What kind of oatmeal is the healthiest?

00:00 childhood memories
0:58 nutrient content
1:23 beta glucan
2:38 postprandial glycemic responses
3:19 oatmeal processing
4:55 oatmeal experiment
8:55 satiety
10:22 take home messages

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Hosting, Research, Writing & Post-Production by Lara Hyde, PhD

Music & Video Production by Robbie Hyde

Thanks to my family for helping me bring my childhood memories of peaches and cream oatmeal to life!

The information in this video is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. All content, including text, graphics, images and information, contained on or available through this video is for general information purposes only.

References

Additional Footage
Pexels: Polina Tankilevitch, Castorly Stock, RODNAE Productions, Engin Akyurt, Luis Quintero, eat kubba, Anna Tarazevich, Naim Benjelloun, Kampus Production
Freepik: katemangostar
Pixabay

Script tidbits
One perspective is the nutrient content. The unflavoured varieties all have 4g of dietary fiber. That’s a pretty good amount of fiber, providing 14% of your daily needs. Specifically, oats are a good source of a soluble fiber called beta glucan. When you eat oats, the beta glucan dissolves in water within the intestine, swells up and forms a gel. This gel makes it more difficult to reabsorb bile acids from the intestine back into the body. This means your liver can’t recycle those bile acids and instead has to make them from scratch using cholesterol, which ultimately helps reduce your bad, LDL cholesterol. Daily added sugar intake is recommended to be capped at 10% of daily calories, so assuming a 2000kcal diet, one serving contributes about a fifth of that added sugar cap. Whether that amount of added sugar is a concern really depends on the rest of your dietary pattern and how much added sugar you get throughout the day. Another perspective is the impact on blood glucose - this is called the postprandial glycemic response. Prandial meaning eating, post meaning after, glycemia referring to blood glucose. Frequent spikes in blood glucose increase inflammation, and over time this drives the development of chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes. Why would we expect different postprandial glycemic responses? Even though they’re all the same ingredients - just oats - they differ in their processing. All oatmeal starts as oat groats. An oat groat has a fibrous bran coat surrounding a starchy endosperm and an inner germ. That outer bran is a dense network of different kinds of fibers, slowing our enzymes from accessing the starch in the endosperm. Steel cut oats take the oat groats and cut them up into coarse pieces. This cutting mostly maintains the integrity of the oat kernel. Old fashioned oats are steamed and then flattened through rollers. The rolling disrupts the fibrous bran, and the steaming relaxes the starch, making it more accessible to digestive enzymes. Instant oats are similar, except that they’re rolled thinner and steamed longer. All this processing impacts how quickly they can be cooked, but also how readily the carbohydrates are accessible for digestion and absorption into the blood. The viscous gel that forms in the stomach slows down gastric emptying, so the meal is more slowly .released into the intestines where the digestive enzymes live, plus the gel in the intestine slows the absorption of glucose. Satiety is a sense of fullness after eating. Meals that maintain satiety for longer help prevent overeating.