How to Eat 12 pounds of Food and Lose Weight

Hi everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to my weekly house call, your chance to ask me your questions. And this week's question is, Dr. Hyman, I've been hearing so much about fiber and all the special fiber you're recommending. What gives with fiber and why should we eat fiber and do I really need it? Well, let me tell you about fiber because fiber is really important. Imagine eating 12 pounds of food a day and staying thin and healthy? Well, guess what? That's exactly what our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate for millennia without any obesity or chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, or dementia. But I wouldn't advise anybody today to eat 12 pounds of food because the food in our society lacks one major secret ingredient that our ancestors ate in nearly all their food: fiber. You might wonder how fiber can prevent obesity and all these chronic diseases of aging? Well, it's actually quite simple. It slows the rate at which food enters your bloodstream and increases the speed at which food exits your body through your digestive tract. That keeps your blood sugar and your cholesterol in ideal balance, and it quickly eliminates toxins from your gut and reduces your appetite. There is a special type of fiber, a super fiber, and it's much more powerful than regular fiber, and it can provide a great way for people to lose weight and reverse chronic disease. And I'm going to tell you about this remarkable discovery a little bit later. First, let's look a bit at the history of how this discovery that fiber is so important was actually made. Well, Dr. Dennis Burkitt was a famous English doctor, and he studied the differences between indigenous African Bushmen and their civilized Western counterparts. Now, the Bushmen seemed to be free of all the scourges of modern life, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity. And he found that the Bushmen had a stool weight of two pounds, and that the civilized people living in the cities had a stool weight of only four ounces. What was the difference? Well, in a word, it's fiber. See, the average American eats about eight grams of fiber a day, and the average hunter-gatherer ate about 100 to 150 grams of fiber from all manner of roots and berries and leaves and plant foods. Now, we need fiber to keep us healthy from top to bottom, as well as to provide food for the healthy bacteria that work with us to promote health, the microbiome. Those are fiber turns into what we call prebiotics. Now, one recent study showed how butyrate, which is made by gut bacteria from certain types of fiber, acts as kind of a switching molecule. And it turns out an anti-cancer gene called the P21 tumor suppressor gene, and that gene turns off colon cancer. Other research proves that fibers can lower blood sugar as potently as some diabetic medication. And it can promote weight loss and it can lower cholesterol. Now, fiber is a great ally in the battle of the bulge, but it's also a hero in more serious battles. It's been shown to reduce the risk of colon cancer by as much as a third, and breast cancer by almost 40%. It also lowers cholesterol and reduces the risk of heart disease by as much as 40%. Now, if you're diabetic, adding fiber to your diet can mean that you can cut out insulin. And it's a great natural cure for constipation and being irregular. We should also shoot for about 50 grams a day, maybe 30 to 50 grams a day, which is a lot less than we used to eat, but I think that's good for most people. Most people think of the bran in fiber as only the big time fiber. But in fact, wheat fiber, a bran, is mostly insoluble and doesn't really get digested. Think of it sort of as a scouring pad for your intestines. That's good for getting your regular, but it really doesn't do the job of soluble fiber. And that's in almost all other plant foods. It's a special kind of fiber in other plant foods. The bacteria in your gut metabolize the soluble fiber that comes from fruits and veggies and beans and nuts and seeds. and from whole grains. It lowers cholesterol, it lowers blood sugar and insulin, it can prevent cancer, it balances hormone levels, and removes excess estrogen, reducing the risk of breast cancer. It also helps to make vitamin and minerals in the gut and provides food for the colon cells and lots more. Now, before I tell you how I want you to increase your fiber intake, I want to tell you about some recent discoveries of an ancient fiber source that can help you lose weight lower your cholesterol, reduce your appetite, lower your blood sugar even more effectively than any other fiber. It's called Glucomannan or GM. Now it's a highly soluble, fermentable and highly viscous fiber that comes from the root of the elephant yam, also known as konjac or konjac root. It's native to Asian. It's not the kind of konjac you drink. The konjac tuber has been used for centuries as an herbal remedy and makes traditional foods like cognac, jelly, tofu, and noodles. Now more recently, purified cognac flour or GM has been used as a food stabilizer or a gelling agent and a supplement. It can absorb up to 50 times its weight in water, making it one of the most viscous dietary fibers known. And in many studies, doses of 2 to 4 grams a day, glucomannan is really well tolerated and resulted in significant weight loss in overweight and obese individuals. Glucagon works by promoting a sense of fullness, and the fiber pushes more calories out through your colon rather than letting them be absorbed. In addition to weight reduction, glucomannan has been studied for its effects on constipation, on cholesterol levels, on blood sugar, on blood pressure, on insulin resistance, and lots more. So how does it promote weight loss, you may wonder? Well, the fiber lowers the energy density of the food you eat. In other words, it bulks up the food in your gut, creating a lower calorie content per weight, of the food that you're eating. And since fiber has almost no calories, but a lot of weight, adding it to the diet lowers the energy to weight ratio of the food that you're consuming. Studies show that it's the volume or the weight of food that controls our appetite. So the fiber increases the weight without increasing calories. Now this powerful fiber may control our appetite in lots of other ways too. For example, it can signal the brain that there's a lot of food in their gut and to slow down on stuffing all that food in there. It also leaves the stomach and the small bowel slowly because it's so viscous, meaning it absorbs lots of water. By slowing the rate of food absorption from the gut to the bloodstream, it actually reduces the amount of insulin that's produced after a meal, which also controls your appetite and your weight. It may also increase the level of hormones in the gut such as Cholecystokinin, that's a big word, but that's another control system on the appetite. It's like a break on the appetite. And lastly, more energy or calories is lost through the stool because the calories are all soaked up into the fiber. So make sure you eat more fiber, not necessarily in 12 pounds of food a day, but by being smart about what you eat and using glucomannan in your diet as shirataki noodles and even as a fiber supplement. The one I love is called PGX. So now I want to hear from you. How have you used fiber? Have you used PGX? What happened? How did it affect you? And if you like this blog, I encourage you to share it on Facebook and Twitter with friends or family, share your comments below or on Facebook and I encourage you to submit your questions to DrHyman.com so maybe next week I may make a house call to you.