Fiber is roughage in foods that improves your digestion, even though most of the substance itself is not digested. Fiber facilitates movement of other food in your digestive system and blends with it to make healthy stool, preventing diarrhea and constipation. Your diet should include 14 g of fiber per 1,000 calories, according to the Colorado State University Extension, so being able to identify fiber sources and types helps you fulfill this need.
Identification
Fiber comes from plant foods such as beans, fruits and vegetables, as well as certain herbs such as psyllium. Animal foods such as meat and dairy products are totally devoid of the substance. Seeds, hulls, skins and stalks have the most fiber, so you lower the roughage content if you peel high-fiber fruits and vegetables or remove the seeds or other relevant parts. For example, you get more fiber from eating a whole apple rather than slices of the fruit without the skin and core. Similarly, you get more fiber from small berries with seeds if you eat them whole.
Insoluble Fiber
Insoluble fiber keeps its shape in your intestines and moves through them rapidly, speeding up the pace of other food, too. This roughage bulks up and moistens your waste products, which facilitates stool passage without straining and prevents hemorrhoids, constipation and diverticulosis. Vegetables have insoluble fiber, as do whole grain and wheat bran. Whole grain breads, flours, pastas and cereals are easy-to-identify insoluble fiber providers. Plant parts rich in insoluble fiber are cellulose, lignin and hemicellulose.
Soluble Fiber
Soluble fiber interacts with water, absorbing it and becoming jelly-like in your gut. This fiber moves at a slow but steady pace through your intestines. Some fruits and vegetables provide soluble fiber, but oat bran, beans, nuts, barley, peas, lentils, peas and seeds are all easy-to-identify sources, MedlinePlus says. Fiber supplements made from a plant called psyllium also provide soluble fiber, since the plant's husks and seeds are rich in soluble roughage. The plant parts that provide this fiber include gum and pectin.
Considerations
High-fiber foods are robbed of their roughage by certain processes. For example, whole grain bread and whole wheat flour or both excellent fiber sources, but the content drops drastically if they are processed into white bread and white flour. Frozen and canned foods retain their original fiber content, but crushing or drying them destroys much of the fiber, according to the Colorado State University Extension. For example, whole canned tomatoes have more roughage than the crushed variety, and dried apples and applesauce lose much of their bulk.
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