Fiber

By: Keri Peterson, MD — If you suffer from diabetes, you likely have had to make some changes in your lifestyle. Exercising more often and watching your diet are cornerstones of managing your blood sugar levels. Learning about carbohydrates and how much of them you get in your diet are...

Fiber has recently received increased recognition as a vital component of a healthy diet, and with good reason. “Fiber has many beneficial effects including lowering cholesterol, reducing blood sugar levels and decreasing risk of heart disease,” says Dr. Keri Peterson, an internal medicine specialist who focuses on preventing, diagnosing, and...

Most of us have heard we need to add more fiber in our diet. But did you know fiber can help build healthier hearts? Three of fiber’s properties are at the core of heart health: solubility, viscosity and fermentability. Solubility The ability of fiber molecules to dissolve in water is...

Robyn Flipse, MS, MA, RDN Research on the eating habits of Americans shows that our consumption of “foods away from home”* has been steadily rising since 1987. The amount of household food budgets spent on foods away from home surpassed the amount spent for “food at home” in 2010 when...

—Robyn Flipse, MS, MA, RDN Food shopping today is very different from just 50 years ago when shoppers pushed a cart up and down the six to eight parallel aisles of a grocery store that only sold food.  Supermarkets now cover over 45,000 square feet and offer everything from the food...

 By Rosanne Rust, MS, RDN, LDN — Fiber is an important dietary component. It serves both the food industry as a functional additive, and also provides benefits to human health. When you think of fiber, you may think of naturally occurring fibers that add “bulk” to the diet (foods like...