Only 15 years ago a conference on dietary fiber, let alone an international conference, would have been considered an extremely unlikely, and in fact an unthinkable, event. Yet in recent years a number of such conferences have taken place at the international level and in different parts of the world; the conference of which the present volume is an outgrowth is the second to have been held in Washington, D. C. This extraordinary development of interest in a hitherto largely neglected component of diet has been reflected by a veritable explosion of scientific literature, with published...

Dietary fiber is a topic that has burgeoned from an esoteric interest of a few research laboratories to a subject of international interest. This growth has been helped by the intense public interest in the potential benefits of adding fiber to the diet. The general popularity of fiber may have been helped by the perception that, for once, medicine was saying "do" instead of "don't. " There has been a proliferation of excellent scientific books on dietary fiber. Why another? The Spring Symposium on Dietary Fiber in Health and Disease was an outgrowth of our belief that informal discussion...