Screw You, Fiber
Friday, April 17, 2009 at 7:30PM 
We already know that when put under a microscope fruits and vegetables aren't so great, but what about fiber? In my vegan days I considered myself quite the fiber superstar. While the RDA recommended a poultry 20-25 grams per day, I consumed 40-50 grams a day from veggies and fruits. By mainstream health authority standards I was kicking ass. While I marveled at my accomplishment I couldn't help but feel conflicted. I was secretly constipated and feeling terrible.
Where did I go wrong? Too much fiber? Not enough fat? Both? To understand the gravity of how badly I was screwing up my body, we have to understand what fiber is, why it's not needed, and most importantly; why it can be harmful to ones health.
Fiber is the indigestible roughage of plants and grains. In short humans do not have a digestive enzyme to breakdown fiber, so it collects (ferments) with bacteria in the colon until it's excreted.
Here, Lex Rooker has a short Q & A about fiber on the Raw Paleo Forum.
Q: I eat lots of raw fruit and veggies so I get lots of fiber.
A: I did this for a while thinking that fiber was important to proper elimination. After converting to a diet of only meat and fat, I've now come to believe that fiber is really bad for our intestines and that we were never designed to eat much of it. There have been studies showing that the conventional wisdom that fiber "sweeps like a broom" and helps prevent colon cancer is total nonsense. There is actually a slightly higher rate of colon cancer on a high fiber vs low fiber diet. The rates of Crohn's Disease, IBD, and Ulcerative Colitis, on the other hand, have reached epidemic proportions on a high fiber diet but very rare on low fiber diets. Fiber is more like sandpaper and irritates the bowels making things worse not better.
Q: I think lots of fibrous foods is very Paleo (Hunter/Gatherer).
A: My research and experience have brought me to the opposite conclusion (in regards to high fiber diet). I've attempted to live off the land eating carbs and found it next to impossible. Wild fruits and veggies are nothing like what you find in your local market. Wild fruits are small, mostly seed, and usually very tart and often down right sour. Wild vegetables are tough, stringy, very bitter and pretty much indigestible. Even the acorns that the local Natives used as a survival food when game was scarce is so bitter from tanic acid that they must be ground and then the "flour" soaked in hot water to make them edible. Even the birds won't eat them. The woodpeckers get the acorns that have insect larvae in them, store them in cracks and then come back when the larvae have matured, crack the acorn and eat the larvae.
The Journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition don't support your conclusion as related to Native North American Indians as they much preferred meat to any other food source. Carbs were a survival option only. The lastest anthropological studies of protein tracers in the bones of pre-neolithic man show that they ate a diet composed in excess of 95% red meat from terrestrial animals - almost zero carbs - thus zero "fiber".
Q: This doctor on the Oprah show talked for a half hour about poop. If the crap stagnates in your gut it can cause medical problems.
A: I used to believe this myth also, however when eating very low carb diet this does not seem to be the case and actually the opposite is true. Remember that our doctors and clinics are dealing with people who have been eating a carb based diet and have zero experience with people eating a meat and fat based diet. Meat and fat are both fully digested with very little waste and almost no nutrients in the waste to support large colonies of bacteria in the gut. Carbs, and especially fiber, are indigestible and leave a large nutrient load in the gut providing firtile ground for bacteria and fungus to grow.
I once read (though can't remember where as it was many years ago) that bacteria and fungus make up almost 80% of the bulk in the bowel movement of a person eating a high carb diet rich in fiber. On a meat diet our bodies efficiently extract all the nutrients from the food leaving little for bacteria and other critters to survive on. This substantially lowers the bulk of the stools of a meat eater compared to someone eating significant carbs.
The High Fiber theory just doesn't hold water when you leave the supermarket and try to exist on truly wild foods, especially when you consider that there were no pots and pans in paleo times so boiling water to soften otherwise inedible food was not possible. Go out into the woods sometime with a sharp stick and some rocks. Go ahead and take matches for fire but no shovels, pots, pans, dishes, or cutlery-including knives. This is what paleo man was faced with. See what plant based food you can find. I think you'll discover that taking down large animals is the only practical solution.
