Dietary fibre in Hungarian foods measured by the Englyst NSP procedure and the AOAC Prosky procedure: a comparison study

Seventeen individual Hungarian foods and ten duplicate meals were analysed for dietary fibre by two current methods; the Englyst procedure (an enzymic-chemical method) for measuring dietary fibre as plant cell-wall non-starch polysaccharides (NSP) and the Prosky procedure (an enzymic-gravimetric method). The results obtained by these two methods are compared. The values obtained by the Prosky method are higher than those obtained by the Englyst method for 16 of the 17 individual foods and for all of the meal samples. National dietary guidelines recommend an increased intake of dietary fibre in the form of fruits, vegetables and whole grains. NSP values for unfortified plant foods provide a reliable marker for the cell-wall material present in the recommended, largely unrefined, plant foods. The Prosky values can represent the measurement of a range of materials formed during food processing and thus do not serve as a reliable guide to the composition of food products or the recommended, naturally occurring high-fibre diet.