Eating a High Fibre Diet CAN help you Live Longer and Warn off Killer Diseases, Researchers say

Chinese researchers say fiber could lower the risk of chronic diseases including heart disease, stroke, diabetes and several types of cancer. People who eat a high fiber diet are less likely to die of any cause, a new study of nearly one million people has found.

Yang Yang, of the Shanghai Cancer Institute in China, and colleagues write in the American Journal of Epidemiology.Individuals should be encouraged to increase their dietary fiber intake 'to potentially decrease the risk of premature death,'  they say.

They pooled data from 17 previous studies that tracked 982,411 men and women, mostly in Europe and the U.S., and recorded about 67,000 deaths.

Yang's team divided participants into five groups based on their daily fiber intake.

Those in the top fifth, who ate the greatest amount of fiber daily, were 16 percent less likely to die than those in the bottom fifth, who consumed the least amount of fiber. In addition, eight studies showed a 10 percent drop in risk for any cause of death with each 10-gram per day increase in fiber intake.

She cautioned, however, that the current study does not prove that eating more fiber is the reason some participants lived longer. 

Their reduced risk of death might be due to some other shared characteristic, like an overall healthier lifestyle, or perhaps some other property of the high-fiber foods, which tend to be nutritious in general.

'Although there is increasing evidence that cereal grains may offer the best risk reductions for colorectal and cardiovascular disease,' she said.