You probably don't make gelatin desserts very often, so here's a quick review if you can't recall the process.

Boil water and pour into a bowl. Sprinkle the gelatin powder on top. Stir until the powder is fully dissolved. Refrigerate for as long as it takes to turn the mixture into solid.The reason for the review? Not to promote gelatin desserts as a super food, that's for sure. If you know the gelatin dessert making process, however, you'll understand how one component of fruits, vegetables, and unprocessed grains does so much to help your health.Fiber, the indigestible part of plant foods that comes in two forms.Insoluble fiber, though, shares little in common with making a gelatin dessert, for it does not dissolve in water. Instead, it absorbs water and expands.The expansion helps food move through your digestive system quickly, which helps your health in two ways: it reduces the time toxic waste spends in your body, and it promotes regular bowel movement.It's the digestion of the second type, soluble fiber, that's analogous to the gelatin dessert making process because it dissolves in water and thickens as a gelatin dessert does when it cools.While the thickened fiber moves through the small intestine, bile, an alkaline acid secreted by the gallbladder to aid in the digestive process, binds to it. Bound bile can't do its intended job: break down fat.Eventually you pass the thickened fiber, bile in tow. Guess what else you pass, as well?Dietary fat that never got digested because bile attached to soluble fiber. Some fatty acids bind to the fiber as well, reducing your cholesterol level, including LDL cholesterol, known as the "bad" type.Because so many other factors affect the digestive process, there's no clear-cut answer as to how many fat calories go undigested because of fiber digestion, but it could be significant. The Peanut Butter Diet by Holly McCord, for instance, cites one study that found for every single gram of fiber consumed seven total calories pass through the body unused.But "free" calories are not the only benefit to having soluble fiber in your digestive system. The gelatinous fiber increases the time it takes to empty the stomach, which moderates the rate at which sugar enters your bloodstream. It's important to avoid dramatic rises in blood sugar because your body responds by secreting too much insulin.Too much insulin means too much sugar is removed from the blood and soon you feel hungry again. Moreover, the muscle cells, can only store a limited amount of sugar, so much - sometimes all - of the potential energy is denied entry. Insulin escorts any leftovers to the fat stores.That's why avoiding high blood sugar levels and the overdose of insulin that results is imperative to achieving and/or maintaining a healthy weight.You just read the decades-old explanation of why consuming at least 25 to 35 grams of fiber a day helps your health. The fact that the average American consumes between 10 to 15 grams a day is just as old. What's new is a surprising study that links eating more fiber to avoiding many disabilities and diseases as you age.Published this June in The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, the study reviewed data gathered from a 10-year study of more than 1,600 subjects who were at least 50 years of age at the onset. The researchers were searching for patterns between the type and amount of carbohydrates the subjects consumed and what they deemed "successful aging" - an absence of disability, depressive symptoms, cognitive impairment, respiratory problems, and chronic diseases, such as cancer, heart disease, and stroke.They calculated total carbohydrate intake, how the carbs scored on the glycemic index, and the amount of sugar consumed, and found some correlations as a result. The strongest one connected successful aging to total fiber intake.The lead author of the paper, associate professor Bamini Gopinath, Ph.D., at the Westmead Institute for Medical Research in Australia, offered the following in a press release: "Those [subjects] who had the highest intake of fiber, or total fiber actually, had an almost 80 percent greater likelihood of living a long and healthy life over a 10-year follow-up. That is, they were less likely to suffer from hypertension, diabetes, dementia, depression, and functional disability."A second recent study suggests that females who eat lots of fiber early in life have less of a chance getting breast cancer later.Harvard researchers reviewed more than 44,000 questionnaires completed by premenopausal women about their teenage eating habits. The women had been part of a larger study - the Nurses' Health Study II - and filled out dietary questionnaires at that time. A comparison of both questionnaires revealed that the women who ate the most fiber as youngsters were 16 to 20 percent less likely to have developed breast cancer.While lead author Maryam Farvid noted that prior studies had not found a correlation between an increased consumption of fiber and a decreased incidence of breast cancer, those studies focused on fiber consumption in midlife or later.