Chapter 12. The Low-Fiber Advantage

Your body is the only “authority” you can trust unconditionally. It lets you feel and evaluate the advantages of a low-fiber diet li­terally “by your gut.” If that’s not enough for you, or if it seems too subjective, consider comparing your past and current blood tests. You should observe a drop in your triglycerides and HbA1c (the av­erage amount of blood sugar over the past six to eight weeks), and most likely, a rise in your HDL (“good”) cholesterol.[1] If you want to investigate things even further, ask your doctor to review your past and present metabolic (kidney- and diabetes-related) and hepatic (liver-related) test results, and you should see them normalizing as well.

Just keep in mind that it takes years, perhaps decades, to develop diet-related health disorders. Hence, it would be nuts to expect that any diet—low-fiber or not—can magically undo all of the damage in a day, a week, or even a year. Still, all things considered, getting better, even slowly, is a far better option than getting nowhere.

So what’s so magical about a low-fiber diet? In a nutshell, two things: (1) it makes the digestive process quick and efficient, and (2) it’s naturally low in carbohydrates. Here’s a brief summation of its most important advantages. First, in terms of your digestion:

The impact of a low-fiber diet on the digestive process is recogniz­able from the relatively rapid reduction of functional (re­versible) side effects caused by excess fiber: the disappearance of heartburn (because there is less indigested food inside the sto­­mach), the absence of bloating (because there is less bacterial fermen­tation), the easy passing of stools (because the stools are smaller), the reduction of hemorrhoids (because there is less strain­ing), and the gradual vanishing of nagging abdominal discomfort (because of all of the above). You can’t miss these signs.

The progress doesn’t end with just the relief of side effects: as the quality of digestion improves, your body begins to absorb more essential nutrients from pretty much the same diet you consumed be­fore, because fiber is no longer there to impede their assimila­tion. The improved availability of nutrients accelerates tissue regen­eration throughout the body, rejuvenates the endocrine sys­tem, and increases the output of digestive enzymes. This, in turn, ac­celerates the healing of the digestive organs, which in turn im­proves digestion, and in turn accelerates the healing... well, you get the picture.

This process of recovery is the direct opposite of the harm fiber causes. The harm starts with fiber’s interference with digestion: as digestion becomes less efficient, so does the body’s ability to resist harm. As the harm increases in scope, digestion becomes even less efficient, and the harm more apparent. This step-by-step decline of health accelerates with aging. Therein lies yet another important ad­vantage of the low-fiber diet:

A Low-Fiber Diet Decelerates
Age-Related Decline

The decline may be slow and imperceptible in the case of young people, and precipitous and apparent in older people, but the as­pects of the decline caused by fiber come to a halt the moment you stop overconsuming it.

I emphasize this point to instill a dose of optimism in you: it doesn’t matter how old you are, nor does it matter how far this or that disorder has progressed. What really matters is that as soon as you take action, you put a stop to the self-inflicted downfall, be­cause you remove one of its most prominent causes. This in itself, even when complete recovery may not be feasible, is worth the ef­fort.

Diseases aside, the impact of fiber’s reduction on satiety is yet an­other important advantage of the low-fiber diet. While appetite makes you want to eat, a lack of satiety causes you to overeat. The mechanisms behind satiety are mainly physiological—you don’t feel satisfied from eating until the stomach is filled to a certain ca­pacity. That’s why stomach-reduction surgeries are so effective for morbidly obese people: after surgery they need just a fraction of food to feel “stuffed.”

But we aren’t actually born with huge, hungry stomachs. They stretch out gradually as we keep filling them with a high-bulk diet. In fact, fiber advocates hawk this phenomenon as an advantage: fi­ber fills you up and promotes satiety, they claim. But that’s a devil’s benefit, as each new “fill-up” keeps stretching your sto­mach a teeny bit more, so that the next time around you need a teeny bit more food to fill it to satiety again. Do this for some years, and eventually you “grow” a stomach that’s indeed hard to please. This is yet another aspect of fiber addiction.

Fortunately, it also works in reverse: as soon as you stop consum­ing a high-fiber diet, your stomach begins to gradually shrink in size, and with each new meal you’ll need less and less food to feel satisfied. All this without a gastric bypass (GBP) or a stomach band (LAP-BAND®) squeezed around it—the two most popular surgi­cal options to reduce the stomach’s capacity and “speed up” sa­tiety.

The advantages of a low-fiber diet don’t stop with just no longer overeating. Here’s a brief recap of its other undeniable benefits: