Peter Attia

So that's actually a plant that you can most commonly consume as a supplement.

These are all viscous, but there's some variability in how viscous they are.

We'll get to that later.

Okay, so the other category of soluble fibers are the fermentable fibers, which are broken down by gut bacteria to produce short-chain fatty acids such as butyrate.

These are also known as prebiotic fibers, which the most common examples of this would be inulin and pectin.

While most prebiotic fibers are soluble, there are some exceptions.

So for example, resistant starches found in cooked and cooled starchy foods, oats, potatoes, and rice, or in beans.

We're going to talk more about these later, but I just kind of want to start high level.

Important to be aware that these two properties, viscosity and fermentability, are not mutually exclusive.

You'll notice that because I just use pectin as an example in both.

So some soluble fibers are fermentable, but don't form gels.

Others are gel-forming, but poorly fermentable.

And some can do both, and some may do neither.

All of this is to say, this is a bit of a mess and sometimes can be a little hard to wrap your head around.

For the sake of my lack of brain damage and anybody else's listening, we have included a table in the show notes of common fibers along with all their properties and the food sources you can find them in.

So if at the end of this podcast, you're thinking to yourself, all right, I kind of want to beef up my intake of this fiber and this fiber, and I frankly care a lot less about this type of fiber.

We want to be able to help you do that in terms of understanding what sorts of foods you'd find that in, and of course, what supplements.

Yeah, so when you take fiber from a whole food source, which I think is what we mostly want to be able to do, you're typically going to get a mix of different fiber types, and therefore they're going to have different properties.

So cellulose and lignin, which are insoluble fiber, are structural components of plant cell walls.

So that means that any whole plant-based food you consume will have some amount of insoluble fiber.