How to Calculate the Daily Percent Value for Fiber

Dietary fiber, or the parts of plant foods that your body cannot digest, promotes bowel health. It may also reduce your risk of diabetes and heart disease. The Food and Drug Administration has set a daily value for dietary fiber at 25g based on a 2,000-calorie diet. You can determine the daily percent value for fiber to see if a food serving contributes a lot, or a little, to your daily recommended allowance and to compare fiber content in different products.

Calculating the daily percent value for fiber requires only simple division. (Image: Claudio Divizia/Hemera/Getty Images)

Step 1

Locate the fiber content on the food label. It should appear under the heading “Total Carbohydrate.”

Step 2

Divide the quantitative fiber amount by the reference value in the footnote of the food label, which is 25g for a 2,000-calorie diet. For example, if you ate a serving of baby carrots containing 2g of fiber, the daily percent value for this serving would be 2 divided by 25, which equals 0.08.

Step 3

Multiply by 100 percent to get a percentage. For example, 0.08 multiplied by 100 percent equals 8 percent. That is the daily percent value for fiber in a bag of serving of baby carrots. This means that when you eat a serving of this food, you are consuming 8 percent of your dietary fiber allotment for the day.