The idea that carbs were a significant part of our human diet throughout history comes from researchers and professors, sitting in their climate controlled offices munching "healthy" sugar soaked "whole grain" granola bars loaded with "candied" bits of fruit.
Let's finish this post with some more Bear. I acquired a quasi-book he wrote a while ago and feel that he sums up the issue pretty well.
Running fibrous, non nutritive material (let alone toxic) through the gut causes the body to produce copious mucus which interferes with nutrient absorption, and over years produces the scar tissues in the bowels responsible for the poor nutrition of the elderly, a serious problem in many individuals.
Fiber is a very BAD idea, as it is not nourishing, and it is very irritating to the delicate and fragile mucosa of the intestines, which must be very thin to allow the rapid absorption of the soluble substances which nourish us. You will develop mucus coating on the lining in the short term from eating such rubbish, and in the long term the mucosa will develop scar tissue. This is not a good thing and can lead to malnutrition even with plenty of food intake, a condition very widely noted among the elderly.
You have no need to ingest it for "regularity" as you will NEVER be constipated on a meat diet, it just is not possible unless you indulge in a lot of cheese. The diet is a HIGH-FAT, not high protein diet, and the fat caloric content should be kept above 50% of calories. Of course you can eat a lot of protein, but this is no problem in this diet. Most MD's have never seen anyone on a total carnivorous diet in their entire professional life, and all of the "suggestions" and warnings such as the kidney thing are based on mixed diets and conjecture.
Rubbish passing through your intestines doesn't "absorb" anything (except the digestive juices which cannot digest it)! That is the biggest pile of crap I have heard yet! Your intestine is an organ which absorbs nutrients in the small portion and excretes in the large portion. The only source of "toxins" would have to be in your food, so don't eat poisonous food, and you will have NO toxins in your body! Your body produces only wastes, not toxins.
If you are sick and fighting some disease, then your body would be throwing off lot of somewhat "toxic" rubbish (bacteria do create toxins), but the intestine is designed for that, otherwise you wouldn't shit. Fiber has no value in the diet, it only causes damage to your sensitive internal organs. The bacteria in your intestines are much less and more benign without carb residues to feed them, so the likelihood of having toxic stuff in your intestines as a meat eater is a non-event. It is a scam that was invented to allow the cereal industry to sell the indigestible potion of the grain at food prices, rather than as a byproduct to the cardboard manufacturing industry.
Danny Roddy
Dr. Mike Eades, author of Protein Power, recently had this to say about fiber:
The dark side of fiber
You just about can’t read anything these days without hearing the virtues of fiber extolled. It seems that fiber is on everyone’s good list. Even low-carb and Paleo diet advocates go to the trouble of making all aware that their diets contain plenty of fiber. No one has anything bad to say about it.
Well, I do. I can’t let one of these odds and ends posts end without linking to one of my own favorite posts from back in the days when I had only three readers.
Take a look here at a post about a pretty good study showing how fiber really exerts its effects.
My slogan has become: Fiber...who needs it?
Danny Roddy
Good Calories, Bad Calories has a whole chapter devoted to how the fiber hypothesis came into fruition. It's in this chapter we learn about the father of the fiber hypothesis, Denis Burkitt. Burkitt stole Cleave's carbohydrate hypothesis and reshaped it to fit his beliefs. Instead of an addition to the diet causing chronic disease, Burkitt suggested that a deficiency of fiber was to blame.
Sadly Burkitt didn't have the science on his side; we have far too many examples of epidemiological evidence that a deficiency of fiber does not cause disease. The Masai, Samburu, the Native Americans of the Great Plains and the Inuit seemed to get along quite well with out the indigestible roughage.
If you don't have a copy of GCBC, Charles Washington has taken the time to summarize all the chapters.
Here are a few quotes from his summary.
