Is Adding Fiber to Food Really Good For Your Health?

"I'm standing in the cereal aisle with three items in my basket: a box of sugary kids' cereal, some yogurt and a bottle of apple juice. According to their labels, all three of these foods are good sources of fiber, which, if you think about it, may say as much about us (the shoppers) as it does about the food we buy."

"'We're looking for elements within things,' says John Swartzberg, a professor of public health at University of California, Berkeley. 'Almost a mystical kind of thinking.'"

"He says that our love affair with food additives — fiber, for example — can be traced back to a single moment in history: British navy, 1747. "They realized that when the sailors were eating citrus fruits, they didn't get this terrible disease called scurvy," he says."