The short answer#
About 14 g per 1000 kcal. On a 2000 kcal day that is roughly 28 g; on 1500 kcal, about 21 g; on 2800 kcal, about 39 g.
You will also see flat numbers — 30 g a day in UK guidance, 25 g for women and 38 g for men in US guidance. Those are the same idea with the arithmetic already done for an average intake. The per-1000-kcal form is more useful when your own intake is not average, which is the whole situation you are in if you are running a deficit.
Why it scales with energy#
A fixed gram target sets a different task for two different people. Someone eating 1400 kcal has far less room on the plate than someone eating 3000, and telling both of them “30 g” asks much more of the first.
SmartCrunch derives the figure from your own budget, so the target moves down when you cut and back up when you do not. You can see what any budget produces in the nutrient target calculator.
Fibre is also the only one of the four figures the app tracks that is a minimum. Sugars, saturated fat and sodium are ceilings; fibre is a floor.
What 28 g looks like#
Rough figures, per typical portion:
| Food | Portion | Fibre |
|---|---|---|
| Porridge oats | 40 g dry | ~4 g |
| Wholemeal bread | 2 slices | ~5 g |
| Baked beans | half a 400 g tin | ~7 g |
| Lentils, cooked | 150 g | ~6 g |
| Apple, with skin | one medium | ~3 g |
| Raspberries | 100 g | ~6 g |
| Broccoli, cooked | 100 g | ~3 g |
| Almonds | 30 g | ~4 g |
| White bread | 2 slices | ~2 g |
| White rice, cooked | 150 g | ~1 g |
Porridge, a tin of beans and a couple of pieces of fruit gets most people two-thirds of the way there. The gap for most people is not exotic food, it is that the default versions of bread, rice and pasta carry very little.
Why it is hard to track accurately#
Fibre is not mandatory on European or UK labels. Energy, fat, saturates, carbohydrate, sugars, protein and salt are. Fibre is optional, so plenty of products simply do not print it — and a food database built from those labels inherits the gap.
This is where a tracker either helps or quietly lies. Counting a missing fibre value as zero makes your day look worse than it is; counting it as an average makes it look better. SmartCrunch does neither: it reports the value as unknown and shows how many of the day’s entries the total was actually computed from. When fewer than half carry a figure, it does not show a total at all.
So a low fibre number in the app can mean two different things, and it tells you which: you genuinely ate little fibre, or several of today’s items never had the data.
Increasing it without regretting it#
Fibre intake that jumps suddenly is uncomfortable — bloating and wind are the usual complaints, and they are the reason people abandon the attempt. The standard advice is to add it gradually over a couple of weeks and to drink more water as you do, because several kinds of fibre work by holding it.
The cheapest structural swaps, in rough order of payoff:
- Wholemeal instead of white, for bread, pasta and rice.
- A pulse in something you already cook — lentils in a bolognese, beans in a chilli.
- Fruit with the skin on, rather than juice.
- Oats at breakfast instead of a low-fibre cereal.
None of that is a diet, and this page is not recommending one. It is arithmetic about a target, and what to actually eat is deliberately outside what this app has an opinion on.
Read next
- How much saturated fat per day? About a tenth of your calories, which is roughly 22 g on a 2000 kcal day. The figure moves with your budget, which is why a fixed gram target misleads.
- How to read a food label The two mistakes that matter are reading a per-100 g figure as a portion, and reading a missing field as a zero. Everything else on a label is arithmetic.