Many people take a daily fiber supplement because it can help manage weight, decrease appetite, reduce risk for chronic disease, and improve gastrointestinal health.
Increasing your dietary fiber also facilitates a smoother digestion process.
Fiber supplements are cheap, easy to use, and widely available. Our researchers ranked the best fiber supplements available, plus reviewed the latest science on their benefits.
Research
Rankings
Last updated: April 11, 2023
Fiber supplements considered: 23
Hours of research: 38
Experts reviewed: 6
Scientific papers referenced: 24
1. Viva Naturals Organic Psyllium Husks
Viva Naturals has made a name for itself delivering simple, no-nonsense basic supplements for a great price, and their psyllium husk fiber supplement is no exception. No flavorings, no additives, and a phenomenal price per serving make this an excellent choice for a powder based fiber supplement. And to top it all off, it’s certified organic!
This is good news if you want to cut down on the number of unnecessary pesticides and herbicides that make their way into your food and supplements. When it’s this easy to go organic, it’s a no-brainer.
2. Garden of Life Raw Fiber
Garden of Life always has a unique take on a given supplement. While most other companies focus on sourcing one type of fiber, Garden of Life’s Raw Fiber supplement includes over a dozen different sources of fiber, including quinoa, chia seeds, coconut fiber, pumpkin seeds, and more.
These are sweetened with stevia, which, although it is a naturally-derived non-caloric sweetener, may not be up your alley. To top it all off, Garden of Life includes a hefty serving of Bacillus coagulans probiotic bacteria. If you want a “maximalist” fiber supplement that’s still certified organic, look no further.
3. Micro Ingredients Organic Triple Fiber
Micro Ingredients combines three different sources of dietary fiber: inulin, acacia, and psyllium husk. It’s great if you want a versatile fiber supplement that can help support healthy gut bacteria, as inulin in particular is a very powerful prebiotic nutrient. The only downside is that the carb content is slightly higher than some of the other options out there.
4. Benefiber
Benefiber is a big hitter when it comes to popularity, but it’s not actually the best-selling fiber supplement out there. For its fiber base it uses wheat dextrin, which is processed to remove as much gluten as possible. It’s certified to contain less than 20 parts per million of gluten, which qualifies it for the label of “gluten free.”
If you have a wheat allergy, or have particularly sensitive celiac disease, you might consider a non-wheat based fiber despite this certification.
It’s unflavored and unsweetened, which can be a good or bad thing depending on your preferences. Benefiber is often lauded for its ability to mix into baked goods and prepared foods to up their fiber content, as it doesn’t cause most liquids to clump up.
5. Anthony’s Organic Oat Fiber
Anthony’s Oat Fiber is a vegan, gluten-free and organic source of insoluble fiber that’s great for baking and cooking. Its purity ranks it high on our list as well as its low caloric content.
Plant based, vegan friendly non-GMO and no additives making this one of the cleanest products out there.
6. Manitoba Harvest Hemp Yeah! Fiber
Manitoba Harvest offers an interesting combo of protein and fiber with just one ingredient. As it turns out, raw milled hemp protein has nearly equal protein and fiber content: one scoop of the loose powder provides 11 grams of protein, 13 grams of fiber, and a tremendous amount of omega 3, omega 6, and omega 9 fatty acids.
7. Sunergetic Psyllium Husk
The bottle packaging alone tells you what this fiber supplement is all about. It’s a plain, simple, capsule-based fiber supplement that provides a respectable 725 mg of fiber per capsule. It includes a few binders and anti-clumping agents, and notably, the capsules are made of gelatin, so this supplement is not suitable for vegetarians or vegans.
With 240 capsules per bottle, you could add over five grams of fiber to your dietary intake per day and the bottle would last you over a month. Of course, you’d be downing seven pills a day, so if you need a massive boost in fiber intake, look for a powder-based supplement if you can stomach the taste.
8. Now Psyllium Husk Caps
If you hate the taste of fiber (and really, who doesn’t?) taking it in a capsule form is a nice alternative. Now Psyllium Husk Caps are a perfect options for a pill-based fiber supplement.
The fiber is plant-derived and bound up with cellulose and stearic acid (derived from vegetable sources, so no problems for vegetarians and vegans) and delivers 1.1 grams of fiber (most of it soluble fiber) per three-capsule serving.
