ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Nutr.
Sec. Nutrition and Metabolism
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnut.2025.1602600
Association between dietary fiber intake and obesity in US adults: from NHANES 1999-2018
Provisionally accepted
- 1Shunde Women and Children's Hospital of Guangdong Medical University, Foshan, China
- 2Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China
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Background ：Previous researches have demonstrated that dietary fiber reduces the incidence of diabetes or hyperlipidemia, but it remains unclear how dietary fiber intake relates to obesity incidence. Methods ： 39,184 adults were obtained from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 1999 to 2018. Multifactorial logistic regression analysis and Cox regression analysis were used to investigate the correlation between dietary fiber intake and obesity. Restricted cubic spline (RCS) analyses were used to describe the dose-response correlation between dietary fiber intake and the incidence of obesity. The robustness of the results was enhanced by Kaplan-Meier survival analyses and subgroup analyses.Results ：After adjusting for confounders, dietary fiber intake in the quartile 4 (≥ 20.8 g/day) was linked with a 26% lower incidence of obesity than those in the quartile 1 (≤9.1 g/day) (odds ratios (OR)=0.74, 95% confidence interval (95% CI): 0.67-0.83, P<0.0001). Further study indicated that heightened dietary fiber intake was linked with 21% decrease in all-cause mortality in the quartile 4 compared to the quartile 1 (hazard ratio (HR)=0.79, 95% CI: 0.65-0.96, P=0.02). The RCS analysis conspicuously showed a non-linear U-shaped association between dietary fiber intake and all-cause mortality (P<0.05) with 26.3 g/day being the turning point, the HR curve for all-cause mortality initially decreased and then increased.Conclusion：Adequate dietary fiber intake has a favorable effect on reducing the incidence of obesity events and obesity patients with high dietary fiber intake exhibit lower mortality of all-cause.
Keywords: Dietary fiber intake, obesity risk, Mortality, NHANES Dataset Analysis, nutrition
Received: 30 Mar 2025; Accepted: 20 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lai, Zeng, Lin, Li, Lin and Ouyang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xueren Ouyang, Shunde Women and Children's Hospital of Guangdong Medical University, Foshan, China
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