Breakthroughs Today

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). B