Dietary fiber helps clump material in your gut

Food, microbes, and medicine all clump together as they move through our gut. Sticky molecules secreted into our intestines bind the gut particles in the same way that flour holds a ball of dough together. Now a new mice-based study from Caltech is showing that dietary fiber also plays a role in clumping. This is the first time that researchers have shown that fiber—stringy molecules found in foods like vegetables and whole grains—helps to aggregate gut particles.