Читать книгу The Big Healthy Soup Diet: Nourish Your Body and Lose up to 10lbs in a Week - Linda Lazarides - Страница 14

Dietary fibre absorbs liquid and so helps to bulk up the contents of your intestinal tract. This keeps you feeling full for longer after a meal. Adding bran to your food was one of the features of the F-Plan diet, which became popular in the 1970s. ‘F’ stood for fibre, and the diet involved consuming as much fibre as possible because this would reduce the calorie content of your meal while still keeping you satisfied.

But bran is not an ideal fibre for this purpose. It contains a lot of phytic acid, which forms complexes with minerals in your food and prevents their absorption. In large amounts, bran can also be quite irritating to the intestines, and is prone to causing gas. Nowadays we are more likely to recommend soluble fibre as a dieting aid. Soluble fibre is found in seeds, lentils, beans, seaweed extracts, fruit and vegetables. Like bran, it is indigestible, but unlike bran, it can be consumed by bacteria in your intestines and turned into useful fatty acids, which maintain an ideal acidity balance in your colon and support the health of your colon walls.

One of the best forms of soluble fibre is pectin. Found mostly in apples, cabbage and the white part of citrus fruit, pectin holds up to 100 times its weight in water. This excellent bulking action is very helpful for controlling appetite, especially if the pectin is in warm foods such as cooked fruit soups and cabbage soup.