How to Eat 25 grams of Dietary Fiber a Day
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To lower cholesterol, the American Heart Association recommends eating 25 grams of dietary fiber per day for a 2,000-calorie diet.
As I discovered while writing, Are You Eating Enough Fiber to Lower Cholesterol? the answer for me was a clear NO. Curious and concerned, I did a little research (and math) and realized that I’m currently only consuming about half of the dietary fiber I need to lower cholesterol.
And that led me to wonder what exactly I’d need to eat to double my fiber intake / get to 25 grams of fiber a day.
What I discovered was surprising. I thought I’d need to overhaul my diet completely. Like adopt an all-oatmeal-all day-long or quinoa quinoa everywhere type of eating plan. But it turned out that all I had to do was pay little more attention and make two easy changes: a) eat whole wheat versions of the foods I was currently eating, and b) add in a high-fiber snack.
To figure all this out, I used two key sources of information. The USDA 2015 – 2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans includes Appendix 13 which is a table called, Food Sources of Dietary Fiber. While informative, I found this chart hard to navigate as it lists foods in descending order of fiber, not by type of food. To make this information more useful in meal planning, I turned it into a chart organized by meal. To do that, I relied on another useful site, SELFNutritionData, where you can search for ingredients or foods and find their full nutritional information.
Here’s a snapshot of the chart I created which lists the fiber in foods, organized by meal. To download a PDF of the entire file, click Fiber By Meal.
For me, here’s what I learned. Yes, I could (and should) shift to either oatmeal or an oat or wheat bran cereal for breakfast. But I continue to cling to my half a bagel with lox habit. So instead, I modified lunch to include a whole wheat pasta and added both almonds and roasted chickpeas as an afternoon snack. It felt familiar and was an easy shift and best of all, it doubled my dietary fiber to 25 grams per day!
Here’s a chart with three meal plans per day: a goal (including oatmeal) meal plan, my ‘current’ meal plan (as of last week), and my modified meal plan where I added whole wheat versions of my current foods and a high fiber snack:
Easy Peasy. A happy lo-co surprise.
How about you? Are you getting enough fiber in your daily diet to lower cholesterol? Download the PDF of my fiber chart to easily figure out what foods you could modify or add to get to 25 grams of dietary fiber per day.
