Fiber is a critical nutrient for your colon and overall health. You need to eat equal amounts of insoluble and soluble fiber. Most people only eat around 8 grams or less of fiber each day. The amount you need to eat is around 25 - 45 grams. This is a lot of fiber and you will need to introduce it slowly into your diet. You may experience gas when you eat more fiber. But this will pass as your stomach gets use to eating more fiber.

Alert: If you have any serious gastrointestinal illnesses, check with your doctor before adding more fiber to your diet.

One major benefit of fiber is that,

Fiber stimulates pancreatic secretions - enzymes and bicarbonates -which help you to digest your food better and prevents undigested protein from reaching your colon.

When you are constipated, your fecal matter remains in contact with your colon walls longer. Undigested protein that is embedded in the fecal matter start to decomposes and putrefies. This undigested protein and putrid matter serves to feed bad bacteria and changes your colon environment into a toxic generator.

If you have not been eating a lot of fiber in the form of vegetable, fruits and grains, you need to add these foods to your eating habits little by little so your body gets use to more fiber.

The more fiber you eat the more vitamins and minerals are lost and eliminated in your stools. What this means, is you need to compensate for this lost by eating more nutritious foods and or by using supplements.

Tip: Provide yourself with natural forms of fiber, such as vegetables, fruits, and legumes. Stay away from the supplemental forms of fiber such as, powders or pills that may help in relieving constipation but do little to provide you with other nutrients those natural forms of fiber provide.

Supplemental fiber granules, powders, or pills can become addictive.

Limit your use of fiber that comes from grains. I know you have been told you need to eat a lot of bran, whole wheat products, cereals, oats, oatmeal, buckwheat, unprocessed bran, rice bran, and so on.

In their recent book, 2001, Electrical Nutrition, Denie and Shelley Hiestand points out that our digestive system was not designed to process grains. When we eat food, our digestive system was designed to ferment food to break them down and make their nutrients available for our bodies. The Hiestand's continue,

"Our digestive tract, like that of the grazing animals, is almost completely unable to ferment a seed-head (grain), whether it is whole or ground up as in flour?when we try to eat grain, the innate frequency of the seed-head can only go into storage-in other words, lay down cellulite?This is why in agriculture to fatten up the hog or cattle, we feed them grain. Likewise, if you want to fatten up, eat grains? they take the most energy to digest, and we get little or nothing from it except large thighs, butts, and bellies. REMEMBER THE OLD FARM SAYING GRAINS FOR GAIN, PROTEIN FOR PRODUCTION.

From an electrical nutrition perspective, modern grains could well be considered toxic."

Remember to stay away from processed fiber that you find in drugstore shelves and go to a farmer's market and get fresh fruits and vegetables. This is the fiber that will keep your constipation away and bring health closer.