Increasing fiber in your diet with Brenda Watson

Oh, do you ever feel like you could use more fiber in your diet, but you just don't know where to start? Well, you're not alone. Experts say about 95% of American adults do not meet the daily requirements. Now, digestive health expert and New York Times bestselling author Brenda Watson joins us live with more. I have to say good morning, Brenda. Good morning. How are you? I'm doing good. Thanks for asking. So let's talk a little bit first about the importance of having fiber in your diet. Well, fiber is probably one of the most important foods we need to be adding into our diet as a result of a lot of the health challenges we're having with the high rate of colorectal cancer and a lot of different things. However, fiber has been mostly used as people thinking it's used just for people with constipation. But we need fiber for many reasons. It helps us with our good bacteria, our probiotics. It helps with many different challenges that we have with getting enough of the good bacteria in our gut because the fiber feeds our good gut bacteria. And what should people look for when they're choosing high-fiber foods? Well, you know, for example, most people will say to me, oh, I eat a salad every day. I'm fine. That's me. Thank you. Yeah, the average salad is three grams of fiber. Now, having said that, if you add over here and you use your darker greens, your spinaches with some beans and walnuts, add a little cabbage in there. Guess what? You've taken that from three grams. 10 grams of fiber just with a few small changes. It's very exciting and you can do this very easily. Also, if you look, start adding in some way an avocado to your daily diet because avocados have 8 to 10 grams of fiber on average. So here I've done like an avocado with boiled eggs in the morning. You could put some salsa over that. Delicious. Another way is to take a sandwich, and instead of using mayo, swap out your avocado mash and put your avocado mash as your mayo on the bread. This will be a great swap out, adding tons of fiber. And then over here, you have your breakfast, where I've added, this is plain Greek yogurt, and it has in it the walnuts and the raspberries, and I will say also chia seeds. So here's a good thing for your pantry, chia seeds. Ground flax seeds, hemp seeds, these are add-ons, walnuts that you can add to your foods and it really increases the amount of fiber in your diet. And I saw you said add some avocado. I love avocado. So is it too much if I'm adding it in my salad and then eating some guacamole for lunch and then having a little bit for breakfast? I think you'll be fine. I think you'll really enjoy it. I love it. No, you will be. Avocado, it's got the good oils in it too, the good fats. So it's such a great food to add into our daily diet every day. That's awesome. And then what does fiber have to do with hunger and feeling full? Talk about that. Well, I've written a new book that's out in the spring of next year called Hunger Reset, and it's about taking fiber. There's different kinds of fiber, and that's the other thing that people are not sure about. We have soluble fiber and insoluble fiber. And so these two types of fiber act very differently in the body. Your soluble fiber, so let me give you an example. An apple has the peeling of the apple is insoluble fiber. It's your bulking. The inside of the apple is your soluble fiber, and that's what helps you soak up excesses in your gut and is very helpful and stops hunger in its tracks. So protein will stop hunger, but your fiber keeps it stopped. So adding these fibrous foods into your meals will make you much less hungry. Hungry and the book is Hunger Reset that I have here and it will be out soon. Awesome. I was going to say, yeah, that's a good thing to know. Healthy snacks always kind of kills hunger. Anything else before we go? We don't have that much time, but that you want to mention about gut health that the people should know at home. Yes, your gut is the core of your health. It guides you. It manages so many things in your health that you don't even realize. So make, pay attention to this, adding fiber in, doing it slowly and the right way, like we've shown you today. All right. Thank you so much, Brenda, for joining us today. And for those helpful tips to learn more about gut health and to keep up with Brenda, you can head to her website at brendawatson.com.