ABSTRACT
Present-day interest in fiber stems from the middle of the nineteenth century when the preoccupation of the Victorians with their bowel habits led many physicians to declaim the virtues of bran. John Burne,
writing in 1840 in
A Treatise on the Causes and Consequences of Habitual Constipation
, recommends that “coarse brown and bran bread is very efficacious, the bran acting as a salutory stimulus to the peristaltic action of the intestines.” There was little need to convince Burne and his generation that bran stimulated colonic movement and increased fecal output. Nevertheless, each generation of medical scientists seems to have to rediscover this fact for itself, and medical and nutritional literature in the 1970s contained many papers in which little else but the laxative properties of bran were reported.
