Here's a study that may surprise you.
In it, 63 subjects with constipation were placed on a LOW FIBER diet for two weeks. After those 2 weeks' time, they could then resume whatever fiber content in their diet they saw fit.
What happened?
All but 6 of them decided to stay on a zero or low-fiber diet. But only those who remained on the zero or low fiber diet experienced an improvement in their constipation.
And pretty significant improvements at that: the 41 subjects who stopped fiber completely went from an average of one "motion" every 3.75 days to 1 every day.
So eliminating fiber in the diet resulted in a major improvement in constipation.
Those who continued on the high fiber diet had no change in their constipation, experiencing an average of one motion every 6.83 days.
Some may also be surprised to learn that the idea that fiber was good for the bowels was first promoted by John Harvey Kellogg, who created his breakfast cereals to cure the two societal ills that he attributed to low dietary fiber: constipation and masturbation (I'm not making this up).
The rest is marketing history.
Fast forward to 2020 where the twin ideas that insufficient dietary fiber causes constipation and that increasing dietary fiber improves constipation are now taken by most as established fact.
The above study tells a much different story.
Yet, there are other studies that show that dietary fiber helps constipation. At least a little.
So what's the REAL answer here? Does fiber help? Or does it hurt? Which camp is right?!
Neither. And both.
The problem, and the source of confusion on so many issues about health, is that we're asking the wrong question.
And we continue asking the wrong questions over and over and over again...
Questions that only make sense if you pretend that the body isn't a complex, interrelated system. Questions that only makes sense if you aren't thinking holistically.
Because nothing, including fiber, exists in isolation. Everything has context - meaning the impact of fiber, or anything else we might choose to look at, depends entirely on all of the other gazillion factors that are also impacting our physiology at any moment, and that are all interacting with each other.
There are undoubtedly countless factors that impact the frequency of our "motions."
Yet, we don't even know what most of those factors are, much less have the ability to comprehend the complexity of those interactions.
It is never any one thing that matters.
It is always all the things that matter.
Slay the Beast!
Reference: Ho, Kok-Sun, Charmaine You Mei Tan, Muhd Ashik Mohd Daud, and Francis Seow-Choen. 2012. “Stopping or Reducing Dietary Fiber Intake Reduces Constipation and Its Associated Symptoms.” World Journal of Gastroenterology: WJG 18 (33): 4593–96.
I'm not surprised at all, but interesting read! If there's one thing I have learned with eating mostly fatty meat and fresh veggies, it's that I'm pooping great :) My family says that I'm a little smug about this, which is embarrassing but true. My impression is that the fat and magnesium make it all work very smoothly. Another thing is that on a standard diet I was a very smelly gass-passer, and that has gone away which is a side benefit I didn't expect. You have opened my eyes to the gut-brain connection. On the rare day that I don't have a happy gut, I am also likely to have a hurting head.