Eat more fiber. Eat less fat. Your parents or doctors have told you this many times before, but do you know why you should eat more fiber instead of more fat? A high fiber diet has many benefits that high fat diets do not offer.
Unlike a high fiber diet, a high fat diet causes weight gain, slower bowel movements, cholesterol and risk for different heart diseases.
Wait, what is fiber?
Fiber comes in foods like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains that are a necessity for our bodies to digest food in our digestive system. Fiber is the parts of foods that are indigestible. So when they pass through our digestive system, they push all the food down through the system.
Having some fat in your body is healthy but when you have a high fat diet, you take in too much fat. When you have a high fat diet, all or most of the food you intake has twice the calories of a normal diet.
For the way our body works, we intake fat and protein and we burn it off through the activities we do. But if you have a high fat diet, you never have enough energy to burn off the fat. Because your body cannot burn off the fat, it is stored in your belly which causes you to gain weight.
Unlike a high fat diet, a high fiber diet helps you lose weight. A high fiber diet is low in calories compared to a high fat diet. Because of the low calories, your body is easily able to burn off the fat and a high fiber gives you more energy to burn off that fat. A high fiber diet does not offer more energy. Basically, a high fiber diet decreases the chance of weight gain while a high fat diet increases the chance of weight gain.
What is the first thing you think of when you hear the word “fiber?” Well, what I think of first is that it aids with digestion and bowel movements of our bodies. While a high fiber diet aids with bowel movements and digestion, a high fat diet causes constipation or when something is hard to pass in our digestive system.
This is because when you eat fat, your metabolism slows, which causes weight gain and constipation. Fiber helps your bowel movements because when eating fiber, it attacks any watery nutrients passing through you digestive system and solidifies it to make it easier to pass throughout you bowel.
Without fiber, the nutrients passing throughout our bowel are watery and start to dry up in the bowel. Then they start to clump together which causes constipation. Fat increases constipation because it dries up faster and clumps together faster.
Fiber, along with decreasing your bowel movements, decreases your chances of getting hemorrhoids and small pouches in your colon. “Some fiber is fermented in the colon. Researchers are looking at how this may play a role in preventing diseases of the colon”.
Cholesterol is fat inside blood cells pumping in and out of your heart. When people have a high fat diet, they have a greater chance or risk of having high cholesterol. Why? Because when you eat food with lots of fat, the fat enters your bloodstream. And the more fat you eat, the more fat enters your bloodstream.
With this thought in mind, high cholesterol can increase the chances of having a heart attack or heart disease. A heart attack is when the fat in your bloodstream clogs a vein or artery leading or exiting to or from the heart.
Clogging a vein or artery is dangerous because it stops blood from coming in and out of the heart, and if there is no blood leaving or entering the heart, your heart stops. Unlike a high fat diet which increases your chances of having a heart attack and high cholesterol, a high fiber diet decreases your chances of having both.
When we eat fiber, especially soluble fiber, it lowers our cholesterol levels because it gets rid of the lipoproteins or “bad” cholesterol in our bodies.
Having a high fiber diet is better than having a high fat diet for many reasons. A high fiber diet reduces your chance of having weight gain and constipation, increases bowel movements, and reduces your chances of having a heart attack or a high cholesterol.
So, the next time you think about eating a hot fudge chocolate ice cream sundae or a basket of fried chicken and fries, think that of all the danger you could be putting on your body. Eat more fiber.