What If You Start Eating OATS Every Day For 30 Days?

Hello, all champions. Today we're going to talk about what would happen if you start eating oatmeal every day. And I came across this video that made some pretty strong claims. They said that if you start eating oatmeal every day, you will get better looking skin. They said you will get much needed protein for your muscles. That you will be full of energy, that you will lose weight, you will decrease your cholesterol levels, you will get rid of digestive problems, and you will reduce your risk of heart disease. And again, this video falls into the trap of thinking in a way that you want to take something for something. And now people start expecting oatmeal to have some magical ingredient and some miraculous properties that will do all these things. So I don't think oatmeal is a bad food for some people. So that's what we're going to talk about. And we want to understand it in the bigger picture and in the context of how it relates to other foods. So the real question is what did you eat before? If you start eating oatmeal every day, then what is it replacing? Is it going to be better or worse than what you were eating before? So if you were eating toast and jam and margarine and orange juice every day, then you'd be vastly better off to switch to some version of oatmeal. Even the instant oats would probably be better than that. And if you had pancakes and corn syrup, if you had coffee and donuts, if you usually eat from a fast food restaurant and you get a biscuit and tater tots, then all of these foods you would do really well to stop eating them and then oatmeal would be vastly better than any of those. And typically oatmeal is something people have for breakfast, but is breakfast something that we have to have or even something that we should have? So in this video course, they repeated the standard opinion that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But I think that we are learning enough about intermittent fasting and the tremendous benefits of intermittent fasting in terms of reversing disease, prolonging life, feeling better in so many different ways. So intermittent fasting is when you restrict the time window during the day that you're eating and most people engaging in intermittent fasting will skip breakfast. So they might have a meal at noon and one at six, for example, and then they would have a six hour feeding window and they wouldn't eat breakfast at all. So breakfast is not something you have to have, but let's talk about it anyway, if breakfast is something that you want or if you want to eat oatmeal at another time of day. The first claim they had was that you will get better looking skin. And they said that oatmeal is ideal for treating inflammatory conditions like eczema, dermatitis and skin rashes. And it wasn't clear from the video if you were supposed to ingest the oatmeal or rub it on your face for these skin conditions. But I'm assuming that you're supposed to eat it. And then if we say that something's good for an inflammatory condition, then it's basically because it's replacing you eating something less inflammatory than something else that you're currently eating. Because this is not like an anti-inflammatory medication or anything that's going to magically reverse inflammatory conditions. And then they said that it promotes healthy skin overall because it contains certain important minerals like zinc, iron, manganese and magnesium. And this is true. These are super important minerals and oatmeal is a good source of these minerals, not necessarily the best, but it's a good source. It's much better than most other grains for sure. But the question now is, are we deficient? Because if you have skin conditions, but the cause is something else than these minerals, then supplying more of these minerals isn't going to do anything. So taking more of something you already have is not going to do anything if the problem is of another nature. So again, we can't just say that you will get better looking skin. And we also want to understand that yes, oatmeal is a good source, but there may be other good sources as well that have other benefits. Claim number two is that you will get much needed protein for your muscles. So they say one serving, which is typically a half a cup of dry oats, meaning about 45 grams or an ounce and a half of dry oats, cooks out to be about a cup of oatmeal. They say that provides 15%. And that is the same as seven grams per serving. So this serving oatmeal has seven grams of protein. And if that's 15%, then they're basically recommending that we get 47 grams of protein per day. Now, I think that's quite a bit on the low side. That it may be enough to avoid deficiency diseases, but if we're talking about optimal health, then I think that we probably want to double that amount. I think we'd be better off plus protein is filling. So foods that contain protein and fat are generally more satisfying and stabilized blood sugars much better. So the protein content in oats is still much better than the vast majority of other grains. If you're going to do a grain, then oats would definitely be a good one. But we also want to keep in mind that vegetable sources of protein are utilized at a lesser percentage. They don't have the biological value of incorporating into our bodies into our tissues that animal protein does. So meat, fish, chicken, and eggs are utilized at a much higher percentage. Next