Why is fiber so important if it just passes through our digestive system?
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It flushes out the other stuffs in the gut, removing buildup and allowing for better digestion later. It’s like running a bottle brush through your tubes.
Because while you human being are not able to digest fiber, the microbes you host inside your guts need these fibers to survive. Eat fibers, feed your gut microbiota and enjoy the associates health benefits.
There are two kinds of fiber: soluble and insoluble. Soluble fiber dissolves into water, and insoluble… doesn’t.
Soluble fiber helps your poops by absorbing water like a sponge, keeping your poops squishy and easy to pass through your bowels. Without soluble fiber, your poops get hard and you end up constipated.
Insoluble fiber acts like a web or net that holds your poops together as larger pieces. Without insoluble fiber, your poops are *too* soft and it leads to incontinence.
As other comments have mentioned, fiber also feeds some bacteria in your guts that are beneficial in a few ways. One thing they do is break down some of the fiber into nutrients you can use, so you do get *some* nutritional value even though you can’t digest the fiber yourself. Many species don’t directly help you at all, but they’re harmless. They help you indirectly by populating your guts and taking up space so that harmful bacteria can’t move in. The harmless bacteria may even fight off some of the dangerous kinds – not to protect you, but to keep those bacteria from muscling in on their turf.
Fibre gives your gut something to grab onto and push against to keeps things moving along, which aids digestion and prevents tough stool. Fiber also takes up room in your GI tract, meaning you eat few calories to feel full, and feel full longer. This discourages over-eating.
People tend to think of food as nourishing our bodies, but it’s more accurate to think of it nourishing a bacterial colony that we feed from. That colony does a lot better with fiber to provide a scaffold. Think about a puddle versus a sponge
Fiber helps digestion, fiber helps cultivate a good gut flora, which is essential to all kinds of health benefits. Fiber helps slow the uptake of sugar and smooth out your bodies insulin response. The more sugar that is in your diet, the more important fiber is to help prevent insulin resistance and diabetes.
For the same sort of reason that a squeegee is important for cleaning windows even though it only scrapes the water off. Or a sponge is important when washing dishes.
(Insoluble) Fibre has a bulk that fills your intestines. As the muscles controlling your gut force this lumpy stuff through it, it “scrapes” off fecal matter that might be clinging to the walls, as well as polyps that are growing in there as well.
Imagine how dirty a tea cup would get if you only ever rinsed it out with more tea. Now imagine that you used a tea-soaked sponge to rinse it out. Imagine how much cleaner it would be.
Now imagine that the cup is your intestines, the sponge is fibre, and the tea is diarrhoea. (I couldn’t resist, because it is gross and true).
The bacteria in your gut make a large percentage of the happy chemicals that regulate your mood, serotonin and dopamine and the like.
The bacteria use fiber as building blocks for those chemicals, so a fiber free diet makes for an unhappy person.
One way to improve your mood is to eat a new form of fiber every week. Grab a random vegetable that you don’t usually eat or cook with, or a can of beans or some other whole vegetable in a can that’s outside your normal diet. Your gut and brain will be happy you did.
A few reasons.
An easy thing to understand is that it breaks up your poop giving it a good consistency. Stops your poop from being either pasty, or rock hard.
The other part is that while you can’t digest it, the bacteria in your intestines can. They actually help regulate the production of chemicals in your brain in the long run, so it’s good to keep em healthy!
The above is also one of the reasons why fermented foods are good for you as well, and really why diet is important to your over all health (mental and physical) in general; help that gut biome help you!
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