Two days of oatmeal reduce cholesterol level
uni-bonn.de69 points by brandonb 4 hours ago
69 points by brandonb 4 hours ago
I fixed my high cholesterol problem with oats... Months ago I replaced my daily dinner with a mix of oats + banana + protein powder + 1 tbsp olive oil + peanut butter + flaxseeds + oat milk - all mixed in a blender. My bad cholesterol (LDL levels) tanked from 160 mg/dL to 91 mg/dL. My daily dinners before that were not even that unhealthy. Dropping sat fat intake had nowhere near that much effect for me. For me and I assume for many others, lack soluble fibers are the root cause of high LDL levels.
I've been doing something similar for breakfast, one cup of oatmeal + one cup of water and about two tablespoons of chia seeds, microwave for 2 minutes. Add a banana and some honey, top it with whole roasted almonds and some raspberries. It has been doing wonders for my digestion. I'll have to try to add olive oil as well. My LDL was 150 last time I checked. I wonder what it is now since I've been doing this meal several times a week.
Interesting. I have almost the same smoothie every morning minus the banana and oats. Instead I use psyllium husks for fibre.
My cholesterol has been in range for years despite eating almost exclusively saturated fat since I'm in the keto camp. Just watched an interesting episode by Peter Attia and Layne Norton on seed oils which might shift my view on PUFAs a bit.
Thoughts?
If switching to oatmeal, go with the unflavored raw oats. It's not bad once a person gets used to it. Substituting milk with water is also perfectly fine.
Eating a low sugar breakfast does feel pretty healthy.
As EZ-E says above, adding a dash of healthy fat (olive oil) above does improve the mouthfeel - as well as using a little more water than you need.
My understanding is that:
1. When someone consumes fat, bile is released into the gut.
2. Oatmeal (and other soluble fibers like psyllium husk) capture this bile and it is excreted in stool.
3. In order to create the bile, the liver needs LDL. Because the LDL it used to create the bile was lost when it was captured, it exposes more LDL receptors and pulls LDL out of the bloodstream, thereby lowering LDL levels.
It seems to me that in order to maximize the effectiveness of this LDL-lowering approach, one must not simply consume psyllium or oatmeal, but rather consume them in conjunction with fat. Not saturated fat, obviously, which raises LDL, but perhaps unsaturated or polyunsaturated fats. My expectation is that this would trigger the bile secretion required in order to actually sequester it.
VLDL, a precursor for LDL, is produced in liver. Both are more or less the same chemically, but differ in the amount of fat carried. LDL is VLDL but somewhat processed by body, HDL is a VLDL (LDL) completely processed by body.
Bile is used to process food in the gut. It does not go back into our system. Bile is still produced by liver even in long fasts.
Oatmeals is a kind of elimination diet, much like carnivore diet or rice diet. The later one also lowered cholesterol.
What oatmeal diet really does is it completely eliminates essential fatty acids in food. These fatty acids are critical in VLDL production and, thusly, oatmeal diet reduces LDL levels through less production of VLDL.
> Bile is used to process food in the gut. It does not go back into our system.
I don't think that's correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterohepatic_circulation
I also think you're mischaracterizing HDL as a VLDL. If you search for Apolipoprotein A here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK305896/ you'll see that HDL is constructed from it, while VLDL and LDL are part of the Apolipoprotein B lineage.
So, me putting butter on my oatmeal is not gross and decadent, but actually the new health food craze?
Presumably you'd want something like olive or avocado oil with less saturated fat.
300 grams of oatmeal a day, basically nothing else, and your LDL only goes down 10%.
Definitely shows the comparative power of medications. Statins, ezetimibe, and PCSK9 inhibitors can reduce LDL or ApoB by 85-95%.
> Statins, ezetimibe, and PCSK9 inhibitors can reduce LDL or ApoB by 85-95%
What? Absolutely not. Not even close. Provide a source if you really believe this.
It seems as if some researchers think that reducing this single metric without considering any other factors is inherently always a good thing and is very important.
Hardly “nothing else”. Two smoothies a day with 150g of oats blended in them will basically cover this. You’d still have plenty of room for other food.
But that's not what the study tested. The study showed that both calorie restriction, and calorie restriction combined with almost all calories from oats, reduced cholesterol; but that the effect was more durable for the latter case. No data was gathered on eating oats without calorie restriction in this study.
It seems more complicated than that - the "Oats only" people were only on that regime for two days, not an extended period of time.
Also the paper says that the "Oats only" people were allowed to eat other fruits and vegetables with their meals.
It's well known that an oatmeal diet lowers cholesterol (the article itself cites a 1907 'oat cure' in its intro). The new finding here is insight into the exact mechanism- a short-term, high-dose oatmeal diet (300g/day for two days) had significantly greater LDL-lowering effect than a medium-term, moderate-dose oatmeal diet (80g/day for six weeks), and they associated the difference with increases in several plasma phenolic compounds triggered by specific changes in the gut microbiome.
300g is a lot of oatmeal.
I eat Bob's Red Mill steel cut oats for breakfast every day; 1/2c dry is about 88g. That's a pretty decent meal. 3.5x that is probably most of what you eat that day.
