Give me an F! Give me an I! Give me a B!...

Okay, you know where this is going. Fiber isn’t just important for you, it’s key for every member of your family, including children.  Fiber is essential for healthy digestion, is known to lower cholesterol, and it helps with maintaining healthy weight, and it keeps us feeling full. Perhaps the best thing about fiber is that if you fill up with the good stuff, you’ll literally run out of space for the bad stuff, which makes one a lot less likely to eat it.

Fall foods are packed with fiber. Take an apple, for example. One medium apple (about 5 ounces), with its peel, has over 3 grams of fiber, over 10% of the Recommended Daily Allowance. The peel of many fruits and vegetable have great nutrients and fiber, but take that same apple, peeled, and you still have 2.7 grams of fiber, which is good news for parents of “peel-please” eaters.

Let's look at fiber more closely. An apple has two types of fiber. The first, insoluble fiber, works like bran, pushing bad cholesterol out of the body through digestion. Apple’s other fiber, soluble fiber, works to reduce bad cholesterol production in the liver. That sounds like two great reasons to head to the local apple orchard and start picking.

They say an apple a day keeps the doctor a way, and perhaps we have an apple's fiber to thank for that claim. But that's just a start. Experts recommend between 5 and 12 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. Luckily, apples aren’t the only fall fiber all-star. Spinach, Carrots, squash, sweet potatoes, and chestnuts are all rich in fiber.

I see a stew coming on….