There
are very few foods that are permitted, in Europe, to state that their
consumption reduces your risk of a specific disease. These claims have to be
proved to a high level of scientific scrutiny by the European Food Standards
Agency.
One
of the few foods to achieve this elevated status is oats. It's been clearly
shown that a kind of soluble fibre found in whole oats, known as beta glucan, can
reduce cholesterol - if you eat
enough oats and do so on a regular
basis. Reducing cholesterol reduces your risk of developing the clogged up
arteries that cause heart attacks. Hence the claim that oats can be “good for
your heart”.
Porridge
is the most convenient way of eating oats and is officially good for you. (Of
course if you are spending the rest of the day smoking on the sofa, eating
doughnuts and crisps, which would certainly cancel out the health-giving effect
of your breakfast porridge.)
Before
the recent crackdown on health claims, they were bandied about fairly freely on
oat products. You may have noticed recently the more carefully worded messages
such as: "Each serving
will have enough beta glucan to begin
reducing
cholesterol." Notice the word “begin”. Now look at the small print, (or
the print that flashes before your eyes on the TV ads) which says something
like:
Each serving contains 33% of
the 3g of oat beta glucan suggested per day to help lower cholesterol as part
of a varied and balanced diet & healthy lifestyle.
The
important thing to remember is that you need to eat at least 90g of whole oats
per day to get a cholesterol lowering amount of beta glucans.
Peering
critically at packets, as I do, I can’t help thinking that the person who
suggested putting oats in one-serving packets and branding them as simple and microwaveable should have had a massive bonus from their employer. It
is a brilliant way of charging a lot more for oats. But aren’t all oats simple
and microwavable? These measured portions are, for beginners, an easy way of
making porridge - but, I would have thought, making porridge in a microwave is
an easy skill that could be managed by a seven year old. And remember – those little packets
only give you a third of the recommended daily intake of oats.
The
cost of these neatly packaged oats is around £5.50 a kilo. Supermarket “value”
brands of porridge oats, sold in one-kilogram plastic bags, can be had for
about 80p a kilo. They are just as good as the oats you can buy in a box, or a
box with lots of little packets.
There
are other branded versions of porridge around, such as individual
microwaveable pots. Again if you want to check the serving size and the price
per kilo, you need to peer closely at the small print. Or visit an online
shopping site so that you can read the nutritional content of foods in bigger
print on their websites. One individual pot I looked at contains 60g of product,
30g of which is oats. So again, you’d have to eat 3 of these (at about £1 each)
to get your daily quota of oat beta glucan.
Dried
fruit is a good way of sweetening porridge without using refined sugar and it
is cheaper to add your own than to buy it ready mixed.
So
if you want to get a cholesterol lowering benefit from your morning porridge,
have a big bowl and have it most mornings. And if you’re watching your pennies
– and who isn’t – go for the ones in plastic bags.
