Jonathan Steedman (00:03.247)

Hey food groupies, I wanted to defend a very good friend of mine in today's podcast. And that friend is oats. The poor humble oat has copped a hiding on social media and surrounds and so I wanted to lay get the record straight on whether oats are something that are healthy or not. I've probably already given the game away but anyway I'll explain why they are healthy, why I think you should consider

 

including them and unpack a few of the claims around why they are unhealthy. So you don't just have to take my word for it as always. Right. So I have found that particularly in the carnivore animal based space or the blood sugar obsessed space, they seem to be the two main areas where oats, copper bad rap. Right. And so I wanted to go through each of their claims. I would say the first claim that I see

 

is particularly in the blood sugar space is around the fact that they're pure starch or they're really high in carbohydrates and they're going to spike your blood sugar. Now, firstly, forgetting even about oats for a second, that whole, I should probably do a podcast on that, but essentially outside of specific medical scenarios, pre-diabetes, insulin resistant PCOS, in those contexts, we do need to pay closer attention to our blood sugar.

 

That doesn't mean that you can't have oats in that context, you absolutely can. But it does mean that, yeah, I wanna be a little bit more careful with my blood sugar. However, most people, like, okay, if that's you, cool. If that's not you, then micromanaging and stressing about your blood sugar is not helpful at all. Typical healthy eating patterns, typical exercise patterns manage your blood sugar super effectively.

 

You don't need to stress about something that raises your blood sugar. Your blood sugar is supposed to go up after a meal. That argument against oats is a little bit silly. Typically, the next argument around that is, they're so low in protein, that's why they spike your blood sugar. Yeah, oats are not a good source of protein, but no one's pooping on olive oil because it's low in protein. Everyone loves olive oil, rightly so.

 

Jonathan Steedman (02:21.739)

very healthy fats, great antioxidant components, all of those things, but zero grams of protein. But also no one is having olive oil by itself. So the easiest thing to do with oats is to also not have them by themselves. Picking on a food for being low in protein when it's not really being used as a protein source makes no sense to me. So if you are going to have oats, understand that they are not quote unquote a complete food. It is a good idea to add a additional or a larger

 

source of protein alongside them like oats or protein powder or high protein milk or plant-based milk options, adding all of those things, sorry, one of those things or a mixture of those things is going to give you heaps of protein and then still give you all the benefits of oats. So they are low in protein argument. Again, like I said, doesn't make sense to me because that's a very, very easy fix and also not a reason to exclude foods that are really healthy in other ways.

 

The next argument I often see is a little bit more closely, it's more the animal based camps. You know, the people who like didn't like eating their veggies as a kid and now they're just like determined to find a reason why they were right. They often like to talk about something called phytic acid, which is a component of oats, this phytic acid. And what they say is that phytic acid binds to certain minerals, you know, like magnesium, iron, those sorts of things. And so you're not getting

 

Like it's depleting you of those minerals or you know, it's basically they like to bang on about it reduces your absorption of these minerals, which it does. I'm not here to argue that fact. However, there's always a however, right? Firstly, oats contain iron and magnesium and things like that, right? So they are also giving you some of it. Now, yeah, you are not absorbing all of the minerals contained in the oats, but you're not absorbing none of the minerals, right?

 

Is that grammatically correct? None of the minerals? Yeah, I think so. So yes, reduced absorption, but by a degree that isn't super relevant. So it's not something that I'll be worried about. Reducing your absorption of something doesn't mean that you automatically have zero absorption, but reduced absorption sounds really scary. And they kind of, they never say that you don't get any nutrients out of it, although some people probably do, but they just want that implication to sit there to make you go like, oh yeah, maybe oats are a bad idea.

 

Jonathan Steedman (04:50.452)

Also, if you are really worried about the phytic acid content of your oats, you can soak them overnight in some water or with a little bit of yogurt, which is a classic way to make overnight oats or birch or muesli. And that soaking tends to reduce the phytic acid component a little. So if that's, I don't know, something you're concerned about for one reason or another, do that. On the other hand, though, we actually ironically see that phytic acid might be beneficial. We see some links with maybe reducing some

 

inflammation, there's some potential anti cancer benefits, right. So as always with food, we're not saying like phytic acid is going to kill cancer or anything like that. we do see that, you know, there's some mechanisms which may help reduce the risk of these things, right, or the incidence of these things, which whether that's true or not, I think really what I want to say about the phytic acid thing is it's kind of a non issue, right? It's a bit of a what's this? It's a storm in a teacup. Cool.

