A Caution to Oatmeal

I love oatmeal. I love the plenty of soluble fibers I can get in a serving of it. But, had I been vulnerable genetically to its side effect, a life-long and incurable disease, I would have had it without even knowing why, of course, until today.

CERTAIN stories are fascinating, particularly those that tell how to keep your health through old age, or perhaps bring it back when lost. But this fascination turns into a deadly error when the story told was far from complete. You know what good it can do to your health; what you did not know was how it would poison your body.

This is the inherent pitfall in natural medicine where treatment does not pass through rigid clinical trials to validate effectiveness, and more importantly ascertain the absence of toxicity. Even pharmaceutical-grade drugs have stories of getting pulled off the shelves as later studies reveal they cause other diseases.

A classic case is oatmeal. Oat, like any cereal, contains beta-glucan in their cell wall (bran). Beta-glucan is a class of indigestible polysaccharides (“soluble fibers”). Scientific studies noted its ability to lower blood glucose, and cholesterol (still weak evidence).

To lower cholesterol, a person must ingest 25 grams of soluble fiber daily (38 grams of oat bran or 75 grams of dry oatmeal contains about three grams of beta-glucan).

Well, that’s the good news. The bad news is... [Read on.]

This article appears on SunStar Cebu newspaper on 6 July 2011.

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