Analysis of Total Dietary Fiber: The Collaborative Study

Abstract

In the fall of 1979 the Association of Official Analytical Chemists (AOAC) set out to develop and test suitable methods for dietary fiber analysis through collaborative studies. The need for such methods was stimulated by the publications of Burkitt et al. (1972), Trowell (1972), and Burkitt (1973), who represented dietary fiber as food ingredients that would cure a number of chronic degenerative diseases. During the past few years the AOAC associate referee for dietary fiber sought (1) to define dietary fiber in terms of chemical components, (2) to perform and/or evaluate intralaboratory methods for quantitatively measuring these components, and (3) to subject the most promising procedures to collaborative study. To help arrive at a definition and method of choice for dietary fiber we contacted more than 100 scientists who were actively engaged in determining dietary fiber. Included in this group were many of the persons who contributed to a joint meeting of the European Economic Community’s Committee on Medical Research and the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer held in Lyon, France in 1977. In 1981 a volume entitled The Analysis of Dietary Fiber in Foods (James and Theander, 1981) appeared, which described the work at that meeting, including the methods then being employed and developed for the analysis of dietary fiber in foods.