they say that if you eat oatmeal every day, you will be full of energy because oatmeal has carbohydrates and they say that is where energy comes from. They say that oats will make you full longer. But here I want to ask better than what? It fuller longer than what? So what are we comparing to? Are we comparing to other carbs like sugar or pancakes or white flour? Or are we comparing to other real foods that has maybe some fat in it? Because the two sources of energy for the body are primarily fat and carbohydrates. And fat is the primary source. It's the better fuel. It is more efficient and it runs much more stable for much longer. So in general, I'm not a fan of grains because I think they create a lot of problems for human health. But oats, I would say, is one of the best. So if you feel like you have to have grains, if it's a staple that you depend on, then oats would definitely be one of the better ones. It is an ancient grain, meaning that the DNA of the grain dates back thousands of years and humans haven't really changed it much. It is a gluten-free grain, meaning in the grain itself, it doesn't naturally contain gluten. However, I put the asterisk there because if you are super sensitive, like you have celiacs and can't tolerate gluten at all, then the normal oatmeal in the store is typically going to be contaminated with the gluten because it's processed on the same equipment. And then you want to make sure that you get something that says gluten-free on the package. Oats are also one of the least allergenic. Most people are sensitive to wheat, most people are not sensitive to oats. Your chances are a whole lot better with oats. And it overall has a much better nutrient profile. It has some good fats in it, has more protein, has more fiber, etc. Which is what they usually emphasize when they promote oats. And of course, it is very, very inexpensive. You can have a meal for pennies, basically. And like I said, I don't think it should be a worldwide staple, but I think it can be okay for some people. I'm going to talk about the criteria there. Claim number four is that you will lose weight. And if you hadn't figured it out yet, I put all their claims in yellow, so that would clarify things a little bit here. But they said that it's because the slow carbohydrates in oats will curb your appetite. And then they said that this will stabilize blood sugar because they're absorbed slowly. Well, then I want to ask compared to what? To jelly beans? Absolutely. They're much, much better than jelly beans. They're better than glucose. They're better than kid cereals. But if we start talking about other types of food, not just grains and cereals, then they are not all that good at stabilizing blood sugar. And then they said that oat contain nutrients to boost metabolism, but they didn't say what those were or what the mechanism would be. So that's just kind of a loose claim thrown out there. And also they said that it will prevent the accumulation of fat and toxins. And again, they didn't specify anything there. So the main thing that accumulates fat and toxin is something called insulin. And insulin goes together with something called insulin resistance. And this is something we really need to understand because this is such a huge misconception that if we try to find just one way of describing insulin resistance, we would say that it is a carbohydrate intolerance. And I don't mean that like an allergy, like you have an allergy to peanuts or shrimp, but it's an intolerance in that your body doesn't know what to do with it. It doesn't have the machinery in place to take care of it anymore. And the way that we can tell that is if we look at your blood sugar, then blood sugar is supposed to be controlled and maintained inside a very narrow range. So a good blood sugar would be around 80 to 90 when you're fasting, 70 to 90, let's say. And after you eat, so that would be an inside this range, after you eat, it shouldn't change very much. So if we start off at 80 and we eat something, then it might rise to 120. And then in a couple of hours, it should come back down into that range. That's when you are metabolically healthy. When your insulin sensitive, when insulin is working the way it's supposed to. However, if you are insulin resistant, if you're not metabolically healthy, then you probably start off a little bit higher to start with. But the big difference here is going to be that your blood sugar goes much, much higher and it stays high for much longer. So if we eat something and we have this kind of profile, then we are carbohydrate intolerant. Insulin isn't working properly because we have abuse. We have broken the machine that processes carbohydrate. And then we need to understand that between this line and this line is a whole range that I usually call a metabolic spectrum. It's a range where people can fall on any place in that range. And on the one hand, we have insulin sensitivity, metabolically healthy. And that would be where the blood sugar just rises a tiny little bit. And on the other side, we have type 2 diabetes, which is nothing more than an advanced stage of insulin resistance. That's all it is. So if we have some other examples, if we have an A1C, which is your average blood sugar for about three to four months, if that number comes in at 5.2 or less, that would be a really good number. You know, your insulin sensitive. And if you're kind of in between, if you're bordering, you just