Using MyfitnessPal I logged every calorie I ate for the last year and a half. It didn’t take long to realize that I do not eat nearly enough fiber, typically about 8-18 grams daily. I know that I am not alone! Even when I added lots of fruits and vegetables to my diet I seldom ate 20 grams of fiber and never the daily recommended 38 grams!
So I started to investigate why. The bottom line is that my intuition about fiber was wrong. I thought that if I ate 5 servings of fruits and vegetables a day I would get the fiber I needed. What I learned is that the things that I thought were giving me fiber really weren’t.
For example salads:
kale (2.4g per cup), romaine lettuce (1g per cup), raw broccoli (0.6g per 1/2 cup), celery (0.8 g for 1/2 cup), carrots (1.8 g for 1/2 cup)
That is a huge salad, with 3.5 cups of vegetables, but it only has 6.6 grams of fiber!! Can you imagine needing to eat 6 salads that size every day?
How about fruits?
D’anjou pear (6g), medium apple (4.4g), medium size banana (3.1g), Mango (3g for 4 oz), raspberries (2.6g for 1/3 cup), cherries (1.5g for ½ cup)
If I eat 3 pieces of fruit I might get another 9 – 13.5 grams of fiber.
Now you start to see the problem. Even when you get the “5 servings a day of fruits and vegetables” (in my example a big salad with kale and raw broccoli and 3 pieces of fruit) it only accounts for 15.6 – 20g of fiber. This only about halfway to the 38 grams recommended. And let’s be honest, how many of us manage to have even that much fruit and vegetables daily?
I decided that I needed to add power foods for fiber to be able to get close to the recommended daily 38g of fiber.
My favorites choices are chia seeds (5g for 1 tablespoon), popcorn (4g for 2 cups), almonds (4g for a ¼ cup), avocados (5g for half a medium avocado), and dark chocolate (2g for an ounce). I am not super fond of oats (4g for 0.2 cup) or various beans (3g for ¼ cup garbonzo), but from time to time I have these, so I thought I might mention them for those who like them.
Most days I make a smoothie (from various fruits) and add a tablespoon of chia seeds (5g fiber). Then if I also have a snack of either popcorn or almonds (4 g fiber) and have an ounce of dark chocolate (2g of fiber in a dessert!!!), I have added 11 grams of fiber to my diet. If you add half an avocado to your salad you get another 5 g.
To be honest I still seldom get to 38 grams of fiber in a day, but I am a lot closer now, and still eating foods I love!!
(A warning about almonds: they are high in oxalate. If you have trouble with kidney stones then having a lot of these all at once might not be a good choice. But you can spread them out over the day safely.)
Atheist to Elder 