 

What have we done? We've done protein, we've done low carb slash glucose spikes, we've fatty acid. Those are the big three that I've seen. Oh, glyphosate I think comes up a lot. I've got a whole post, maybe I should do a podcast on that too, on where the actual levels of glyphosate are in our food and how they are obscenely below anything that even approaches risk. Like so, so, so, so far below anything we have to consider. If you drink one glass of wine, I think it's like a year.

 

you've still like that's way more toxins quote unquote than the glyphosate residue on your oats. So don't don't stress about that either. What we do see when we you know actually look at the science look at the evidence is quite a number of really big really robust studies supporting the benefits that we see from oats and and showing quite a wide range of benefits. We see improvements in

 

what we call dyslipidemia, which is a fancy way of saying like high cholesterol or high triglycerides. So high LDLC, which is LDL cholesterol, which is the quote unquote bad cholesterol. we see oats are really effective at bringing that LDLC down. They're pretty good at bringing your triglycerides down so they could help give you like a better fat profile in your blood. We see kind of minor improvements in things like blood pressure. Really ironically, if you remember back to the fear mongering around oats spiking your blood sugar.

 

Jonathan Steedman (07:11.371)

we see that there's groups with people regularly eating oats, people with type two diabetes regularly eating oats actually see improvements in something called HbA1c, which is just a blood measure, a blood, sorry, it's a biomarker that they test in blood, which is kind of a snapshot of their blood sugar control over the past three months. So put simply, these type two diabetics that regularly eat oats actually see improvements in their blood sugar control, which if oats were so terrible, surely we would see the opposite.

 

Right? we have, oats have great nutrients in them. There's really robust findings in these studies around people that eat more oats tend to be healthier for a whole host of different reasons. Just to touch very quickly on the type of fiber specifically that oats contain, they contain something called beta-glucans, which are really, they're soluble kind of sticky viscous fibers, which is why, one of the main reasons why they are so good at reducing your cholesterol.

 

If you listen to my cholesterol chat, you'll know that, you know, that kind of sticky viscous fiber is a really good way to kind of bind to bile salts in your stomach and you excrete those and your body has to make more and that helps lower cholesterol. You know, we can also see that the oats might be blocking your cholesterol reabsorption. So lots of really cool things that oats are doing for your health. And then the last argument that everyone comes back, not everyone, people come back with is that a lot of these studies are what we call like

 

cohort like observational studies, right? We're not putting people in a lab and controlling everything they eat for 12 weeks and doing this kind of, what we would call a randomized control trial or an RCT. And those are amazing. It's just that in nutrition, they're kind of, there's a lot of times where we can't do them. It's not feasible to do that, right? One, lots of things around nutrition take decades to appear. So we know that diets high in saturated fat,

 

increase your risk of cardiovascular disease, but that takes 10, 20 years. It could take 10, 20 years off your life, but if you're 20 doing that, it means you might die at 60 instead of 80. We can't put you in a lab for 40 years, right? So we have to use these cohort studies. And yeah, what they lack in control, because people are out doing a whole bunch of other things, they make up for in what we call like statistical power, because you can have...

 

Jonathan Steedman (09:31.656)

hundreds of thousands of participants, because you can pull all of this data and it's quite easy to use this data. And they can do a bunch of statistical analysis on it, which I don't understand because stats is like insane. I wish I was better at it. But you know, so everyone's first instinct is like, what if all of these people are, you know, they're smoking and having doing alcohol.

 

if you watch the US office, you know, they're doing these other unhealthy behaviors, how can we know that the oats are good or bad? And so they can do statistical analyses to kind of exclude those influencing factors. But I guess the main my main interpretation of it is if oats were so in these studies, we see that people who eat more oats are healthier in a very summarized way. If oats were bad for you,

 

Are you trying to say that all of these people that are consuming oats more regularly are also doing a ton of extra things that make them extra healthier and if you remove the oats, they would be healthier still? I don't, I can't, I can't see how that would be the case. I can't see how, they're actually healthy because they do all of these other things that are healthy and the oats still kind of holding them back a little bit. Like, I just don't think that's the case. So.

 

If you or someone you love has been scared of oats or has been told that oats are a problem, please direct them to this podcast. Have a quick listen. I'll put some studies in the show notes, of course. So you can follow up if you don't trust me, which don't trust me, don't trust anyone. And hopefully you can include your oats guilt-free, worry-free from here on out. All right, chat to you next time.