jumped into prediabetic, you'd be at 5.8. And if you're over 6.5, then you are at the type 2 diabetes. And they, once they get into that type 2 diabetes, very often that number can go up to 8 or 10 or 12 or 14 as well. So where we are here makes all the difference on how much carbohydrate we can handle. And oats, like we talked about, it by far, not the worst carbohydrate, but it's still a carbohydrate. Something else I suggest you measure is insulin, because that gives you a really good idea of your insulin sensitivity level. If it's between 3 and 5, then that's a really good number. If it starts slipping up like 10, now you're becoming more metabolically resistant, insulin resistant. And if you're type 2 diabetic, it's typically going to be over 20, sometimes often as high as 30 or 40 as well. And if we measure one more thing, which is triglycerides, that's the fat in your bloodstream. So your body has two types of fuel. One is glucose and the other is fat as in triglycerides. And if we have a number of 60 milligrams per desoliter, that would be a really good number. That means that the fat gets into the bloodstream and very quickly the cells accept it. They get into the cell to be used for energy very quickly. But if the body is starting to resist, now the triglycerides, the fat kind of gets stuck in the bloodstream and the numbers go up. And the excess glucose also becomes turned into fat to push that number up even further. And type 2 diabetics could have a whole lot higher than that as well. So these are just examples. It doesn't mean that the patterns are going to look exactly like this, but this would be fairly typical. So what we need to understand is that when your insulin levels go up, you're becoming more insulin resistant than insulin is a storage hormone. The higher your insulin, the more your tendency will be to store calories as fat, to store energy, to not burn through it. So if we want to lose weight, the number one thing that we need to do is to bring down the level of insulin resistance to become more metabolically healthy, more metabolically flexible so that we can start using the fat for energy. And the number one way to do that is to cut down on carbohydrates. So as it relates to oats or oatmeal's being good, I would say that if you tolerate it well, then for this type of person, oatmeal could be a good food. And if you're in the middle here, I think it's possible to reverse insulin resistance even if you eat some oats. Now and then, if most of the foods you're eating are really good, if you're on a mostly low-carb diet, then I think you can have some oats and still move toward health if you're kind of in the middle here. But if your system is kind of broken down, if you are type 2 diabetic, if you are carbohydrate intolerant, then I would say that oats is not a good food for you. So let's look at some examples here and try to understand how oatmeal relates and what we can do with it. So if we just have the oats themselves and typically like I said, a serving is referred to as half a cup of dry oats and that's about 45 grams or an ounce and a half, that comes out to about 160 calories and by itself, 17% of the calories come from fat. So that's kind of high for a grain, which would be good if you are insulin resistant if you're trying to reverse that. Protein is also really good at 19% of the calories that's excellent for a grain, even though like I said, the vegetable proteins are not utilized as well as the animal proteins. 64% of calories come from carbohydrates and then if you notice, we have 4.5 grams of fiber. So on this side of the scale, it's percentage of macronutrients and on the other side, it is grams of fiber so we can compare that as well. Now, most people are not going to just cook up some oats with water and just eat that plain. They're going to have something with it. So if we add in some skim milk, which is usually recommended, and we add in some syrup or sugar because most people need some flavor, they probably put some cinnamon and then they want some sweetener and oftentimes they also drink orange juice, which was also recommended in this video that I referred to. That would put you at 369 calories and now because we added a bunch of carbohydrates, the fat level fat percentage came down to 9%. The protein dropped down to 14% and the carbohydrates went up to 77% and of course the fiber didn't change because these other things we added doesn't really have any fiber. But here's what I would suggest. If you like oats, if you're metabolically healthy, if you'd like it as part of your lifestyle for variety, I think that's okay. But I would use steel cut oats instead, the same amount because steel cut oats are less processed, they have less surface area so they get absorbed much slower. So in terms of blood sugar, you're not going to get as sharp a spike here. You're going to have less fluctuations, which makes it much easier for your body to manage. But then we add whole milk instead of the skin milk. Now we get a little bit of fat to keep us fuller, but also to slow down that blood sugar. absorption a little bit. Then I would suggest you put in some seeds or nuts. It could pick anything that you like really. But one example here is with chia seeds and then maybe throw in some pumpkin seeds as well. So if you have half a cup of milk, you have one tablespoon of chia seeds and you have two tablespoons of pumpkin seeds. Now we get 390 calories, but check this out how