If we are going to skip breakfast and cereals, are we not missing out on a source of fibre? Yes we are. However, just as we wouldn’t sit on a desert island for 12 hours in direct sunlight, going lobster red from head to toe, to top up our vitamin D levels, there are plenty of other ways to receive our daily intake of fibre.
For those who juice, stop right now! Juicing is one of the most ridiculous trends of the last 50 years. When we extract juice from our fruits and vegetables, we lose all of their great fibres, miss out on most of their nutrients (healthy nutrients are normally bound to the fibre) and often end up with a glass full of fructose (sugar). Orange juice is possibly the worst of them all. If you don’t like fruit the way nature de- signed them, don’t juice the goodness out of them, but instead retain all the benefits by liquefying or blending them. We need to throw the entire fruit into the blender, or we are missing out on the best bits. Sure, we will want to peel the skins off our orang- es and bananas, but then it’s essential to throw the whole fruit in our high-powered blending machine.
Take apples. Eating apples reduce our chances of type 2 diabetes, but drinking just the pure sugary juice, the type that is transparent, increases our chance of diabetes.
What is fibre? It’s the rough guys that hang around with macronutrients. They can either be absorbed in water (soluble) or not (insoluble). Fibre is great at making us feel full without taking on lots of calories. In fact, insoluble fibre tends to pass through the system without leaving any calories behind, and even soluble fibre is extremely light in calories. For example, there are pastas, spaghetti and noodles that have been consumed in Japan for thousands of years that have zero calories and zero CARBS! How is that possible? Known as shirataki (meaning white waterfall’) and made from the konjac plant, these transparent insoluble fibre noodles are edible, but not digestible. They absorb water so well that, while what is eaten might look identical to normal wheat noodles, they are actually made of 95% water temporarily suspended in fibre. The great news is they are now starting to become available in UK supermarkets. We recently had some friends round for dinner, and I cooked shirataki noodles in a Thai soup. My friends could not believe that ‘Primal Ste- ve’ (that’s what they call me) was eating CARBS. I asked them how they found the soup and they loved it. They had no idea at all that the noodles were any different to the norm. When I told them that it was CARB-free with zero calories, at first they said I was just playing with them.
Why tell you about shirataki? Because it’s a great example of what fibre does. It can fill up our stomach, and at the same time be used as a vehicle to transport micronutrients around our body. There are numerous health benefits for making sure we eat plenty of fibre in our diet, and I felt it right and prop- er to feature at least one quote from our amazing National Heath Service in this book. The NHS web- site states, “Fibre is an important part of a healthy balanced diet. It can help prevent heart disease, diabetes, weight gain and some cancers, and can also improve digestive health. If you have constipation, gradually increasing sources of soluble fibre – such as fruit and vegetables, oats and golden linseeds – can help soften your stools and make them easier to pass”. Solid advice from our NHS, spoilt only by including oats and the phrase ‘balanced diet’. As mentioned previously, the only time we should balance is on our bathroom scales! You will read later that we avoid oats just like all grains because they contain anti-nutrients that cause leaky guts and inflammation, and can damage our immune system.