What are Soluble Fiber Foods?
Soluble fibre foods are essential for a healthy diet, being a great and natural way to lower your LDL cholesterol levels.
Soluble fibre foods are required to keep the digestive system healthy. They can also help by moving food at a slower speed through the stomach, making you feel fuller longer and helping you maintain or reach an ideal weight with less effort.
Soluble Fiber Foods Examples
Whole Grains
The highest of the soluble fibre foods in the grain category is oat. Ingesting half a cup of cooked oat bran or oatmeal for your breakfast is the best way to get a good amount of soluble fibre foods.
Try mixing it with some high fiber fruits that are also high in soluble fibre.
Barley is another grain with good levels of soluble fibre that can also be cooked as a cereal.
Fruits
Prunes, pears, and citrus fruit (like oranges or grapes) are the highest soluble fibre foods in the fruit category. Other fruits with nice levels of soluble fibre include nectarines, peaches, plums, apples, bananas, and blackberries.
It’s a good thing that fruit can be eaten in many ways. You can mix some of your favorite fruits together to create an easy way to add to your daily soluble fibre intake. You can also put them into a low-fat yogurt (and oat-packed granola) to prepare a healthy meal, great for soluble fibre intake. Finally, maybe taking along fruit to eat when hungry for a snack may be just the fast-food Mother Nature intended for us.
Legumes, Seeds, and Nuts
Legumes are, without a doubt, the best soluble fibre foods. Half a cup of cooked legumes can provide as much of it as three pieces of fruit. While lima and kidney beans are at the top, pinto, navy, black and northern beans come in right after as a close second.
Lentils, whether yellow, green. or orange, have almost the same soluble fibre as one piece of fruit or cup of oats, but far more overall fiber. The same happens with chickpeas and black-eyed peas.
Eating just 1 tablespoon of ground psyllium seeds can get you more fibre than any legume, grain, fruit, or vegetable available. This is often found in products such as Metamucil.
Vegetables
While there are not many vegetables with high levels of soluble fibre, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and carrots are the soluble fibre foods in the veggie category that are good both for your heart and your digestive system.