different we went from 9 to 47% of fat. And that's a good thing because these are good fats. Then our protein jumps a bit because the nuts and seeds also have protein. And our carbohydrates drop to 33. So before we had almost 10 times more carbohydrate than fat and we just change a few things around and now we have more fat than carbohydrate which is going to dramatically smooth out this blood sugar curve. And not only that, but the fiber has more than doubled to 9 and a half. And we're going to go into some little more detail on that too. So if you want to eat oatmeal, then I think you should definitely do it this way. That would be my strong recommendation. And I think that's fine if you want some variety. If you also want some other options that are quite different, let's just look at that and compare. And we're going to take this middle part which is how oatmeal is typically consumed or recommended to be consumed. So we'll bring this up to here and we'll compare to something different. And this would be one thing that I sometimes eat, not for breakfast necessarily, but sometimes as one of the two meals. And it's my own homemade yogurt. So I ferment it and I use half and half which is 11 and a half percent fat. So it doesn't need straining. It's super thick and creamy to start with. And then I add some chia seeds. I grind chia seeds and keep them in the freezer. That way they keep for months. I add some pumpkin seeds and a little bit of raspberries sometimes. So this would be about a three quarter cup of yogurt. It would be a tablespoon or tablespoon and a half a chia, two tablespoons of pumpkin seed and about 10 raspberries, 40 grams or so. Now we get 470 calories, but 80 percent of that is fat. And they're good healthy solid fats that are going to burn a clean and stable and give you solid energy much better than carbohydrates. And the protein is 15 and a half, which is a good level. Carbohydrates drop all the way down to 4 and a half. And I need to explain that a little bit because milk products usually have milk sugar, lactose. And if you buy yogurt in the store, they've only fermented that for a few hours. And usually on the label, they'll give you the same number of grams of sugar and carbohydrate that you find in milk. But if you run the fermentation as long as you can, which is 36 to 40 hours, maybe even longer, the longer you keep it running, the more lactose is going to be consumed because the bacteria eat the lactose, turn it into lactic acid. That's why the yogurt gets sour. So if you find a bland yogurt in the store, it's not going to have much bacteria and it's going to have most of the sugar still in there. But the more sour you can make it and sweeten with stevia if you have to, the more sour you can make it, the less sugar is left. And if you've kept it running till it's really sour, it basically has zero or just trace amount of sugar left in it. So that's where these carbohydrates fall so low, even though there was some sugar in the milk originally. And here in this version, we actually get 12 grams of fiber. I'm going to talk about how that's even better than it looks. And if you want more options, here's something else you can do. Here's something I've been doing lately. So I scramble a couple of eggs. Then I make a stir fry of different vegetables. I take onion and bell pepper, eggplant, tomato. I stir that up with some extra virgin olive oil. And then I serve it with avocado afterwards. So this is like an ounce or maybe two of the different vegetables. It's a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil and half an avocado with two eggs. So you can increase those sizes of course if you're a bigger person. But I try to keep the calories down for my examples. So this would be a little over 400 calories and it's going to have 75% of calories from fat, 15 from protein, 10 from carbohydrates. And you get 8.4 grams of fiber. So again, we get drastically better ratios for blood sugar between fat and sugar. But we also double or triple fiber. And that fiber is often promoted as something miraculous in the oats. So claim number five and claim number six is that oats will lower your cholesterol and it will eliminate. It will rid of your digestive problems. And the number one reason that they give for this is soluble fiber. And indeed soluble fiber will absorb. It will prevent the reabsorption into the body of some cholesterol. So some people who reabsorb excess amounts tend to have higher levels. That not necessarily a bad thing, but it could be if it's too much. So soluble fiber can help bring this down a little bit. But the question then is, is this something unique or miraculous about oats? And the answer is not really. So oats are a good source, especially for a grain. And again, we use the same serving size. The total fiber in a serving in a half a cup of oats is four and a half grams, better than vast majority of grains. And about a third of that is soluble fiber. And that's the one that we really care about because that's that acts as a food for your probiotics, for your bacteria. And it also is the kind that will will prevent the reabsorption. So soluble is the key. So this gives us 1.6 grams, which is okay. But again, it's not really all that impressive to tell you the truth. Because if we compare to something like chia that I sprinkle on the yogurt, one tablespoon, grounded tablespoon, 15 grams of chia has six grams of total fiber. But 90% of that is soluble