This is the main downside of capsule based fiber supplements: you have to down a lot of them to get your fiber intake up. Given that the recommended daily intake for fiber for optimal health is 25-38 grams per day, you’re going to go through a lot of pills if your fiber intake is low.
9. Metamucil Daily Fiber
As seen on TV, the most-recognized fiber brand has made a few tough choices to broaden its appeal. The classic Metamucil comes as psyllium husk powder, which is great if you really need to crank up your fiber intake. One container provides over 1,000 grams of fiber, which is enough for a month of use even if you got no additional fiber in your diet.
Metamucil is cheap, works well, and will last a long time. However, it is flavored and colored, so if that’s not your preference, look elsewhere. It uses both natural and artificial flavoring, as well as the artificial sweetener aspartame and the coloring agent Yellow 6.
10. Fiber Choice Gummies
For those who really hate the taste and texture of fiber, and can’t handle capsules either, these gummies are one possible solution. They pack a surprising punch: each gummy contains 2 grams of soluble fiber, which is pretty good for a pill-based fiber product.
They are colored and flavored with natural products only, which is nice if you are trying to avoid artificial ingredients in your supplements. However, the fiber content can’t match powder-based fiber supplements.
Category winners
Best fiber overall: Viva Naturals Psyllium Husk Powder
Simple, pure, and with a bare minimum of calories, Viva Naturals Psyllium Husk Powder should be your first choice if you want a versatile fiber supplement to increase your daily fiber intake.
Best fiber for weight loss: Viva Naturals Psyllium Husk Powder
With five grams of fiber per scoop, all of it from organic psyllium husk, Viva Naturals provides a fiber supplement that’s great for suppressing appetite, either on its own or when added to a green drink or meal replacement shake. It’s easily our favorite when it comes to fiber for weight loss.
Best fiber for constipation: Micro Ingredients Organic Triple Fiber
With a huge amount of fiber per serving, and a variety of sources of this fiber (both soluble and insoluble), Micro Ingredients Organic Triple Fiber is great for clearing out constipation and helping sustain regular bowel movements.
Best fiber for healthy gut bacteria: Garden of Life Raw Fiber
Garden of Life uses a panoply of natural ingredients to source the fiber in this supplement, and even includes live bacterial cultures. There’s no better option for helping to support a healthy gut microbiome.
Best fiber for keto diet: Anthony’s Organic Oat Fiber
This fiber supplement is super-pure, organically certified, and almost totally devoid of calories. It’s the perfect way to adapt baking recipes to the keto diet, keeping their bulk and fiber but cutting out the carbs.
Best fiber for heart health: Sunergetic Psyllium Husk
Adding fiber to your diet is one of the easiest ways to decrease your blood pressure and lower your cholesterol levels. We love Sunergetic Psyllium Husk for heart health—taking a few capsules per day couldn’t be easier. No fuss and no mess.
Who should buy fiber?
If you are having a hard time getting enough fiber from fruits, vegetables, and legumes in your diet, a fiber supplement can help correct that deficiency. Fiber supplements are specifically useful for the following groups.
People with GI complaints like constipation. If you are having gastrointestinal problems like constipation, a fiber supplement can be especially helpful—often, these problems can be traced to inadequate fiber intake.
A lack of dietary fiber is common in people who travel or eat out a lot, because processed foods are usually quite low in fiber, which can cause constipation and other GI complaints.
People who are looking to lose weight. Fiber has dual benefits for weight loss: first, it helps you feel more full, reducing your caloric intake. And second, it can help reduce some of the negative side effects of being overweight, like having poor blood sugar control. Fiber is an easy and safe supplement to add to your weight loss routine.
People who want to reduce their risk for heart disease. High fiber intake is known to reduce risk factors for heart disease like high cholesterol and blood triglycerides, making it a great addition to your supplementation regimen if you are concerned about long-term health.
How we ranked
There are a ton of fiber supplements out there, some of them great and some of them not so great. Here were the ranking criteria we applied to separate out the very best.
Primary focus on fiber. The first criteria we used when formulating our rankings was that any supplement that made it into our rankings be focused primarily on fiber, and not merely delivering fiber as part of a larger overall supplement like a meal replacement shake.
