Don’t take the pills - the serving size on them is very misleading. You have to take a ton of them to have any effect. Gotta go with the powder.
Nothing wrong with supplementation! It’s hard to eat that much fiber (even if your diet is good) due to the relatively low fiber density of most foods. We adapted to our food sources, not so much the other way around, and when we did adapt our food sources to us we were not thinking of maximizing fiber content - and we don’t spend all day chewing on fibrous, foraged plants anymore. Plus, psyllium husk is a food. It’d be the same as eating a shitload of flax or something but with fewer calories.
For instance, raspberries are one of the most fiber dense foods at 8g fiber/100g of berries. You’d need to eat 568g to get your RDA of fiber. The avg person eats around 1.85kg of food daily - 30% of your diet by weight would need to be raspberries (one of the most fiber dense foods) to get enough fiber. Even moreso with other fiber-rich foods, like broccoli. You’d need 1.1kg of broccoli each day (8kg/week). The sheer bulk of that amount of food would be challenging for most people and just isn’t practical.
So you eat half a kilo of raspberries, and then the rest of your diet is a juice cleanse? Here an example diet: oats for breakfast (6 g), a sandwich loaded with greens for lunch (4 g), chili for dinner (15 g). Throw in an apple for a snack (5 g). It’s really not that hard.
The National Academy of Medicine recommends:
• Women 51 and older: 21 grams of fiber per day
• Men 51 and older: 30 grams of fiber per day
Now your numbers go with 45 g per day, but honestly that example diet would leave me hungry. I’d probably also have a peanut butter and banana sandwich (7 g). Throw in a small amount of berries or raisins into the breakfast oats and we’ve hit your higher target.
Fair enough! It can be a little harder to hit consistently in practice depending on the level of variety in your diet, if you go out occasionally, etc. In my opinion and personal experience, anyway. But that is a solid and reasonable meal plan without a doubt.
The raspberries example was more an example of if one were to “fibermax” as the kids will be saying in 20yrs. Trying to most efficiently achieve the RDA with the most fiber dense foods possible - not intended as an actual, reasonable diet.