fiber. That's why chia seeds become gelatinous. They can swell up and become all slippery. That's the soluble fiber doing that. So you have 5.4. You have more than three times as much soluble fiber in one tablespoon of chia than you have in a serving of oats. And this is the strongest claim they have for making oatmeal a miracle food that it helps with cholesterol and all these different things. And I'm not putting oatmeal down, but I'm just trying to say that it's not unique, it's not miraculous. Go ahead and eat it if you like it. If you can tolerate it and you're metabolically healthy, but also realize that there are many, many different options. Another great example is avocado. And if you eat a whole avocado, it's about 150 grams. That has 10 grams of fiber. And 30% of that is soluble. So now we get three grams. So roughly twice as much in the avocado as in a serving of oatmeal. But we have to look a little bit more at number six here that when they claim that it can reduce digestive problems, because increasing soluble fiber can improve digestive problems, but oats can also make it worse. There's all sorts of different foods that can make it worse if you don't tolerate it well. So for sure, for most people, oats are a whole lot better than wheat because the majority of people don't really tolerate wheat that well, they just don't know it. And the extreme version of wheat intolerance is called celiacs. So here's another spectrum if we talk about grain sensitivity. So now on the one end, on the far end here, we have celiacs disease, which is about 1% of people get extreme reactions to gluten. But we also have to realize that there's different types of gluten epitopes. There's different points on the gluten molecule that can irritate the gut and have antibodies. And celiacs disease is just one of those markers. So there are a lot of people who have sensitivities and even antibodies to gluten and to other grains that don't have celiacs. And oats, like we said before, are naturally gluten-free. So someone with celiacs, if they get a certified gluten-free version, a lot of those people can eat oats. But we also have to understand that it gets a little more complicated that there is something called cross-reactivity that we have these different markers and these different antibodies and they can cross-react. So once we've developed a sensitivity to something, now we can have a cross-reaction to other things such as corn and rice and even oats. And this is not nearly as common as the wheat sensitivity that I talk a lot about. But I would estimate the people coming through my clinic, they're probably somewhere between two and five percent of people who are sensitive to oats. And if you are sensitive to oats, then it's not going to improve your digestive problem, it's going to worsen it. Same thing if you have SIBO, small intestine bacterial overgrowth, then feeding any sort of fermentable carbohydrate can make things worse. Claim number seven, they said that you will have a reduced risk of heart disease and they said the reason is that oats are rich in good fats. So I think it's a little bit of an overstatement to say that it is rich in fats but it certainly has more and better fats than most grains. So in one servings like we talked about, there's 2.9 grams of fat and the ones that they're claiming to be primarily the good one is the mono unsaturated which we have 0.9 grams. So it's like yeah it's better than most grains but it's not all that super impressive. And then when we look at poorly unsaturated fats, we have about 1 gram of those. So if you're eating oatmeal instead of white toast with jam, then yes, you'd be much better off but what are the other alternatives? What could we eat instead? So let's look at an avocado. If you eat one avocado, 150 grams edible portion has 23 grams of good healthy fats. Out of those 16.3 are mono unsaturated, oleic acid, same as an olive oil. And that's 18 times more of these supposedly heart saving fats than we have in oats. So again, I'm not opposed to oats but we can't keep talking about these things as treating disease or having some miracle properties. And then avocado also has 3 grams of poly unsaturated fatty acids. And that's something else that we hear a lot about. The poly unsaturated fatty acids. They're trying to promote these vegetable oils like canola and soybean and safflower because they're supposedly high in poly unsaturated fats. And is that a good thing? Well, it is good if it occurs in small to moderate amounts in natural foods, in avocados, in nuts and seeds, then it's protected by the food. And when we eat it, we can process it quickly before it oxidizes and goes rancid. But if 10 grams are good, it doesn't mean 20 or 30 is better because that's not the type of fat that we need to burn for fuel. We want to eat some of it because it balances out the omega-6s and some of it like fish oil helps us with very specific things like hormones and cell membranes. But that's not the type of fat that we are supposed to burn for fuel. So when you buy the so-called vegetable oils in the store and they claim that they're good because they're high in poly unsaturated fatty acids, that's not true because these oils are destroyed. They're highly, highly processed, they're completely devoid of nutrients. And those you do not want anything to do with, but a little bit inside food that occurs naturally is just fine. 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