Searching for fiber in my food

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The newspaper has a story on how "roughage" and "more fiber" in our diet can extend our lives, but it's short on information about what foods have them.

The daily recommendation is 25 grams for women and 38 grams for men. However, the Associated Press story, which equates "roughage" and "fiber," only mentions one food source: grains.

The National Cancer Institute study is called the largest of its kind. "It finds the overall benefit to be strongest for diets high in fiber from grains." 

Rather than rely on the Associated Press, it's probably best to read a summary of the study on the Web site of the Archives of Internal Medicine at the following link: 

Dietary fiber and mortality 

I took a look at some of the food in my cupboard and refrigerator to see which has dietary fiber.

My breakfast this morning included two foods with dietary fiber: Bob's Red Mill 100% Whole Grain Hot Cereal (10-Grain), which I prepared with dried blueberries and honey; and sun-dried tomatoes, which I paired with buffalo-milk mozzarella cheese.

Lundberg Organic Short-Grain Brown Rice also is 100% whole grain, but other brown rice has fiber, too. You can get more fiber from fully cooked, canned kidney beans or Madras-style lentils.

A half-cup of ShopRite's Organic Dark-Red Kidney Beans contains 6 grams of dietary fiber; 5 ounces of Tasty Bite Madras Lentils contain 5 grams of fiber, and one-quarter cup of organic brown rice has 3 grams of fiber.

Although I am cutting down on bread to lose weight and giving up that fiber, I make up for it by eating pasta and almonds, both of which contain dietary fiber, as do fruits and vegetables.

You can find a fact sheet on dietary fiber, including a listing of foods, at the following link:

Dietary fiber

Salt in Costco Wholesale almonds, Trident Seafood fish sticks

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Blanched almonds, like those sold at Costco Wholesale.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

A half-dozen or so roasted almonds are one of my favorite snacks -- alone or with fruit and cheese -- and I rely on Costco Wholesale in Hackensack for these crunchy treats.

But in looking at labels, I've discovered that the more expensive Kirkland Signature Marcona blanched almonds from Spain have twice as much salt as the Kirkland dry-roasted almonds from California.

A 28-gram or 1-ounce serving of the Spanish almond contains 9% sodium, compared with 4% for the same serving size of the California almond (on the daily value scale). 

The former costs $7.99 for 17.63 ounces, while you'll pay $8.89 for 40 ounces of the latter. They are both delicious.

I believe Costco sells a 3-pound bag of raw, unsalted almonds, but I've never bought them or checked out the label. Next time.

Update (2015)

For the last couple of years, we've been buying the raw almonds at Costco to cut down on our sodium intake, and roasting them in the oven at 275 degrees for 1 hour and 20 minutes.

After they cool, we put them in a container on our kitchen counter and dust them with plenty of ground Saigon Cinnamon, also available at Costco.

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Fish shtick

Costco is the only retailer I know that publishes a magazine, and the February 2011 issue  of Costco Connection has an upbeat story on Trident Seafoods, the Seattle, Wash., company that supplies fish sticks and other products to the warehouse store.

I read about The Ultimate Fish Stick from Trident and asked my wife to pick up a package this week. Four pounds or 60 breaded fish sticks are $12.99. 

I prepared some last night. I found them tasty, but think the name is overblown. 

They are finger-length and cut from fillets of snow-white Alaska pollock, the largest wild fishery in the United States. 

Pollock tastes like cod, but is cheaper. Salted pollock, for example, retails for about half the price of salted cod.

A sad footnote is a 2008 incident that killed 120,000 wild king salmon when they were caught in pollock nets, according to "Four Fish, The Future of the Last Wild Food," a new book by Paul Greenberg.

The Trident package calls the fish sticks "crunchy" and "more fish, less breading." They are 65% fish, but they weren't crunchy. 

I didn't preheat the oven to 475 degrees, so that may have been a problem, though I baked them for much longer than indicated in the directions. 

Costco also sells Trident's tilapia-fillet fish sticks, but the package doesn't say whether they are made from farmed fish. They appear bigger than the pollock fish sticks. 


I've seen wild-caught tilapia at H Mart, the Korean supermarket chain, but most tilapia is farmed. It also is called St. Peter's Fish.