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes) confirms that consuming more fibre holds significant benefits for diabetics.
But the overarching finding is, if we all want to get greater value from the fibre we consume, we need to consider the time of day we con-sume it! This new approach is expected to make it easier for everyone to up their fibre benefits without necessarily having to eat more fibre-rich foods.
What they did
According to an abstract of the study report, the authors divided the study participants into four equal-sized groups from lowest to highest fibre intake, and assessed their risk of developing type 2 diabetes over an average of 11 years’ follow-up.
The authors also undertook a data-mining analysis, in which they pooled the data from their EPIC-InterAct study with those from 18 other similar, independent studies (eight in the United States, four in Europe, three in Australia, and three in Asia).
What they found
They found that participants with the highest total fibre intake (more than 26 g/day) had an 18 per-cent lower risk of developing diabetes compared to those with the lowest total fibre intake (less than 19 g/day), after adjusting for the effect of other lifestyle and dietary factors.
Meanwhile…
Another, independent Cambridge University study found that when you consume your fibre may be just as important as how much you eat…
What they did
They set up a group of 19 healthy adults consumed two randomised 28-day weight loss (WL) diets, as higher-fibre (HFWL) or higher protein (HPWL), with all food provided.
Both WL diets were designed as 45 percent, 35 percent and 20 percent of calories to be consumed in the morning, afternoon and evening, respectively.
What they found
They discovered that both dietary and mechanical fibre consumed in the morning has multiple bene-ficial effects, especially on gut health. First, a fibre-rich breakfast can help control appetite through the morning, quelling cravings for sugar- and fat-rich ‘coffee break’ treats. But the’s also a follow-on effect in the lower gut, in which resident microbota ferment fibre to produce beneficial organic com-pounds called short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), produced by gut bacteria when they ferment dietary fibres.
My take
As I mentioned at the top of this post, most current versions of the ‘Western’ diet don’t provide suf-ficient daily fibre to meet our needs.
But these new studies suggest that eating more fibre and eating it at breakfast, can go a long way to bridging what doctors are calling the ‘fibre gap’…
~ Maggie J.