Of Course Porridge Oats Don't Make you Fat!

For years now, many weight loss experts, dietitians, doctors and slimming consultants alike have been telling us how Porridge Oats or easily the best option for our breakfast.

Granted most of us now know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, followed closely by our choice of post-workout nutrition, but why?

Well, you see, porridge oats are what are know as a Low Glycaemic Carbohydrate, meaning that it enters the bloodstream and is converted into sugar quite slowly, thus providing a slow release of energy throughout the day.

Hopefully you all know packaged breakfast cereals that are so common in many cupboards are just processed rubbish that I guarantee will make you fat- yes even Bran Flakes, All Bran and the like are very poor choices

Don't let the fact that they have 'added vitamins and minerals' fool you into thinking your morning bowl of cereal is healthy. It's not!

After being rendered into a kind of slurry paste, the grains that were used to make the flakes that you eat every morning were passed under high pressure and high heat through a pipe (a process that renders the grains mildly toxic) before being sprayed with synthetic chemicals and cut into their desired shapes. This process, known as extrusion, basically removes much of what was once nutritious from the food.

Haven't you ever wondered why your cornflakes turned to mush when you leave it too long? Real food doesn't do this!

So, what is THE best breakfast?

Well, believe it or not it's a plain old omelette! And before you game me the aren't eggs bad for your cholesterol? line the amount of cholesterol in eggs had no effect on your blood cholesterol. They are a great from of protein.

Anyway, here's a study to back it up (you know I love my studies)

It's a study done by Dr. David Ludwig at Harvard University; he studied three groups of overweight individuals. Feeding each group a breakfast containing and IDENTICAL number of calories. One group ate instant oats; one group ate steel cut oats (the type that take 45 minutes to cook); and the third group had a veggie omelette and fruit.

They then ate a lunch identical to the meal they had eaten for breakfast, then after lunch they were told to eat whenever they were very hungry for the rest of the day. Now the results here blew me away!

Many of you would think that the healthiest meal would have been the oatmeal right? It was actually the omelette!

The group that are the instant oatmeal ate 81% more food in the afternoon than the group that had the omelette. Not only were they hungrier but the omelette group also had lower levels of insulin, which means there body was using fat as energy!

The steel cut oats were slightly better than the instant; the group still ate 51% more food the rest of the day than the group who ate the omelette.

The conclusion here for me is that the kind of calories and not the AMOUNT of calories you consume have a HUGE impact on how much weight you lose or gain, because different types of food are metabolized in different weighs- in short PROTEIN ALWAYS WINS!

Now I'm not an advocate of the Atkins diet which is little or no carbs but what I am a fan of is low REFINED carbohydrate, so eat your oats, your brown rice and your veggies but ALWAYS eat them with protein!

So go get those eggs for breakfast and watch those afernoon munchies dissapear!

Copyright (c) 2007 Paul Mort