"Burkitt’s fiber hypothesis was based originally and in its entirety on Cleave’s saccharine-disease hypothesis but rather than claiming that the diseases of civilization were based on an addition to our diet, he argued that they were based on the subtraction of the fiber from those evolutionarily ideal diets. This subtraction led to constipation and ultimately to the diseases of civilization. This fiber deficiency was caused by either the removal of fiber during the refining of carbohydrates or by the consumption of refined-carbohydrates in lieu of the fibrous bulky roughage we should have been eating.
The fiber and refined carbohydrate hypotheses were photographic negatives of each other but the fiber hypothesis caught on immediately upon appearing in the journals even though the refined-carbohydrate hypothesis was the only one of the two capable of explaining the actual evidence. The fiber hypothesis was consistent with Keys’ hypothesis whereas Cleave’s and Yudkin’s was not. It resonated with the nation’s countercultural leanings toward diets heavy in vegetables, legumes and cereal grains.""Burkitt theorized that removing the fiber from cereal grains would slow the “transit time” through the colon thus providing more time to inflict damage on the surrounding cells but it was conceivable that the over consumption of refined carbohydrates would increase the bacterial flora of the stool and that in turn could lead to carcinogens being metabolized by the bacteria out of “normal bowel constituents.” Burkitt could offer no explanation for why this might cause appendicitis but he was confident (read: believed) that some combination of all these factors played a role."
"It’s important to remember while reading this book that science and the scientific method have been invoked to show how unscientific this whole business is. The conventional wisdom on diet and nutrition is based on such flimsy evidence and golf course deals over lunch. It’s built on observations in the market place and assumptions and pure dogma. It is hardly based on anything scientific. It gets me riled up each time I review this chapter."
Danny Roddy
More on fiber and mineral availability by Stephen at Whole Health Source.
"Mainstream health authorities are constantly telling us to eat more fiber for health, particularly whole grains, fruit and vegetables. Yet the only clinical trial that has ever isolated the effect of eating a high-fiber diet on overall risk of death, the Diet and Reinfarction Trial, came up with this graph:
Oops! How embarrassing. At two years, the group that doubled its fiber intake had a 27% greater chance of dying and a 23% greater chance of having a heart attack. The extra fiber was coming from whole grains. I should say, out of fairness, that the result wasn't quite statistically significant (p less than 0.05) at two years. But at the very least, this doesn't support the idea that increasing fiber will extend your life. I believe this the only diet trial that has ever looked at fiber and mortality, without also changing other variables at the same time.
Why might fiber be problematic? I read a paper recently that gave a pretty convincing answer to that question: "Dietary Fibre and Mineral Bioavailability", by Dr. Barbara F. Hartland. By definition, fiber is indigestible. We can divide it into two categories: soluble and insoluble. Insoluble fiber is mostly cellulose and it's relatively inert, besides getting fermented a bit by the gut flora. Soluble fiber is anything that can be dissolved in water but not digested by the human digestive tract. It includes a variety of molecules, some of which are quite effective at keeping you from absorbing minerals. Chief among these is phytic acid, with smaller contributions from tannins (polyphenols) and oxalates. The paper makes a strong case that phytic acid is the main reason fiber prevents mineral absorption, rather than the insoluble fiber fraction. This notion was confirmed here."
Danny Roddy
I didn't realize that Peter over at Hyperlipid had done all the work for me.
While I was hunting said paper I hit on the PPT (Polyp Prevention Trial). This was another mega intervention trial along the lines of WHEL in breast cancer. I had the temerity to click on the "related articles" link and all of the papers poured out. Significant increases in all of the politically correct stuff, sustained with INCREASING compliance over 4 years. Fat was down at close to 20% of calories with at least 7 servings of plants a day. Enough fiber you wouldn't want to share an enclosed space with an intervention participant for too long. Obviously produced diddly squat improvement compared to no intervention by four years, so they followed for eight years. You can't say that this belief structure doesn't engender persistance! More diddly squat at eight years.
