Porridge Oats – Heathy and Cheap?

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. 

Multigrain - High in Fibre?

The weekly shop is not pleasure for many busy parents as they squeeze it into busy schedules. Choosing products that are "healthy" is not made easy. Food marketing professionals know that they have a brief opportunity to attract a busy shopper to their brand. I’ve no doubt that they sit in meetings, trying to think of healthy-sounding words and phrases that suggest their product it a healthy choice. These are not "health claims, which are subject to strict regulation, but words that cast a nice healthwash over the product, making us think they are a better than the other products displayed.

The word "multigrain" is one of these words. It crops up on boxes of cereals, bread, snacks and baby food. We know that wholegrain is supposed to be good for you, so the word "grain"works by association. If one grain is good then surely a multitude of grains must be even better? But multigrain is not a precise or technical term. It could - and does - just mean a mixture of flours - wheat flour, rice flour, maize flour etc. 

This sneaky word is presumably meant to make us think these products are high in fibre – but do they actually contain a worthwhile amount?

The information on one "multigrain" cereal, very much aimed at children, shows that a 30g serving gives you just one gram of fibre. This is about the same as a medium slice of white bread.

Recommended fibre intake for adults is 24g a day and although guidelines for young children are not clear, you would expect them to be around 15g per day or more, depending on size of child.

It's clear that a bowl of multigrain crispy novelty shapes is not going to get a child's daily intake of fibre off to a flying start. A child would have to eat 15 or more bowlfuls of the stuff to get their daily minimum fibre intake. Better than a cereal made with no fibre at all of course, but in the context of a daily diet it is not going to make a big contribution. 

The word multigrain definitely counts as healthwash - one to look out for and treat with scepticism.

Healthwash

When I was a child my grandmother sometimes felt the urge to whitewash. A bucket of lime and water was mixed and a clean, chemical odour filled the back yard. No finesse was needed, just a rough and ready paintbrush and a strong arm. She would disappear into the outside toilet and attack its walls. Grime, dust, fly-dirt, cobwebs and unwary spiders were swiftly smothered in a pristine, gritty layer. Then she would look around to see where the remains in the bucket could be deployed. Round the outside drains, on the walls near the bins, anywhere else? I could tell she found it satisfying to turn dingy areas hygienically white, without the fuss of proper decorating.

Whitewash covered a multitude of sins and it has come to mean anything that deliberately conceals mistakes or faults.

Much more recently the word “greenwash” was coined.  If you haven’t come across this term, it means: disinformation disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public image. An extreme example might be an oil company boasting about their track record on recycling while planning to despoil vast tracts of Alaskan wilderness.

One of the aims of this blog is to bring you examples of "healthwash", which I'm defining as disinformation included in marketing, advertising and packaging, so as to present a healthy image.

There's a lot of it about in the aisles of the supermarket. You know the sort of thing. A product claims to contain a substance that has a healthy reputation, or to be “free from” something that has an unhealthy reputation. Thus the brand is health-washed. The aim is, of course, to convince busy shoppers that they are making a healthy choice. There is an armada of buzzwords and phrases that bombard us again and again – vitamins, minerals, five-a-day, antioxidants, fibre, grains, fruit, unsaturated, free-from, low in, part-of-a-healthy-diet and so on. Despite a recent tightening of the rules on health claims on food packaging there is still wide use of these many of these terms.

Then there’s the fuzzier stuff :- natural, all-natural, pure, country, home-cooked, hand-cooked, wholesome, herbal and so on - all of them suggesting an association with health.

Lets face it, eating a healthy diet consists of consuming moderate quantities of uncomplicated foods, preferably prepared at home, from fresh ingredients. When you are eating healthily you can usually see exactly what you’re eating. Most of the complications occur with manufactured foods that contain a long list of ingredients.

When you buy something in a packet, a jar or a tin there is a lot of small print  (often very small indeed) about nutrition. This information is not easy to understand. The terminology varies (Vitamin C or ascorbic acid? Salt or sodium?) and it changes over time. No sooner do you understood the idea that saturated fats are bad and un-saturates good, than you have to get you head around the various Omegas and their relative merits.

Then you have to mentally juggle the amount of nutrients per 100gms, the amounts of nutrient per serving, and the percentage of your recommended daily consumption that this amount represents. And then there is calculation of how the recommended serving size compares to the amount in the packet. You need an A* grade in your GCSE Maths to stand a chance of working out the relative health benefits of a product. Degrees in chemistry and statistics would also come in quite handy.

If you studied all the labels while filling your supermarket trolley, you would be there for hours. You’d need a magnifying glass to read the labels and a calculator to work out the maths.

So it's inevitable that most of us look at the headlines - those enticing words, designed to suggest that we are buying something reasonably healthy. Words that are carefully chosen to cast a veil over less unhealthy aspects of the product and create, instead, a shiny, healthy glow. Watch out for future blogs that will highlight the truth behind the healthwash and help you to become a more sceptical shopper.

Cranberry Juice – Can it Cure or Prevent Cystitis?

For several decades now there has been a health rumour circulating that cranberry juice can cure urinary tract infections (cystitis) or have a preventative effect in those who tend to suffer multiple attacks. Such health rumours are extremely popular with the “health columns” of many newspapers and magazines. There is an obvious appeal in the idea that something natural and fruity will act like a medicine. But is there any evidence to back these claims?

If you want to know the answer to questions like this, the oracle is Cochrane. Many scientists publish reviews of literature. Sometimes they are thorough. Sometimes they are biased in support a particular theory. The Cochrane Collaboration, on the other hand, publish systematic reviews. These are exhaustive examinations of the literature carried out by volunteers from the ranks of medical scientists. They leave no stone unturned in their search for studies. Then they select the studies that involve well-conducted trials (randomised, controlled trials with a placebo) on human beings. They look at these carefully and determine whether the sum of the results tend to show any clear evidence.

The fact that they look at human studies is important. Lab data from cells in dishes or from mice are often cited but neither of these tell you whether something works in a human being. In the case of cranberries there is some lab evidence that cranberry juice contains a chemical that can discourage bacteria from sticking to the wall of the bladder. But does this translate into practice?

In a recently updated Cochrane review the authors failed to detect any clear effect of cranberry products in preventing cystitis in susceptible people. In a review in 2010 the Cochrane team found no well-conducted studies on cranberry products as a treatment.

There was a problem with a high drop-out rate from the studies. Consuming cranberry juice in sufficient quantities, every day, to maintain a high level of cranberry chemical in your urine is not easy. The juice is acidic and sugary. The implications for dental health are obvious and as I posted previously, consuming a lot of juice is not necessarily a Good Thing.  

If you don’t want to read scientific reviews and you’re wondering whether some food or drink has a proven health benefit, I suggest you read the packaging carefully. It may refer vaguely to something that sounds healthy – but does it clearly say there is a proven benefit to a specific aspect of health? If not, you can be confident that no convincing case has been made to the regulatory agencies.

There is a long list of food products that would dearly love to prove they have health benefits but the list of those that do is an extremely short one.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD001321.pub5/abstract

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD001322/abstract

http://www.cochrane.org