Missing Ingredient
In American Diets

Where's the fiber?

Handy and quick, Quaker Oatmeal Breakfast Squares cereal bars hit the market as an alternative to traditional oatmeal. The Brown Sugar Cinnamon type has two grams of fiber -- half the fiber in a small bowl of Quaker's old-fashioned oatmeal.

Kellogg's Frosted Flakes milk-and-cereal bars have only 1% of the recommended daily dose of fiber, compared with 3% in a serving of the original flakes. Campbell's Supper Bakes Garlic Chicken with Pasta, a boxed dinner mix promising "Easy 5-Minute Prep," offers two grams of fiber per serving, the same as two Snickers bars. A medium apple, by contrast, has about four grams of fiber.

From breakfast to dinner, fiber is disappearing from the American diet, as high-margin, eat-on-the-go packaged foods replace basic foodstuffs. On one level, fiber has been on its way out for decades, through the high-speed processing of raw commodities such as fruit and grain. But its disappearance is being hastened now, as a side effect of the food-industry's drive to develop snacks and easy-to-prepare dishes to replace what used to be called square meals.

REFINED DINING Diverticulitis: Link to Low Fiber

The fiber erosion is occurring just as experts are warning of a critical fiber deficiency in the U.S. After the flash-in-the-pan fiber craze of the late 1980s, fiber's reputation took a hit amid conflicting research into its role in preventing colon cancer. But studies this year have underscored the connection, and now the national scarcity of dietary fiber is being more carefully scrutinized for its role in everything from heart disease to obesity to diverticulitis, a rapidly growing intestinal disease.

"The diets we consume are highly processed and depleted in fiber, and that has a major adverse impact on health," says Edward Giovannucci, associate professor of medicine at Harvard University's school of public health.

Warning that Americans are eating only about half the 25 grams of fiber they need daily, the American Dietetic Association says persuading people to eat more fiber-rich plant foods could have a "significant impact on the prevention and treatment of obesity, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes." (Insufficient fiber also has been linked to rising U.S. rates of diverticulitis. See related article.)

High-fiber foods, including many fruits and vegetables, act as an appetite suppressant, helping slow the absorption of nutrients in the gut and leaving a person feeling full longer and less likely to overeat. Weight Watchers International Inc. encourages dieters to eat higher-fiber foods by awarding them more-favorable status in its dieting point system. "Foods with higher fiber tend to be healthier and have fewer calories," says Maria Walls, senior nutritionist for Weight Watchers.

Eyeing the latest evidence, the National Academy of Sciences last year suggested a revision in the recommended fiber intake for Americans, to 38 grams a day for men and 25 grams for women up to age 50, with slightly lower levels for those over 50. The current recommendations call for 25 to 30 grams, regardless of age and gender. The average American consumes about 15 grams a day.

It is hard to find much fiber at all in many packaged foods. Top-selling brands of pasta, breakfast bars, cereal and bread are made with refined wheat. Whole-grain pasta often has triple the quantity of fiber found in popular pasta brands. A cup of cooked brown rice typically has four grams of fiber, or four times the fiber found in refined white rice.

Quaker touts fiber's benefits on its regular oatmeal labels. At the top of the familiar round canister, above the old Quaker with the blue hat, is a picture of a heart and the message "Oatmeal helps remove cholesterol!" Getting the recommended amount of fiber daily is "an insurance policy for a whole slew of health diseases," says Mark Andon, a nutrition scientist for PepsiCo Inc.'s Quaker, Tropicana and Gatorade lines.

But Quaker doesn't alert consumers that processing results in less fiber in some of its products, such as its Fruit & Oatmeal cereal bars, some of which have less than one gram of fiber apiece. "All that information already exists on the nutritional label," says Mr. Andon. "All anyone has to do is look at the label." While acknowledging that Breakfast Squares have less cereal than plain oatmeal, the company says the bars still give consumers a way to get nutritious whole-grain oats in their diet.

Kellogg Co. says the fiber is lower in its Frosted Flakes cereal bars because the bars contain one-third as much cereal as the traditional flakes. Campbell Soup Co. says its Supper Bakes line isn't meant to be a complete meal. Research showed people would choose their own vegetables or salad to serve with it, adding fiber to the meal, Campbell says.

Long dismissed simply as "roughage," fiber is basically the remnants of plants that the human digestive system can't break down. Fiber provides no nutrients, but its ride through the 30-foot digestive tract is greatly beneficial because it helps push along other waste. Soluble fiber, which dissolves in water and is found in oat bran, beans and barley, among other foods, helps prevent cholesterol from being absorbed into the blood stream. Insoluble fiber, found in wheat bran and some fruits and vegetables, helps promote regularity.

Decades-old practices of high-speed factory processing purge food of much of its natural fiber. With wheat, for instance, millers routinely separate the small but highly nutritious bran and germ of the raw wheat, leaving only the starchy aftermath, the endosperm, for white flour. That refined flour, which doesn't spoil as quickly as whole-grain flour, allows food companies to produce mass quantities of packaged food faster. White flour also has a clean taste and a less-gritty texture that's easier on the palate and less vexing to packaged food formulations.

But refined flour is also less nutritious, with 77% less fiber, 21% less protein and 54% less calcium than whole-grain flour, according to an analysis of nutrients from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Some of the nutrients, but usually not the fiber, are restored if the flour is fortified.

Of course, there are some attempts to bring more high-fiber foods into the grocery store. Major bakers like Sara Lee Corp. now offer loaves of whole-grain bread, made with the entire edible part of the grain, including the fiber-rich bran. New World Pasta Co., one of the biggest players in its market, is selling a line of Prince pasta products called Healthy Harvest, which blend traditional semolina with whole wheat. The new pasta has 50% more fiber than regular pasta "without the grainy texture," according to New World.

In breakfast bars, some of the most-popular "convenience" foods, the amount of fiber-bearing grain has been diluted with milk proteins and other "binders," which hold the bars together like glue, says Colleen Zammer, a food scientist with TIAX LLC, a research-and-development consulting firm. "On a per-serving basis, you're getting less cereal."

Write to Michael J. McCarthy at mike.mccarthy@wsj.com

Updated October 22, 2003