| Summary: | Dietary fibre (DF) has been part of human diet since ancient times, and its benefits for the human health have been well established and scientifically confirmed. Having in mind the importance of DF the present work was undertaken to evaluate the level of knowledge shown by Portuguese people about the health effects associated with an adequate ingestion of DF. For that, a descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted on a non-probabilistic sample of 382 adult participants. The results allowed concluding that people showed different degrees of information about the benefits of DF in preventing and/or treating various diseases. Constipation was the most recognized helth effect, followed in decreasing order by obesity, bowel cancer, cholesterol, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and breast cancer. The results also showed that significant differences were encountered between age groups for most of the diseases evaluated, but not between genders, levels of education or living environments. Hence, generally, it was concluded that the participants in this study were relatively informed about the roles of DF in preventing and/or treating some diseases.
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