Modern agriculture and the food industry have provided people with a large number of nutritious and delicious foods, but the incidence of certain diseases has increased. In developed countries, overweight and obesity have become a common phenomenon, and the incidence of diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, myocardial infarction, stroke, etc. has risen significantly.
Dietary fiber is very beneficial to the body. In this context, in addition to dieting to lose weight, people have turned their attention to another type of substance, namely "dietary fiber". From a nutritional perspective, these substances are "waste" and cannot provide nutrients for the human body. So why do we still eat them? Medical research has found that they play many "beneficial" roles in the gastrointestinal tract. They are large in size and can produce a "feeling of fullness", reduce food intake, and help with weight loss; they can promote gastrointestinal motility, prevent constipation, and accelerate defecation, thus removing old feces and reducing the incidence of colorectal cancer; they are conducive to the growth of "friendly" intestinal bacteria, promote vitamin synthesis, and reduce toxins produced by "bad" bacteria... It is precisely because they are so important to human health that dietary fiber is called the "seventh nutrient" in addition to the "six major nutrients" of protein, fat, sugar, vitamins, water, and inorganic salts.
In fact, from an evolutionary perspective, this is not surprising at all. Over the millions of years of human evolution, our ancestors, in addition to hunting, also collected various edible parts of plants, including roots, stems, leaves, flowers, fruits, and seeds, which contained abundant "dietary fiber". In other words, "dietary fiber" was originally a "normal component" of our ancestors' diet. Our ancestors' bodies also adapted to this situation, developing corresponding digestion and absorption mechanisms and intestinal bacterial systems, and "recording" this situation in human genes. The emergence of "modern society" and the changes in human diet have only occurred over a short period of a few decades. "Dietary fiber" has gradually decreased in people's diet, but human genes have not had time to change and are still digesting and absorbing food in the same way as before. This is the root cause of various diet-related diseases. Now people are paying more attention to the role of "dietary fiber", but it is just a "return" to the past natural state.