"Despite the current healthy diet lobby there were no claims of increased (or decreased) fibre intake by patients or control subjects"
The clear association of ulcers with sucrose was interesting. The total lack of protection from cereal fiber was too (sorry, lack of negative association). But the best bit was vegetable fiber. This was slightly "protective". Until you corrected for social class (and a few other things), at which point the association was lost. Looks a bit suggestive that vegetable fiber intake might just be a surrogate for being more well off.
Another throw away comment from Nottingham in the late 1980s was that Crohn's disease is consistently associated with high refined sugar intake. I think I've seen quite a number of studies coming to that conclusion. But surely sucrose (or HFCS for that matter) can form part of a healthy balanced diet...
Lactobacillus casei strain Shirota is pretty interesting according to the company which sells it. Lovely graphics on the homepage BTW. How much did the web site cost? I guess nothing compared to their TV advertising budget.
But are they needed anyway? Two interventions which do work are compared, by Dr Hunter again, here:
Metronidazole (an antibiotic aimed at anaerobic lower bowel bacteria) is pretty good, reducing peak gas production from 671ml/min to 422ml/min. Obviously no one wants to take metronidazole long term in view of its serious interaction with alcohol and its occasional neurological toxicity. But it makes a fairly convincing case that the problem is a bacterial problem. What do bacteria eat that humans cannot digest? Fiber.
So the other intervention is a no-fiber diet. Peak gas production dropped from 564ml/min to 205ml/min. This looks to be very effective and very interesting.
Both improved symptoms. As fiber is of no use to humans and it appears to feed the bacteria that cause IBS, including good old klebsiella, you have to wonder where the medical fascination with fiber comes from...
We all know where fiber ends up, why suffer the gut problems it causes as it gets there?
Reader Comments (13)
Yep, fiber did a number on me a couple of years ago. I was averaging about 30 gm/day. Had horrible IBS then swelling and pain in my lower, right abdomen. I had to do a colon cleanse before a scheduled colonoscopy. After the procedure, the swelling/pain was gone, I eliminated all fiber from my diet, went to VLC, and have felt fantastic with no problems since!
Hey Deedum, thanks for the comment.
My experience echoes yours. The less fiber in my diet the more my bowels stayed moving. As you know, it's all about the fat!
I always had digestive issues until I started low-carb. I'm not up for zero-carb just yet, I'm weak! ;)
I've been meaning to ask, where does vitamin C come into play in a carnivorous diet? I'm not trying to poke holes in it, I actually agree with it and have seen a lot of people have excellent results with it, but I'm just wondering.
Thanks for the comment Ms. V!
It's truly life changing. You should give it a go once you're ready.
I should definitely do a post on vit c, but the short of it is that meat contains a small amount of vitamin c.
Since glucose blocks vitamin C at the cellular level it would take a lot of vitamin C to enter the cell on a high carb diet.
Since we eat VLC or ZC the vitamin C is free to enter the cell without battling glucose.
In the book Not By Bread Alone, it outlines that sailors who ate fresh meat were cured of scurvy (vitamin C deficiency)and those who ate fruits were not.
Excellent post
Thanks Anthony!
Doesn't fish skin have lots of c-vitamin in it?
Thanks for commenting Lisa,
I'm not up to speed on the nutrient values of fish skin, but meat usually contains a small amount of Vitamin C. I have a post on Vitamin C and scurvy a couple pages back if you're interested. I explain more of my thoughts there.
Useful info. Psyllium husk appears to be useful if one is detoxing as it can bind toxic bile and escort it out of the body. Your thoughts?
Thanks for commenting Timo,
My understanding is that bile acids and cholesterol do most of the dirty work.
"Neurotoxins are transported throughout the body attached to protein components of lipoproteins, and therefore require cholesterol for their transport and elimination. These neurotoxins also have a strong affinity for lipoidal tissue of the nervous system and brain. A rise in cholesterol levels and triglycerides in response to neurotoxins protects by preventing permanent attachment of the neurotoxin to the nerve and brain cells. Symptoms of neurotoxicity are most likely to occur when the cholesterol is lowered suddenly or when the affected patient goes on a low-fat, low-cholesterol, low-protein diet."
