Chapter 11. Avoiding the Perils of Transition

“In many cases, the toilet bowl predicts your future with more certainty than a crystal ball.”
Konstantin Monastyrsky, author

A low-fiber diet isn’t exactly chemotherapy. If anyone tells you otherwise and claims that a low-fiber diet isn’t safe, or can harm you, or that fiber is an essential nutrient, that person is misinformed.

Consider Japan, for example. It has the highest life expectancy among developed countries,[1] provides free health care to all of its citizens, and yet its health-care costs relative to gross domestic product are among the lowest—7.9% vs. 15% in the United States. This statistic is salient, because it means that the Japanese are much healthier than Americans, and need to spend half as much precious national resources to deliver, according to all accounts, superior medical care.

Anyone who has ever visited Japan, set foot in a Japanese restaurant, read Japanese cookbooks, or is partial to FoodTV, knows that Japanese cuisine—haute and casual alike—is about as low in fiber as it gets. Aside from white rice, which is the main source of carbohydrates for the Japanese, Japanese cooking is dominated by fish, seafood, white and red meats, tofu, and seaweed (0.5% fiber), which is used in salads and wraps.

One cup of cooked rice (186 g) contains just 0.56 g (0.3%) of fiber.[2] Even a prodigious eater, like a sumo wrestler, consumes less fiber from twelve cups of rice than the average five-year-old American from just one cup (59 g) of relatively benign (fiber-wise) Kellogg’s Raisin Bran (6.73 g of fiber, or 11.4%[3]).

Even though white rice is omnipresent, plentiful, and contains 54 g of carbs per one cup serving, the rate of obesity in industria­lized, modern Japan is 3.2%, compared to 30.6% in the United States.[4] The exceptionally low fiber content of the Japanese diet is one of the reasons behind this stunning 952% difference.

And if someone tells you that the Japanese are different from Americans, that it’s all in the genes—that’s not true, either. The genetic difference between an ethnic Japanese and a Caucasian or African-American is just 0.1%—not a big enough difference to attribute the low obesity rate among the native Japanese to genes alone.

Just a few generations ago, before the fiber menace hit Americans full-force, the obesity rate in the United States was almost as low as it is in Japan today. If that’s not proof enough for you, mo­dern-day Germany, Ireland, and Italy—the countries that provided the largest gene pool of white Americans—have, respectively, 12.9%, 12.0%, and 8.5% obesity rates.[5] Although these rates are higher than they should or used to be, they’re still nowhere near as high as the obesity rate in the United States. So much for genetics.

The obesity rate in Africa is even lower than it is in Japan, except among the very rich, who have adopted Western-style diets. But according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 48.8% of adult African-American[6] women are obese, com­pared to 30.7% of adult white women. This isn’t surprising. African-Americans also tend to consume more fiber-rich processed food than do Caucasians.

One diet, highly acclaimed for its high-fiber content from fruits, vegetables, and grains, is the famous Mediterranean diet. But lo and behold, the obesity rate in Greece today stands at 21.9%—not as high as 30.6% in the United States, but it’s catching up. Greece also happens to be one of the poorest and least developed countries in the European Union, hence the higher ratio of cheap and plentiful grain crops (a major source of fiber) in the after all not-so-healthy Mediterranean diet.

So pita bread and Greek salad are out, nori (dry seaweed wrap) and kaisou (seaweed salad) are in. But before you snap your chopsticks, your digestive organs must get reacquainted with a low-fiber diet.

The good, the bad, and the diet-breakers

If a low-fiber diet is safe, healthy, and effective, then why isn’t getting off a high-fiber diet a “piece of cake”? Because the consumption of fiber gradually alters the physiology of the digestive organs. And nobody knows the side effects of sudden fiber withdrawal as well as the untold millions of people who failed on the Atkins diet, which, at the very beginning, happens to be not just low-carb, but also fiber-free. Even Dr. Atkins himself failed with his own diet, and he died morbidly obese.[7]

All that being said, a low-fiber diet isn’t a low-carb diet, unless you consciously decide to reduce carb intake in order to lose weight, or to prevent and treat carbohydrate-related disorders, such as hypertension, diabetes, or kidney disease.

Let me emphasize this point again: a low-fiber diet has nothing in common with the Atkins diet, except that it is purposefully LOW IN FIBER. If you’re healthy and your weight is normal, you may stick with your usual diet, but just cut down on foods high in fiber, such as bran, whole-wheat bread, cereals, or beans. That’s really all you need to change. You may not even notice the transition, except that your stools will become noticeably smaller, and you may go down a size or two and lose five to ten pounds of weight, once your intestines expel fiber, water, and any fiber-laden stools “in transit”—the phenomenon already explained in Chapter 3, Atkins Goes to South Beach.

Unfortunately, as you may already know from health statistics and personal observation, disease-free and normal-weight people are a shrinking minority, and are more than likely not the readers of this book to begin with. So, should you decide to adopt a low-fiber diet for health, weight loss, or any other worthwhile reason, the following information should help you make the transition as trouble-free as possible.

This chapter addresses major conditions that may arise when fiber and carbohydrates are suddenly reduced. The most apparent side effects of fiber withdrawal are constipation and indigestion. Other challenges come from breaking a dependence on carbohydrates (which customarily accompany high-fiber food) without encountering the usual side effects of their withdrawal, such as hypoglycemia, dehydration, and malnutrition. Let’s begin with con­stipation—the undisputed champion of diet-breakers.

Constipation

The complete withdrawal of fiber from one’s diet reduces the daily volume of stools from the usual 400 to 500 g to under 100 g. As Chapter 5, Constipation, explained, 100 g or less of stools daily is considered normal, which makes 400–500 g abnormal, almost freakish. This anomaly isn’t just the outcome of consuming fiber, but also a symptom of chronic constipation, which can be either latent (hidden) or organic (from organ damage).