http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts/dairy-and-egg-products/133/2

Stephan Guyenet has a post up about butyrate, always a good read.

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/12/butyric-acid-ancient-controller-of.html

Sure. You can stay in the first couple of phases longer or you can cycle through them again until you get near your goal then head off onto the last two week phase. We know that people can’t lose 40-50 lb in 6 weeks, but people needing to lose 50-60 lb can make a huge dent in their visceral fat in those 6 weeks.

If these SFCAs are used by the body as energy – then can we not consider this:

Insoluble fiber passes through the body totally undigested and these fiber carbs can indeed not be counted when one is counting carbs.

Soluble fiber is used by the body for energy (in the form of SFCAs) and therefore soluble fiber carbs should be counted?

I have also read sources indicating that the impact of SCFAs on metabolism can be negative in that in that SCFAs improve insulin sensitivity by blunting lipolysis from fat cells.

Your thoughts on SFCAs – good, bad or otherwise? Thanks!

SCFAs are great. They are produced by bacteria in the colon that break down fiber as it passes through, which means that fiber does provide some calories, but not 4 kcal per gram as does carbohydrate.

I have done that and read every article that you have written about fiber.
I understand your conviction about fiber because all the evidence that support fiber-hypotesis and CHD is epidemiological or based on risk calculations ( which are based on cholesterol levels etc.., i think). I share the same conviction.

But I have to be fair and say that when you say that

“Other longer better financed studies show no benefit to fiber consumption. Others show a negative correlation.”

I thought you knew these studies. But I am unable to find such studies. Almost all epidemiological studies and all meta-analysis that I have found show correlation between fiber and CHD. And all risk-analysis studies show benefit from fiber. Some studies show no correlation between fiber and CHD but the amount of fiber consumed in these studies is low and below recommendations and could be consider not valid because of that.

What I have been unable to find also are clinical, intervention studies showing that fiber does indeed lower total mortality and CHD-rates, which would be a definit proof that there is something useful about fiber. Are there any?

Yet Taubes says the same thing about fiber and CHD in GCBC but where are these studies?
Sorry to bother you with this fiber-stuff but could you (or someone else reading these msgs) please tell me where to look for these studies? Any blogs etc that mention these?

At this point you’re going to have to rely on someone else to dig these up for you. I don’t have the time at the moment, and I’m already convinced, so I don’t need to root them out for my own purposes. Have you tried PubMed? If not, here is a post on how you can search for what you need.

Hi, I hope you answer to this question sometime in the future.
I am looking for those studies that you mentioned above.

This is what I have come up so far:

follow-up to DART-Study:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12032650

It was follow-up to a intervention-study and found no help in fiber consumption. But this was a small study and consumed fiber amounts were small.

Are there any more controlled and randomized intervention studies about fiber?

Type ‘fiber’ in the search window of this blog, and you should come up with several studies on fiber. Based on my own reading of the literature, I’m convinced that fiber is pretty useless, so I don’t spend a lot of time gathering studies on it.

Which studies are these?

I found one study plan:
http://www.muschealth.com/clintrials/Default.aspx?DocID=NCT00085800.xml

I tried to find that study in internet but I only came up with this:

http://www.annfammed.org/cgi/content/full/6/2/100

I think that is the same study, not sure though. Well anyway that kinda falsifies the fiber hypothesis cos that study showed that fiber did not reduce significantly infl. markers. They are planning to do more clinical studies. Are there any other clinical trials about fiber?

Anyway, it would be nice to see a blog post about titled something like “Fiber Myths” going through most of the studies against and pro fiber to settle this thing. At least in my country it seems that fiber still has some kind of god status on health issues. It doesn’t go a day by when some newspaper posts about health properties of fiber or low-fat.

I’ve posted a few times on various fiber myths. Just put ‘fiber’ in to the search window to check them out. Here is one that you might find interesting if you haven’t read it already.

Here is few that I have come up:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8627965
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/289/13/1659

But on the other hand Taubes says that current studies (WHI and so on) show no correlation between fiber and CVD risk.

What is your take on this?

Both of the studies you linked are observational studies (often called epidemiologic studies) and as such they don’t prove anything. Correlation is not causation. Other longer better financed studies show no benefit to fiber consumption. Others show a negative correlation. But all are observational studies, which provide interesting but meaningless data.