If you are eating any kind of snack cracker or refined wheat product, I would suggest replacing with oats and then reporting back on results after one week.
I think the beneficial effects are strong enough to completely offset the impact of things like occasional bowl of ice cream and package of nerds gummy clusters. This is what gets me to power through. If there wasn't some kind of strong upside no one would be eating this stuff willingly.
My cholesterol has been in range for years despite eating almost exclusively saturated fat since I'm in the keto camp. Just watched an interesting episode by Peter Attia and Layne Norton on seed oils which might shift my view on PUFAs a bit.
Thoughts?
I tried to get into rolled or cut but the prep time was hard to keep up with.
What? Absolutely not. Not even close. Provide a source if you really believe this.
Also the paper says that the "Oats only" people were allowed to eat other fruits and vegetables with their meals.
1. When someone consumes fat, bile is released into the gut.
2. Oatmeal (and other soluble fibers like psyllium husk) capture this bile and it is excreted in stool.
3. In order to create the bile, the liver needs LDL. Because the LDL it used to create the bile was lost when it was captured, it exposes more LDL receptors and pulls LDL out of the bloodstream, thereby lowering LDL levels.
It seems to me that in order to maximize the effectiveness of this LDL-lowering approach, one must not simply consume psyllium or oatmeal, but rather consume them in conjunction with fat. Not saturated fat, obviously, which raises LDL, but perhaps unsaturated or polyunsaturated fats. My expectation is that this would trigger the bile secretion required in order to actually sequester it.
Bile is used to process food in the gut. It does not go back into our system. Bile is still produced by liver even in long fasts.
Oatmeals is a kind of elimination diet, much like carnivore diet or rice diet. The later one also lowered cholesterol.
What oatmeal diet really does is it completely eliminates essential fatty acids in food. These fatty acids are critical in VLDL production and, thusly, oatmeal diet reduces LDL levels through less production of VLDL.
I don't think that's correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterohepatic_circulation
I also think you're mischaracterizing HDL as a VLDL. If you search for Apolipoprotein A here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK305896/ you'll see that HDL is constructed from it, while VLDL and LDL are part of the Apolipoprotein B lineage.
Eating a low sugar breakfast does feel pretty healthy.
Don't get me wrong, to each their own, if you like it that's great, but way too liquidly oatmeal plus oil just sounds really disgusting compared to just normal oatmeal + normal amounts of water.
I eat Bob's Red Mill steel cut oats for breakfast every day; 1/2c dry is about 88g. That's a pretty decent meal. 3.5x that is probably most of what you eat that day.
6 weeks of 'oatmeal for breakfast every day' was less effective than 2 days of 'stuff yourself with oatmeal'.
I'd guess the easiest way to get it down would be to just blend the oats into water without cooking so you have something that you can just drink like water.
The trial was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the German Diabetes Association (DDG), the German Research Foundation (DFG), the German Cereal Processing, Milling and Starch Industries’ Association (VGMS), and RASO Naturprodukte."
I'd be quite suspicious of this study for this reason alone.
"They also lost two kilos in weight on average and their blood pressure fell slightly."
Two kilos in two days?
Edit: Oatmeal is great. I have some most mornings, either as porridge or letting it soak for a bit in "viscous mesophilic fermented milk", as Wikipedia suggests it can be called in english. Lots of starch but it takes a while for it to sugar the blood, and some fiber and protein.
Oatmeal and milk, nothing more. No fruit no nuts no sugar no honey no sprinkles of whatever. Perfect.
My go-to is oatmeal with milk and pepper, but some days I want some aged cheddar, or smoked cheddar (mmmm!). Frozen wild blueberries/wineberries for a winter treat. Tumeric, ginger, cinnamon and honey if I'm getting sick. A fried egg and hot sauce if it's a lazy sunday.
I've had something similar in Iceland, good call.
I would consider a normal bowl of oatmeal for breakfast to be about half a cup, so this is quite a bit more.
Oats are for horses. Mankind basically co-evolved with Barley.
That can be achieved within many other diets too. I wish they were more specific in saying what's special about oats, if anything.
I also get upset when I see a ton of junk options at the grocery store. They are talking about plain cut oats and whole fresh fruit, but based on the way shelves are stocked I imagine a majority of people get the kind with all the added sugar. You might as well be eating honey smacks at that point. Yogurt has the same problem at the store.
I don't see how. Adding sugar doesn't remove the fiber.
Effects on but biome are real too, and apparently beneficial, and may factor in, but it isn't the only (or necessarily the primary) mechanism for reducing serum cholesterol.