One simple dietary hack could make you vastly healthier

Fiber might just be the key to healthy weight management.

The research is clear — fiber is important not just for happy bowel movements but also for your blood sugar, weight, and overall health.

Fiber might just be the key to healthy weight management — and nature packages it in perfectly balanced ratios with carbs when you eat them as whole foods. Think unprocessed fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts, and seeds. Research suggests that carbohydrates are meant to come packaged in nature-balanced ratios of total carbohydrates to fiber. In fact, certain types of fiber affect how completely your body absorbs carbohydrates and tells your cells how to process them once they are absorbed.

Fiber slows the absorption of sugar in your gut. It also orchestrates the fundamental biology that recent blockbuster weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic tap into but in a natural way. Your microbiome transforms fiber into signals that stimulate the gut hormones that are the natural forms of these drugs. These, in turn, regulate how rapidly your stomach empties, how tightly your blood sugar levels are controlled, and even how hungry you feel.

It’s as if unprocessed carbohydrates naturally come wrapped and packaged with their own instruction manual for your body on how to digest them.

Guidelines recommend at least 25 to 30 grams of fiber a day from food.

It may not be surprising that lack of fiber contributes to diabetes and obesity. What is surprising is that the fiber gap also likely contributes to heart disease, certain types of cancer, and maybe even Alzheimer’s disease.

Research shows that limiting carbohydrates induces ketosis, a biological process that frees energy from fat reserves during starvation and prolonged exercise. Low-carbohydrate diets can also help people lose weight and lead to improvements in blood pressure and inflammation. FULL STORY from Inverse