The Overlooked Nutrient That Shapes Your Energy, Mood, and Blood Sugar

You eat a decent breakfast. You order the salad sometimes. You are trying. And still, the afternoon crash arrives on schedule, the bloating shows up uninvited, and a low, hard-to-name sluggishness settles in by mid-day. You are not sick, exactly. You just do not feel well either. For millions of people, that gap between “my labs look fine” and “I feel awful” has a single, unglamorous explanation, and it is one almost no one talks about at the dinner table: fiber. Study after study suggests that somewhere around ninety to ninety-five percent of us are not getting nearly enough of it, and the cost shows up everywhere from our energy to our blood sugar.

Roxanne McBride learned this the hard way. Before she became the founder of FiberBlisss, a clean-label fiber company, she spent years as a finance executive in the consumer packaged goods industry, including building the finance department at the beverage brand Poppi. She also spent those same years managing diabetes that began at nineteen, cycling through statins, a GLP-1 medication, and what felt like every powder, capsule, and gummy on the shelf. McBride did not set out to build a company. She set out to feel better, and when nothing on the market worked the way she needed it to, she went looking for the science herself. What she found reshaped how she thinks about food, and it is the kind of knowledge that helps even if you never touch a supplement.

Fiber Is Not Really About Your Bathroom Habits

McBride is quick to point out that fiber has an image problem. We file it under bathroom talk, she says, which misses the point. That association captures only the output, not the purpose, and the trips to the bathroom are really the byproduct. What fiber actually does, in her words, is keep the cells in your body running, which is part of why it helps the body clear waste so efficiently. The trouble begins when that clearing slows down. McBride describes a pattern she has seen in herself and in others: the longer waste builds up in your system, the worse you feel, and the longer it takes to figure out why. For the reader, the shift is small but meaningful. Instead of thinking of fiber as a fix for one occasional problem, think of it as routine maintenance for a system that touches almost everything else about how you feel.

Your Gut Works Like an Air Traffic Controller

One reason fiber reaches so far beyond digestion is the role McBride gives the gut in the body’s larger operation. She compares the brain to an electrical circuit board, the part that processes information and tells the body how to move. The gut, she says, is doing a different job altogether, coordinating and routing in real time. When the digestive tract is not getting what it needs and is backed up, McBride says it can produce symptoms that seem entirely unrelated, starting with something as common as brain fog. Energy, immune function, mood, and how steady your blood sugar stays through the day all run through the same hub. The takeaway is worth sitting with. A foggy, exhausted afternoon is not always a sleep problem or a willpower problem. Sometimes it is a digestion problem wearing a different costume.

You Need Two Kinds of Fiber, and Probably More of the One You Ignore

Here McBride gets specific in a way most food labels never do. There are two types of fiber in the food we eat, soluble and insoluble, and the body needs both. Soluble fiber has had a moment lately, largely because of its relationship with prebiotics and probiotics. But McBride points out a detail that surprises people: current USDA guidance actually leans toward more insoluble fiber than soluble, on the order of two to one. The frustration she ran into as a consumer, and the reason she eventually built her own formula, is that soluble and insoluble fiber rarely show up together in the same product, or even in the same food. Understanding this gives you a sharper question to ask at the store. It is not only “am I getting enough fiber,” but “am I getting both kinds, in something close to the right proportion.”

Why the Wrong Fiber Made Her Knuckles Swell

Quantity is only half the story. The type of fiber matters just as much, and McBride learned that through her own body. One of the most popular fiber sources on the market is inulin, found in chicory root, artichoke, and agave. It sounds healthy, and McBride recognized the ingredient immediately when she began her research. But inulin carries a higher FODMAP rating than many people realize, and a great many people are sensitive to it. When she used it during her own product development, the inflammation response was unmistakable. Her knuckles, she says, felt like rocks. That reaction sent her digging through the research, and it led her to acacia fiber and cellulose, two fibers that both the science and her own experience suggested were far more widely tolerated. The lesson for anyone adding fiber is freeing. A bad reaction does not always mean fiber is wrong for you. It may simply mean that one particular fiber is wrong for you.

The Label Word That Means Almost Nothing

McBride spent years reading ingredient panels with a finance executive’s eye, and she has strong feelings about which claims deserve your trust. The most tightly regulated terms, she notes, are the fiber ones. A product cannot call itself “high fiber,” a “good source of fiber,” or “fiber rich” unless it actually delivers twenty percent or more of the daily value. Those phrases have to be earned. The phrase she warns people about is “net carb.” According to McBride, net carb is essentially unregulated. The only real rule is that a company has to show its math, which does not mean the math is accurate, that anyone has checked the work, or that their version of a net carb will behave that way in your body and your blood sugar. Her advice is refreshingly plain. Flip the package over, read the actual nutrition panel, and treat unregulated marketing language as exactly that.

Start Small, and Don’t Forget the Water

For anyone who hears all of this and immediately feels behind, McBride’s guidance is gentle. Just start, she says, and start slowly. Going from almost no fiber to thirty grams in a single day is a recipe for regret. She suggests working it in gradually and paying close attention to what your body reports back. Not everyone needs the commonly cited thirty grams. Some people stay comfortable and regular at around twenty, while others need more, including people who regularly take NSAIDs or narcotic pain medication, both of which can cause significant constipation. The other half of the equation is water. McBride is blunt that too much fiber without enough liquid can make everything worse, and she points specifically to uncaffeinated fluids, so the fiber moving through your system has what it needs to do its job. Most people, she says, start to feel a difference within a few days.

Pay Yourself First, and Play the Long Game

McBride’s larger philosophy sounds a lot like the way she talks about money. “Pay yourself first and play the long game,” she says, the same advice she would give about savings and retirement, applied instead to your health. Moderation, in her view, prevents a great deal of chaos. The extreme approaches, the crash diets and the all-or-nothing rules, tend to fail because they ask you to deprive yourself rather than build a habit you can actually keep.

She also offers a piece of permission many people need to hear. You can train your taste buds, something one of her doctors told her that stopped her in her tracks. Eat something good for you that you do not love yet, give it a few weeks, and your preferences really can shift. The point was never perfection. McBride still eats her ice cream sandwich at night. She simply makes sure the rest of the day is built on real food and genuine nutrition.

If you carry one thing out of McBride’s experience, let it be this: start where you are, add fiber slowly, drink your water, and listen to what your body tells you in the hours that follow. You do not have to know exactly where you are going in order to take the first step. After decades of managing her own health and years spent formulating a solution she could not find anywhere else, Roxanne McBride has earned the authority to say that feeling good from the inside out is far more possible than most people think.