"In a human trial, a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet was compared to a low-protein, high-carbohydrate diet. The researchers found greater clearance of toxins with the high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet and diminished clearance when the ratio was reversed.33,34 To utilise the protein correctly, the fat on the "lamb" needs to be eaten. The use of additional butter or lard in cooking is of paramount importance. By having adequate fat, bile production is stimulated, absorption of minerals increased and the excretion of mercury facilitated as long as constipation is avoided."
http://www.westonaprice.org/envtoxins/mercury.html
Fiber in my experience, equaled a big bag of constipation. Do you find that it helps you? What are you trying to "detox" from?
Hi Danny,
I'm interested to find out more about the excretion of toxins in bile. My understanding is that most bile, even if it contains toxins such as heavy metals, is reabsorbed at the end of the small intestine.
"The human liver can produce close to one litre of bile per day (depending on body size). 95% of the salts secreted in bile are reabsorbed in the terminal ileum and re-used. Blood from the ileum flows directly to the hepatic portal vein and returns to the liver where the hepatocytes reabsorb the salts and return them to the bile ducts to be re-used, sometimes two to three times with each meal."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bile
I believe that poor bowel, thyroid and liver function are quite common. People suffering with these problems have likely been accumulating toxins for sometime. If the body burden of toxic metals is high it is of high priority to get them out pronto. If one attempts a high animal foods, high fat diet the ability of the body to mobilize and then excrete toxins in bile is increased for various reasons including a higher intake of nutrients available to assist the detox process and also because fat stimulates bile as you quoted. However, my observations and research tell me that the toxins can easily be reabsorbed in the intestine. The result is peoples health may actually worsen.
Psyllium appears to be a bile acid sequestrant, so it can theoretically be useful to prevent reabsorption of bile. I have attempted low carb before and found it very difficult. I was extremely fatigued among other things. This time I am taking psyllium husks before meals and doing daily enemas. Adapting to low carb has been a breeze. It may not be cause and effect but it may well be. I may try discontinuing the psyllium but staying with the enemas.
I'm going to venture a rather private question, how is your bowel function?
I am now very low carb. I eat beef, lamb, chicken, fish, shellfish, organ meats, eggs and butter. I eat oysters, liver and fish raw. I am unsure about raw dairy, which seems to be gaining momentum with health concious people. I consume lemons for Vit C.
I value talking to someone with interests similar to mine.
Tim
Hey Tim,
Very good question.
My experience with a low-no carbohydrate diet (and more recently pemmican) has been a roller coaster. When I started eating meat only, I still had elimination problems. With pemmican I have never had any issue whatsoever. Elimination is once every couple days and has considerable less odor than it use to have.
As for your excellent bile acid questions, I don't have a solid answer. From my notes (which are sadly unreferenced) I have gathered this info:
"The liver removes toxic and metabolic waste products from the body by converting then to water-soluble compounds that can be excreted in the urine. Those substances that are not water-soluble are transformed by the liver and excreted in the bile, a substance used for this purpose and for the digestion of fats. The bile is then transported into the intestines where it is eliminated in the feces. Toxins not completely removed by either one of these processes may be eliminated through the skin (fat soluble compounds are excreted in sweat), or lungs. Toxins that remain in the body accumulate in the adipose (fat) tissue and nerve cells, contributing to a wide range of degenerative conditions."
For me fiber equaled constipation, if it helps to bind and eliminate toxic substances, it's kind of a moot point because I wasn't eliminating in the bathroom.
A question I have is: If bile is bound to toxic debris, is it always escorted out into the feces? Perhaps someone with more knowledge on the digestion track can enlighten me.
I remember reading somewhere that healthy intestinal flora are needed to prevent absorption of bile toxins by changing them so that they are eliminated. I have discontinued the psyllium and I am including small amounts of sauerkraut and yoghurt. I will monitor my progress.
Reading the Fiber Menace website also led me to this decision:
http://www.fibermenace.com/
Thanks for the info,
Tim