Abstract
The dietary fiber contents of Lettuce, Celery, Sweet pepper, Cucumber, Spinach, Eggplant and Chinese cabbage commercially available in Tokyo were deterrmined gravimetrically using the partly modified method of Asp et al. involving enzymatic digestion. Recovery tests performed on cellulose powder gave a recovery of 101.5%, and those performed on model samples containing potato starch and casein gave recoveries of 1.73 and 1.02%, respectively, using mixtures of 6: 4 and 8: 2. These results indicated that the digestive ability of enzymes to remove starch and protein in samples was sufficient under the experimental conditions used. The total dietary fiber contents of these vegetables were 1.1-2.3% fresh weight, which were 1.40-1.81 times higher than those obtained by the neutral detergent fiber (NDF) method of Van Soest using the same samples. The results suggested that some components of dietary fiber might be dissolved by the NDF reagent.
