Abstract
PREVIOUS calculations1 have shown little change in the total intake of fibre in the United Kingdom from 1880 to 1970. There has been, however, a substantial decline in the consumption of fibre from cereals, except during the Second World War. The hypothesis that relates a low intake of fibre to various diseases2 refers to dietary fibre3,4 which includes lignin and all the polysaccharides in the diet which are not hydrolysed by the endogenous secretions of the human digestive tract5. However, the values for fibre used in previous calculations were for ‘crude fibre’6, and that underestimates dietary fibre to an uncertain extent4. Now that values for dietary fibre in a range of foodstuffs are available7,8 we have repeated the earlier calculations to provide an assessment of the changes in the intakes of dietary fibre during the past century.
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SOUTHGATE, D., BINGHAM, S. & ROBERTSON, J. Dietary fibre in the British diet. Nature 274, 51–52 (1978). https://doi.org/10.1038/274051a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/274051a0
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