There are so many fiber treatments out there that they have sneaked into the cereal aisles at the grocery store . . . and the chips aisles and the snack, cracker, and frozen dinner aisles. It looks like someone is trying to tell us something. Maybe we have overdone the white flour explosion of products (bleached, processed, and stripped of nutrients) over the years and all of our intestines are so distraught with it that everyone is seeking a way to relieve themselves of the discomfort in their bowels and some marketer somewhere along the line, picked up on the distress call. So now we have our whole wheat options and our “Fiber Plus” options and even our liquid fiber options, to keep things moving along and maintain our innards’ happy status.

But what if you can’t eat wheat? Even healthy, fiber-filled whole wheat? The 9 grain and the 12 grain sandwich breads and the whole grain Sunchips brand snack? What if you can’t eat wheat but you want to get to live the same fiber-filled lifestyle as the rest of them? If you suffer from IBS, Celiac’s Disease, Wheat/Gluten Intolerance or Wheat/Gluten Allergy, then you need to know your possible alternatives for fiber.

Unfortunately, what is basically left: potatoes, white rice, and processed corn, don’t do so great as fiber alternatives, in fact, they can sometimes encourage the opposite. With your recommended fiber intake being from 25-35 grams per day for an adult, you need to become familiar with the alternatives. Try to discover ways to include the following: chickpea (garbanzo bean), soy, brown rice, wild rice, amaranth, quinoa, and my favorites, FLAX SEED and FLAX MEAL. Flax meal has 34 grams of fiber for one cup. All of these can in some way be constituted into a cake/flour arrangement and, actually, most of them can be found packaged as their own flour already. There are alternatives to fiber if you can’t eat wheat, you just have to do a little hunting.