Health care practitioners and nutritionists often recommend a high fiber diet. Dietary fiber is found in the cell walls of plants. It is a complex carbohydrate, which is not strictly classed as a nutrient because we cannot assimilate it. Despite containing no nutrient value of its own, the food in which the fiber is found is laden with nutrition.

The average American gets just fifteen to twenty grams of fiber daily. When comparing this with the daily recommendations of thirty-five grams for women and forty-five grams for men it is easy to notice a sufficient shortfall in what we obtain through our regular diet. This is why supplementation is usually necessary.

There is much documentation on the benefits of fiber especially relating to heart disease and particularly the effect fiber has on lowering cholesterol. Cholesterol is a fatty substance, which cannot be eliminated in its fat-soluble state. The liver produces eighty five percent of the body's total cholesterol. It is both produced and processed for elimination in the liver. Cholesterol is returned to the liver to be converted into a form that can be purged by the body.

To change the cholesterol from a fat-soluble to a water-soluble substance requires that liver to use a complex chemical process. The liver will then produce bile and add this to the water-soluble cholesterol. This mixture is then dispatched to the gallbladder where it is stored. The bile will later be used to help in the digestion of fats. The normal terminology for this process is emulsification. Bile consists of histamine, dead blood cells, and hormones and used up cholesterol. The biles task is to transport these toxins out of the body.

Small amounts of bile will be released into the digestive tract by the gallbladder whenever fat is eaten. The cholesterol and other components of the bile are bound up in fiber and carried out of the body in a bowel movement. It is therefore necessary to eat sufficient fiber; otherwise the toxins have nothing to bind to. They then have to be reabsorbed thorough the blood vessels lining the colon. The liver festers and becomes overburdened as it receives the toxins again. Along these lines, inadequate dietary fiber can lead to a blood test that returns not only today's cholesterol in the blood, but also yesterdays and the days before.

Therefore to reduce blood cholesterol levels it is necessary to eat a high fiber diet to enable absorbing of water-soluble cholesterol.