How Much Fibre Is Actually in Your Snack? Reading the Fibre Line on a Singapore Label

Everyone knows they should eat more fibre. Far fewer of us have ever turned a snack packet over and looked for the fibre line — and if you did, you may have found it wasn't there at all.

Fibre is one of the more useful numbers on a Singapore nutrition label, partly because it's one of the few that's genuinely hard to fake. But the claims wrapped around it — high in fibre, source of fibre, fibre-rich — mean specific, regulated things that most shoppers have never been told. Here's how to read them.

First: how much fibre do you actually need in a day?

Singapore's Health Promotion Board recommends roughly 10g of dietary fibre per 1,000 kcal eaten. As Ms Christine Ong, Senior Principal Dietitian at KK Women's and Children's Hospital, explains via SingHealth's HealthXchange, that works out to about 20g a day for women and 26g a day for men.

The World Health Organization landed in similar territory when it updated its carbohydrate guidance in 2023, recommending adults get at least 25g of naturally occurring dietary fibre per day, alongside at least 400g of vegetables and fruit.

Note that phrasing — naturally occurring. It matters, and we'll come back to it.

What "high in dietary fibre" legally means here

In Singapore, fibre claims aren't marketing language a brand can invent. They're approved nutrition claims with numerical criteria set out in HPB's Guide to Nutrition Labelling for Food Products. The thresholds are:

  • "Source of dietary fibre" / "Contains dietary fibre" — at least 1.5g per 100 kcal, or 3g per 100g.
  • "High in dietary fibre" / "High source of" / "Good source of" / "Fibre-rich" — at least 4g per serving, or 3g per 100 kcal, or 6g per 100g.
  • "More / added / enriched dietary fibre" — at least 25% more fibre than the reference food it's being compared with.

Two practical takeaways. First, "source of" is a much lower bar than "high in" — roughly half. They read similarly on a front of pack; they are not the same product. Second, a food can qualify as "high in fibre" through any one of several routes, including per serving. A generously sized serving can carry a claim that a 100g comparison wouldn't.

The catch: the fibre line isn't always required

This surprises people. Under Singapore's Food Regulations, a Nutrition Information Panel is only mandatory for certain products — including any product that carries a health or nutrition claim, as HPB sets out on its nutrition labelling page. Where a panel is required, the compulsory nutrients are energy, protein, fat and carbohydrate, plus whatever nutrient is being claimed.

So dietary fibre appears in HPB's recommended core list of nutrients, but a plain packet making no claims isn't obliged to declare it. If there's no fibre line, that's not evidence the food has none — it's simply an absence of information. If a brand does claim fibre, the panel has to back it up with a number. That's the useful asymmetry: claims come with receipts.

Not all fibre on a label is the same fibre

Singapore's definition of dietary fibre is broad. It covers non-digestible carbohydrate polymers occurring naturally in food, but also polymers extracted from raw materials and even synthetic ones — provided there's accepted scientific evidence of a physiological benefit. Inulin, polydextrose and resistant starch can all legitimately count toward the number in the panel.

That's not a scandal, and isolated fibres aren't worthless. But it's worth being honest that WHO's 25g recommendation specifically refers to naturally occurring fibre from whole grains, vegetables, fruit and pulses — not to fibre added back into a processed product. A biscuit hitting 6g per 100g through added chicory root is not nutritionally identical to a bowl of dhal. Both count on a label; only one comes packaged with everything else that whole plant food brings.

What a snack can realistically contribute

Keep expectations calibrated. Against a 20–26g daily target, a snack delivering 2–3g of fibre is a genuinely useful contribution — roughly a tenth of your day — but it isn't going to carry you. Fibre is won at meals: brown rice instead of white, wholemeal instead of white bread, an extra serving of vegetables.

The encouraging news is that this shift is already happening here. HPB's National Nutrition Survey 2018 found unrefined carbohydrates rose from 14% to 17% of total carbohydrate intake between 2010 and 2018, driven largely by more wholegrain, fruit and vegetables. Modest, but moving the right way.

A three-second check at the shelf

  1. Look for the fibre line in the panel. No line, no claim — treat it as unknown, not zero.
  2. Check whether the number is per 100g or per serving, and which one the claim is leaning on.
  3. Ask whether the fibre is coming from the actual grain or from something added at the end. The ingredients list usually tells you.

None of this requires a nutrition degree. It just requires turning the packet over — which, given how much design effort goes into the front, is the single highest-return habit in the snack aisle.

At HexaCrunch, we bake our crackers from brown rice — a wholegrain — and add cricket protein for a protein and micronutrient lift, then print the full panel so you can check the numbers yourself rather than take our word for it. If you'd like to taste-test all three flavours before committing, the Try-All 3-Pack is the easiest place to start.

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