I was channel surfing the other evening on TV and a reality show caught my attention as the “intervening expert” was chiding someone about her diet and how unhealthy she was.

The lesson that evening was apparently that the woman who was the focus of the show was in denial about how terrible her food choices were. The gimmick for convincing her? Her solid waste output.

Gross! But effective. I admit… I had to watch to see what was going to happen. The expert carefully explained that if this woman’s toilet was falling victim to her horribly unhealthy food choices, what must her arteries look like? This bears investigation, even though it’s generally considered a taboo topic…toilet habits, that is. The investigation doesn’t need to be the actual output; but rather, how is the plumbing getting along inside and out?

If you are consuming enough soluble and insoluble fiber, you will have a much higher chance of having a healthy digestive system all the way through. Problems along that plumbing pathway often indicate that you will most certainly have problems in your arteries, too. Conversely, healthy intestines can indicate a higher chance of healthy arteries.

Hopefully, most of you should know by now that a high-fiber diet is absolutely one of the best ways to maintain healthy cholesterol levels. Evidence abounds all over the Internet and in medical journals about how increasing fiber intake from 5 grams a day to 25 grams can, in very short time, bring bad cholesterol down and drive good cholesterol up.

Another effect of better fiber intake? Weight loss. If you are eating at least the recommended daily allowance of fiber, you are much less likely to be overdoing it on calories. The reason is because the more fiber you are eating, the more full you feel. Stomping excess calories also keeps blood sugar at a healthy level, reducing the dependency on insulin…biological or synthetic.

How do you know if you are getting enough fiber? Assume you are not if you don’t count grams of fiber every time you eat. You need to make friends with food labels, and you also need to work on learning about fiber in foods that don’t have labels, such as whole foods. There are a lot of easy-to-find resources that will list fiber content of raw foods like all those veggies and fruits you should be eating. Maybe buy a table in book form and keep in the bathroom for some inspiration while you’re there!

You should also consider yourself to be under-eating fiber if you are constipated at all. A clogged toilet is just one indicator of clogging going on elsewhere in your body.

While high-fiber diets tend to “loosen things up” intestinally, this diet can also bulk it up if you make too many trips to the bathroom. One myth about fiber is that you shouldn’t increase intake if you have a problem with diarrhea. In fact, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Studies show that people with Irritable Bowel Disease, Frequent Bowel Syndrome, and even Chrone’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis- diseases all characterized by bouts of painful diarrhea, among many other symptoms- have all been instructed by their dieticians and rheumatologists to increase the fiber in their diets and to not let up.

In today’s fast food-driven world, it seems the deck is stacked against us. Calorie-bombs at the drive through window hurl the following shrapnel:

• More than 1 day’s total allowance of calories in just one typical “meal”

• Highly processed foods in every corner of the value meal form the sandwich to the fries to the soda

• Food that’s sat under a warmer has all but lost any nutritive value that the frying process didn’t already destroy

• Meals bought this way are often very inexpensive to buy, as compared to buying a balanced basketful of groceries at the local market, increasing the ease and convenience-and therefore likelihood- that these are the foods that are chosen instead of what we should be eating

• Constant advertising images and audios forcibly drill the urge to eat this junk firmly onto the top of mind awareness of most people in developed countries

At some point we have to ‘flush’ the habit we developed of willful noncompliance when it comes to our food habits. We have to commit to better choices at every meal, every day of every week of every month in every year. Looking for more information? You may wish to check out our http://blueheronhealthnews.com/blog/health-guides/cholesterol-guide/.

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