The subject of dietary fiber in the human diet has found a new niche in nutrition and medicine in recent years. Although the various workers in this field of research are far from agreement, a recent symposium sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (March 1977, Bethesda, Md) and numerous publications on the subject, seem to have made the point that dietary fiber has elicited substantial interest among the scientific and medical professions.
The present interest in dietary fiber, revived in the late 1960s by two British physician-epidemiologists, Burkitt and Trowell, spawned numerous investigations in an attempt to prove or disprove some of the generalizations and hypotheses formulated by the aforementioned investigators. Preliminary research in this field has been plagued by the lack of the following: (1) precise definition of the diets used, (2) knowledge of the composition of the dietary fiber in question, and (3) to a great extent,