No artificially-flavored low-dose imitators. From there, we winnowed down the field by tossing out products that relied heavily on artificial flavoring and didn’t deliver an adequate amount of dietary fiber.
That’s why lesser-known products like Garden of Life (which uses stevia) ended up much higher in the rankings than blockbuster best-sellers like Metamucil (which uses artificial flavorings and colorings).
Natural sources of fiber are best. For the products that remained, we prioritized natural sources of fiber like psyllium husk and plant seed fiber, since these come with a comprehensive balance of soluble and insoluble fiber.
Great taste matters too. Flavoring was important to us as well, since a bland and flavorless fiber supplement (though great for adding to protein shakes or green drinks) can be hard to consume on a regular basis.
This is particularly problematic for fiber because to get the benefits, you need to take fiber every day for a long period of time to make the most out of the long-term health effects.
So, we prioritized great-tasting products, although we had a strong preference for naturally flavored products that used ingredients like stevia, as compared to products that used artificial sweeteners and artificial flavoring agents.
Powder-based supplements came out on top. Finally, we carefully considered the benefits and drawbacks of capsules versus powder-based fiber supplements. In most areas, powder based supplements came out on top: it’s much easier to get the specific dosage you need, and you can mix them into shakes and smoothies as desired.
However, some people just can’t get behind the taste and texture of fiber powder. For them, capsules are desirable. Since powder-based supplements have so many advantages, they ended up at the top of our rankings. That being said, we still left some capsule based products in the rankings due to the niche that they fill.
After sorting the remaining products by purity and quality, we had our final rankings—these are the best fiber supplements on the market right now.
FAQ
Q: Is fiber supplementation important if you are on a keto diet?
A: The necessity of taking a fiber supplement on a keto diet depends entirely on what foods you are eating to stay in ketosis.
If your keto diet is high in fibrous foods like kale and spinach, you’re probably fine without a fiber supplement. But if you rely on foods like bacon, chicken, cheese, and coconut oil, you should consider a fiber supplement—these foods, while keto-friendly, don’t have much in the way of fiber content.
Fortunately, a fiber supplement isn’t going to affect your ability to stay in ketosis, because your body can’t derive any calories from fiber.
Q: When should you take a fiber supplement?
A: The timing on when to take a fiber supplement depends to some extent on what you’re trying to get out of taking a fiber supplement.
If you are taking a fiber supplement to deal with constipation, for example, it’s common to take your fiber supplement in one dose, right before bed.
This can help with having a regular bowel movement every morning. On the other hand, if your goal is to take fiber to help with weight loss, it’s better to take fiber in the mid-morning or early afternoon.
That way, you can leverage the appetite suppressant effects of fiber to help reduce your food intake at lunch or dinner. Taking a fiber supplement at night won’t help much, because you wouldn’t be eating at night anyways.
Q: Can fiber supplements help with constipation?
A: Yes, one of the core applications of taking a fiber supplement is for reducing constipation. Research supports using between six and eleven grams of fiber in the form of a supplement to reduce the symptoms of constipation.
Fiber can take up to a few days to start working, as it needs time to build up bulk in your digestive tract, but it is safe and does not induce reliance like some other anti-constipation supplements, making it a very good first option for constipation.
Q: How much fiber should you get per day?
A: In terms of overall fiber consumption, the recommended amount is 25 grams of fiber per day in your diet, according to the American Heart Association (1). Some other health experts recommend at least 30 grams per day, and as with many other nutrients, exceeding the bare minimum is a good thing.
If you are supplementing your normal dietary intake with fiber, make sure that you are checking the nutrition label – 10 grams of a fiber supplement won’t necessarily contain 10 grams of fiber, since not all of the material in, say, psyllium husk is actually fiber.
Related articles
Recap
Fiber feeds friendly bacteria in the gut that help keep everything functioning smoothly as digestion processes take place.
While this may be part of the reason why eating a high-fiber diet appears to be a healthy choice, many other factors are involved. It may take many years and numerous studies to ferret out the particulars.
Whatever the details, it looks like a smart bet to keep those high-fiber foods on your plate or take a fiber supplement.
For BodyNutrition‘s #1 fiber recommendation, click here.
