Definition and analysis of dietary fibre in the context of food carbohydrates
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Dietary fibre is originally a concept based on epidemiology that has to be defined chemically in order to be measurable in food analysis. Its main components are carbohydrates, and dietary fibre is included in carbohydrates as conventionally measured “by difference”. Small-intestinal digestibility is a key determinant of the nutritional characteristics of food carbohydrates, and should be the main feature in the delimitation between (digestible, glycaemic) carbohydrates and dietary fibre. In practice, dietary fibre is often defined as material measured with a certain method, or a set of methods. Recent new definitions of dietary fibre include carbohydrate components (and associated substances, particularly lignin) provided that they escape digestion in the small intestine and have some beneficial physiological effects. The recently proposed differentiation between “dietary fibre” and “functional fibre” is theoretically appealing, but these fractions of “total fibre” cannot be measured separately in food products.