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There is considerable epidemiological and direct experimental evidence concerning the nutritional benefits of dietary fibre. Over the last few years, and particularly as a result of the publication of The F‐Plan Diet, public awareness and interest in this topic has increased enormously in the UK and there has been a growing demand both for information about the dietary fibre content of foods and for food products containing higher levels of dietary fibre. It is becoming increasingly important, therefore, to understand exactly what is meant by the term ‘dietary fibre’. In this article Helen F. Kearns, BSc and Gillian D.A. Lowy, MA, review the methods that are used for the determination of fibre in foodstuffs, outline some of the physiological effects of dietary fibre, and discuss how values quoted for the dietary fibre contents of foods may be interpreted in the light of their physiological role.

In recent years, the concept of “reification” has virtually disappeared from debates in social theory, including critical social theory. The concept was at the center of the revitalization of Marxist theory in the early twentieth century generally known as Western Marxism. Georg Lukács in particular introduced the concept to express how the process described in Marx's critique of alienation and commodification could be grasped more effectively by combining it with Max Weber's theory of rationalization (see Agger, 1979; Stedman Jones et al., 1977).¹ In Lukács's use, the concept of reification captured the process by which advanced capitalist production, as opposed to earlier stages of capitalist development, assimilated processes of social, cultural, and political production and reproduction to the dynamic imperatives and logic of capitalist accumulation. It is not just interpersonal relations and forms of organization constituting the capitalist production process that are being refashioned along the lines of one specific definition of economic necessity. In addition, and more consequentially, the capitalist mode of production also assimilates to its specific requirements the ways in which human beings think the world. As a result, the continuous expansion and perfection of capitalist production and its control over the work environment impoverishes concrete social, political, and cultural forms of coexistence and cooperation, and it brings about an impoverishment of our ability to conceive of reality from a variety of social, political, and philosophical viewpoints.