Dietary fiber: analysis, physiology and calorie reduction

Abstract

For nutritionists and food scientists the 1970s and 1980s may well be termed the dietary fiber decades. The 1970s witnessed a sudden focusing by the medical research community on physiological implications of dietary fiber, attributable in large part to the work of two British doctors, Burkitt and Trowell. These investigators considered the differences in diet between Third World countries and Western European, and compared them with the differences in patterns of diseases in the two geographical areas. They concluded that the lower level of dietary fiber in our ‘civilized’ diet contributes to a long list of ills, ranging in severity from dental caries through hemorrhoids to obesity, colorectal cancer and coronary heart disease (Burkitt, 1973; Burkitt et al., 1974; Trowell, 1976; Trowell et al., 1985). This idea fired the imagination of numerous research groups; a survey report prepared by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) for the Food and Drug Administration in 1977 (Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology, 1977) listed approximately 100 literature references. A similar report (Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology, 1980), written only three years later, and limited to diseases of the gastrointestinal tract, contained about 300 references.