Yeah, the article showed that the high-dose intervention (modeled after von Noorden's famous century-old 'oat cure') is most effective. A large bowl of oatmeal (100g) all 3 meals for 2 days, 6 large bowls total.
6 weeks of 'oatmeal for breakfast every day' was less effective than 2 days of 'stuff yourself with oatmeal'.
It's quite a bit of volume, but it's "only" about 1000 Calories if it doesn't have any oils/sugar added.
I'd guess the easiest way to get it down would be to just blend the oats into water without cooking so you have something that you can just drink like water.
Been trying to get into overnight oats (home made) for breakfast but its been hard to hit protein numbers, even with protein powder.
With just the oats it's hard. What I do is ferment my own greek yogurt (milk and starter in an instant pot for 9h, then strain it in the fridge overnight) and eat that with müsli mixed in (the German kind that's nothing but whole grains and some raisins, not the garbage that's basically breakfast cereal). Tastes great and gives you a ton of slow-release energy and protein.
The study is suggesting two days of intense oats. You can go totally without protein for two days and barely notice it as long as you're keeping yourself full, and a big pile of oats does a surprisingly good job of that.
Oatmeal is food of the gods - BUT only if you don't pollute is with all sorts of add ons.
Oatmeal and milk, nothing more. No fruit no nuts no sugar no honey no sprinkles of whatever. Perfect.
Bah. I love putting a layer of frozen blueberries at the bottom of the bowl then layering on piping hot steel cut oats to thaw and warm them up. You’re probably right that I shouldn’t add dried cranberries and a tiny drizzle of maple syrup on top (occasionally with thinly sliced bananas) but I’m happy enough to be wrong about it. I also skip the milk.
You're missing out on up to two or three extra months of life by enjoying yourself now! I hope you think about that when you're too old to think about things!
The great thing about oatmeal is you can change the taste easily. Savory, sweet, spiced, aromatic, creamy, chewy, whatever you want.
My go-to is oatmeal with milk and pepper, but some days I want some aged cheddar, or smoked cheddar (mmmm!). Frozen wild blueberries/wineberries for a winter treat. Tumeric, ginger, cinnamon and honey if I'm getting sick. A fried egg and hot sauce if it's a lazy sunday.
Savoury oatmeal might be my wife's top-rated thing that I brought to the relationship.
If you are taking out the sugar you might as well go all the way and take out the milk.
It’s so funny you’re being downvoted, i think it’s just an expression of how much people hate oatmeal and like milk, lol. And also you can pry my milk from my cold dead hands.
That’s nothing. You should have seen me on my Halo Top ice cream only diet. One point of the ice cream, nothing else. Lost way more weight than these losers. Halo Top, guys, it’s the key.
This isn't news it's be known for decades?
Yea it’s on the oatmeal boxes even. Part of what’s interesting about this study though is they claim this two day intensive(300g per day) oatmeal diet showed microbiome changes which persist for months.
Yeah for reference 54 grams is about 200 kcal, so this is 1200 kcal or so of just oats. That leaves 600-800 kcal for other food if you’re targeting 1800-2000 kcal/day which is a reasonable calorie restriction. So this isn’t really a sustainable diet in the long term.
300g of oatmeal is about 3.3 cups (US measure).
I would consider a normal bowl of oatmeal for breakfast to be about half a cup, so this is quite a bit more.
Yeah... a large (1" tall) canister of oatmeal is 1.2kg so imagine eating 2 big ass cans of oatmeal a week.
I think you are mixing up oats and oatmeal. And I think (but am not positive) that the study is referring to 300g of prepared oatmeal.
That wouldn't really make sense since amount of water could vary. Anyway the article says "Each oat meal comprised 100 × g of rolled oat flakes... boiled in water."
Oatmeal is fine, but has nothing on hulled barley.
Oats are for horses. Mankind basically co-evolved with Barley.
Barley was the preferred food for cavalry horses alongside oats since antiquity so “oats are for horses” is a medieval European quirk.
Hulled barley gives me the worst stomach ache of my life. I’m a horse I guess.
This comment actually had me 'laughing out load', haha. I've never tried Hulled Barley, and I guess now I'm put off from even trying :)
I think the main thing is to understand why oatmeal works: soluble fiber and the gut bacteria feeding on the carbs.
That can be achieved within many other diets too. I wish they were more specific in saying what's special about oats, if anything.
I also get upset when I see a ton of junk options at the grocery store. They are talking about plain cut oats and whole fresh fruit, but based on the way shelves are stocked I imagine a majority of people get the kind with all the added sugar. You might as well be eating honey smacks at that point. Yogurt has the same problem at the store.
Hold on there. High fiber consumption increases the excretion of cholesterol, by reducing the reabsorption of the cholesterol in bile. The liver produces cholesterol for bile, which mixes with our food in the duodenum and aids absorption of fats. Most of this cholesterol is then re-absorbed by the small intestines. By increasing bulk, fiber reduces the amount that is re-absorbed.
Effects on but biome are real too, and apparently beneficial, and may factor in, but it isn't the only (or necessarily the primary) mechanism for reducing serum cholesterol.