Eating oats – and not much else – for two days straight can have lasting benefits for your metabolic health, according to a recent study.
A group of 17 adults ate 300g (10.5oz) of oatmeal per day, made with water rather than milk and optionally topped with fruit or vegetables – and nothing else, for two days.
As a result, the participants lost around 2kg (4.4lbs) of weight each, and their LDL (‘bad’) cholesterol fell by 10 per cent on average. Gut health and blood pressure also improved, with these gains still evident six weeks later.
Researchers from the University of Bonn, Germany, compared this brief intervention with a longer, six-week diet in which another 17 participants added 80g (2.8oz) of oats per day to their usual meals.
That longer approach proved less effective, suggesting the metabolic benefits seen in the study were driven by the short, intensive oat-only phase rather than simply adding oats to an otherwise normal diet.
All the study’s participants had metabolic syndrome: a condition that affects nearly a third of the global population, and which involves elevated body weight, blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol.
Metabolic syndrome puts people at risk of developing obesity-related diseases, such as type 2 diabetes or heart disease, and it’s associated with poor gut health.
The research suggests oats might be helpful for this group, as a source of fibre, vitamins, minerals and anti-inflammatory plant chemicals called polyphenols.
During digestion, some of our food gets broken down by microbes in the gut. These gut bugs release chemicals, which can enter the bloodstream and have helpful or harmful effects, depending on the food and strain of microbe.
When participants followed a two-day porridge diet, their gut bacteria seemed to produce more helpful compounds – notably, ferulic acid, which has been linked to lower cholesterol levels in previous research.
Those who saw the most increases to ferulic acid were also more likely to significantly lower their total and LDL cholesterol levels.
The scientists concluded that – thanks to interactions between bacteria and oats in the gut – a short-term oat diet could be a cheap, sustainable and effective way to target metabolic syndrome.
The study was published in Nature Communications.
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