A chicken and broccoli stir fry looks like a plate of vegetables. Over white rice, it comes to about 5 grams of fiber. The broccoli, pepper and bok choy do their part. The cup of white rice has 0.6 grams and the chicken has none, and those two make up most of the plate. More…
Oatmeal has a big reputation as a fiber food. The bowl itself does less than you’d think. A cup of cooked oatmeal has 4.0 grams of fiber, according to USDA. Against a 30-gram day, that’s about an eighth. If you’ve been eating oats every morning and still coming up short, the bowl isn’t the problem….
You start eating a bowl of oatmeal every morning for your cholesterol, get retested three months later, and the number has barely moved. It is tempting to decide fiber doesn’t work. Check the dose first. The oat trials used at least 3 grams of beta-glucan a day, and the classic worked example is three servings…
Most chia-versus-flax articles end in a polite draw: both are “superfoods”, eat whichever you like. That is not an answer, and the numbers do not support a draw. Ounce for ounce, chia carries 9.8 grams of fiber and flaxseed 7.7. Chia also gets there on fewer calories. Flax wins something too, but it is not…
Most high-fiber food lists are either twelve items long or a wall of numbers per 100 grams that nobody eats. This one is fifty ordinary foods, each at the portion you would actually put on a plate. At the top, a cup of cooked navy beans carries 19.1 grams of fiber. A cup of brown…
Nuts have the strongest health reputation of anything in the snack aisle, so it comes as a surprise that they are middling for fiber. The best of them, the almond, carries 3.5 grams an ounce. An ounce of chia carries 9.8. They are still worth eating — an ounce of almonds is a real 3.5…
Seeds get sold as a single category — a spoonful of “seeds” on your porridge, whichever jar is open. For fiber they are not one category at all. An ounce of chia carries 9.8 grams of fiber. An ounce of hemp hearts carries 1.1. That is nearly a ninefold gap between two things that sit…
Swapping white rice for brown is the whole-grain upgrade almost everyone makes first, and it is a real one: a cooked cup goes from 0.6 grams of fiber to about 3.2. It is also nearly the smallest upgrade on offer. A cup of cooked bulgur carries 8.2 grams — two and a half times brown…
Ask which bean has the most fiber and most people say chickpeas. They are everywhere — in hummus, in every grain bowl, and in more of the recipes on this site than I would like to admit. By the cooked cup, chickpeas come twelfth out of twenty-one. The winner is the plain little white bean…
Most salads are the wrong shape for two jobs at once. A generous leafy bowl — two cups of romaine, a tomato, half a cucumber — comes to about 4 grams of fiber, and if you make it on Sunday for the week, it is wet lettuce by Tuesday. A dense bean salad solves both….
