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University of California, Berkeley Department of Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology Berkeley, CA 94720-3104 E-mail: fleming{at}nature.berkeley.edu
The Handbook of Dietary Fiber comprehensively describes the chemical, physicochemical, metabolic, and health effects of dietary fiber and related compounds. Most of the 45 chapters in this book are excellent, are self-contained, and begin with a general overview that is useful to the novice. Although this leads to overlap across chapters, it allows the reader a quick comprehensive understanding of each topic. The reader will benefit from the perspectives of 74 authors from more than 20 countries. The book includes summaries of very specialized topics, which are rarely found elsewhere. One example is the 53-page chapter "Chemistry and Analysis of Lignin," which includes a 20-page table of the lignin content of foods and a 5-page table of lignin intakes from specific foods by Canadians. Also novel in this book is a chapter described by its title, "Critical Review of Hydrogen Breath Test Methods in Resistant Starch and Dietary Fiber Research." In addition, separate chapters describe the dietary fiber intakes in Spain, Israel, China, Poland, Chili, Mexico, and Brazil. Individual chapters are devoted to describing the characteristics and effects of specific sources of fiber, including wheat bran, psyllium, oat fiber, barley fiber, rice bran, sugar beet, pectin, guar gum, alginate, gum arabic, gellan gum, inulin, and the little known fiber curdlan.
The book is divided into 5 sections in the following order: "Dietary Fiber in Health and Disease," "Physicochemical Properties," "Chemistry and Analysis," "Functional Dietary Fiber Ingredients," and "Worldwide Dietary Fiber Intake and Regulations of Dietary Fiber Foods." Although each chapter is excellent, the overall presentation could have been more logical. Readers wanting to learn about dietary fiber for the first time might begin by reading the chapters "Physicochemical Properties of Dietary Fiber: Overview"; "Chemistry, Architecture, and Composition of Dietary Fiber from Plant Cell Walls"; and "Classification, Structure, and Chemistry of Polysaccharides of Foods."
Considerable overlap between sections is evident because the chapters in one section describe all that is known about a specific fiber, whereas chapters in another section describe how all fibers influence specific health conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, or cancer. This redundancy may be troublesome to some readers.
This book differs in several respects from a book of a similar name, the CRC Handbook of Dietary Fiber in Human Nutrition, 3rd edition, published in 2001 and edited by GA Spiller. Both books are written by many authors; however, there is surprisingly little overlap, with only 5 authors contributing to both books. The Handbook of Dietary Fiber includes information relating to the effects of fiber on humans, ruminants, and other nonhuman mammals, whereas Spiller’s book focuses on research findings relevant to human nutrition only. The Handbook of Dietary Fiber includes extensive information on the chemistry and health effects of food constituents such as oligosaccharides, resistant starches, and polyphenols, whereas Spiller’s book is largely devoted to describing the effects of dietary fiber on human health and disease. Thus, these 2 books are substantially different even though their titles are similar. In summary, Cho and Dreher have edited a compendium of excellent chapters written by a broad, international group of scientists.