Oatmeal: One Hot Dish!

Oatmeal is one hot dish for your insides especially when the weather outside is snow and ice.

Research shows that oatmeal can support blood sugar control and lower cholesterol levels, help manage weight and improve digestive health. Oat consumption lowers cholesterol levels by adding high fiber to the diet. This may be particularly beneficial in reducing the risk of heart disease in people with mildly high cholesterol levels. As an added bonus, the polyphenols found in oatmeal have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties which can help combat chronic health conditions such as heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and obesity while helping to counter the effect of aging.

It’s probably a good idea to add milk to a steaming hot bowl of oatmeal. While oatmeal is a high protein dish, like all grains its proteins are “limited,” which means they lack sufficient amounts of certain of the amino acids that constitute proteins. In this case, lysine. No problem. Milk has plenty of lysine. Pour some on the oats and voila! A complete protein food.

If you want to jazz up the milky oatmeal, try it with shredded cheese some chopped tomatoes, and maybe a basil leaf for flavor. It may sound a bit bizarre, but remember: oats are grains, they partner with cheese a milk product with–guess what?–lysine.

Keep the milk or cheese low-fat or fat-free and the oatmeal is as heart heathy as all get-out. Oats are high in dietary fiber, particularly beta-glucans, the soluble gums that give the coral its sicky texture. Beta glucans are champion cholesterol mopper-uppers. They positively wipe away low-density lipoproteins (LDLs) the “bad” cholesterol that can clog arteries and raise the risk of a heart attack.

Quaker Oats, a prime cereal maker, suggests this happens in primarily two ways. For example, beta glucans bind some of the cholesterol in the digestive tract so that it never makes its way into the blood stream. If some does, the same beta glucans latch on to the LDLs and pull them out of blood vessels so they can be excreted. Second, as little as three grams of soluble fiber such as that in beta glucans increase the number of beneficial bacteria in the intestinal tract which studies suggest may influence cholesterol metabolism.

One very early study of 220 heathy volunteers at the Medical School of Northwestern University showed that people with cholesterol levels of 200 mg/dL could reduce their total cholesterol by nearly 10 percent by following low-fat, low cholesterol diet supplemented with two ounces of oat bran or oatmeal. The oats were given credit for about one-third of the drop in cholesterol levels; the other two thirds went to the diet itself.

Having reviewed this and other similar studies, the Food and Drug Administration said: “Soluble fiber from food such as oat bran, as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease.”

Nobody at all argued with that, but later on, as Quaker notes, when more sophisticated scientific info became available, their copy was up graded to “3g Of Soluble Fiber From Oatmeal Daily In A Diet Low In Saturated Fat And Cholesterol May Reduce The Risk Of Heart Disease. This Cereal Has 2g Per Serving.”

Which is only one reason some famous folk love oatmeal. “I agree that ordinary oatmeal is very boring,” the actor Alan Alda of M.A.S.H. fame has said, “but not the steel-cut Irish kind–the kind that pops in your mouth when you bite into it in little glorious bursts like a sort of gummy champagne.”

For celebrity chef Emeril Legasse, the added inducement is cinnamon, “an awesome spice to use and it goes great with something like apples in the morning or in a mixture of fruit or in your oatmeal or even in your cereal.”