Nutrition · 4 minute read

Protein has had the spotlight for years. Fibre is the nutrient with the stronger long-term evidence, most Australians are well short of it, and closing the gap is easier than the internet makes it look.

If you’ve been paying attention to protein lately, you’re not alone. The yoghurt is high protein, the bread is high protein, there’s a scoop in the smoothie and a bar in the handbag. That’s not a bad thing. Protein matters, particularly from your thirties onward when holding on to muscle gets harder.

But there’s a second number that almost nobody has asked you to hit, and it’s the one with the longer track record.

Fibre is suddenly having its own moment on social media (you may have seen “fibremaxxing”), which means it’s about to be sold to you in powders and gummies. Before that happens, here’s what the evidence says and how much you really need.

The gap

The Australian target is 25 grams of fibre a day for women and 30 for men. If you want the amount linked to lower risk of chronic disease, it’s 28 and 38. The average Australian adult gets about 20.

So most of us are somewhere between five and fifteen grams short. Every day, for years.

That matters because the research on fibre is unusually strong. A large review commissioned by the World Health Organization, pooling nearly 250 studies, found that people eating 25 to 29 grams a day had:

• A 15 to 30 percent lower risk of dying from any cause
• 16 to 24 percent lower rates of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and bowel cancer
• A further drop for every extra eight grams a day

What it’s actually doing

Fibre is the part of plant food your body can’t digest, and that’s the point of it. It does a handful of quiet jobs at once.

• It feeds the bacteria in your gut, which turn it into compounds that calm inflammation and keep the gut lining healthy
• It slows the release of sugar from a meal, so energy is steadier and the mid-afternoon crash is smaller
• Some types bind to cholesterol and carry it out, which matters more from midlife on, when cholesterol tends to rise
• It keeps you fuller for longer on the same calories
• It keeps things moving, which is the job most people know it for and the one they’re least likely to bring up

If you’ve noticed digestion becoming less predictable with age, more bloating, more variation week to week, you’re not imagining it. Hormonal shifts, less movement and a changing diet all alter how the gut behaves, and fibre is one of the few things that reliably helps rather than hurts.

Where the trend gets it wrong

The “fibremaxxing” version of this involves going from 15 grams to 40 overnight, usually with a powder. Please don’t.

Your gut bacteria need a couple of weeks to adjust to a higher fibre intake. If you jump, you’ll spend that fortnight bloated, gassy and convinced fibre doesn’t agree with you. It does. You just went too fast.

Two rules make it painless

Add a few grams at a time and hold there for a week before adding more. And drink more water as you go, because fibre works by absorbing it, and without enough fluid it does the opposite of what you wanted.

One more thing: protein and fibre aren’t rivals. The meals that do both, lentils, beans, oats with a scoop of protein, yoghurt with berries and chia, are the ones that keep you full, steady and regular, which is most of what people are chasing when they buy the powders.

Where ten grams actually comes from

Food first. Powders like psyllium are fine as a top-up (a tablespoon is about five grams, with a full glass of water), but they don’t bring the vitamins, the variety or the fullness that food does.

Look at that list and the gap closes quickly. Oats instead of a low-fibre cereal is four grams. A tablespoon of chia in the yoghurt is three and a half. Seeded bread instead of white is another three. Beans through whatever you were cooking for dinner anyway is six.

That’s more than ten grams without changing what your day looks like.

The boring version wins

None of this needs a tracker or a supplement. It needs oats, seeds, beans, fruit with the skin on, and a couple of weeks of patience while your gut catches up.

Most of what helps with fibre is smaller and more ordinary than the trend suggests, which is usually a good sign that it’s real.