WEEKLY HEALTH BULLETIN June 10, 2009

Soak Your Grains and Nuts
Get The Most Out Of Your Morning Bowl Of Oatmeal.

That morning bowl of oatmeal is touted as one the healthiest breakfasts around. With loads more natural nutrition than the extruded grain dead food product dry cereal that gets fobbed off on a credulous public as some sort of health food.

What a joke.

Add some skim milk and sugar to your cheerios and all you get is a lot of cheap flour and sugar plus some skim milk solids processed out of whole milk and marketed as some sort of heart healthy alternative.

Over and over I see people wasting breakfast, the most important meal of the day, on a cheap dessert-like assemblage of industrial food product. This is hardly the way to support good health and happiness.

Rats fed dry cereal, vitamins and water last 2 weeks. Then they die. Rats fed whole grain cereal and water Live a normal year or more. (Unpublished study cited in Fighting the Food Giants by Paul Stitt)

Here’s another one for you. I’ll tell you, you can’t make this stuff up!

In the 1960s, researchers at the University of Michigan divided rats into three groups: one group received corn flakes and water; a second group was fed the cardboard box the corn flakes came in plus water; the control group received rat chow and water. The chow rats in the control group remained in good health throughout the experiment. The rats eating the box tired out and eventually died of malnutrition. But the rats receiving the corn flakes and water died before the rats that were eating the box! (The last corn flake rat died the day the first box rat died.) Before they died, the corn flake rats developed schizophrenic behavior, threw fits, bit each other and finally went into convulsions. There was apparently more nourishment in the box than there was in the corn flakes. (Source: Unpublished study cited in Fighting the Food Giants, Paul Stitt)

Dry breakfast cereal is stripped of most of its natural nutrition by industrial processing – extrusion is simply pushing something under high temperature through a hole. Extruded grains are forced through tiny holes so they can be easily processed, shaped and packaged. A little bit of cheap vitamin spray is sometimes added back to “fortify” something that’s already been killed. And then we’re told what a great way this is to meet our daily vitamin needs!

Cooked oatmeal with some berries, nuts and a pat of butter sprinkled over with cinnamon is guaranteed to get you off to a great start. The fats and fat soluble vitamins like A, D and E in the butter and nuts complement the B vitamins in the grains. They also slow down absorption of the carbohydrate in the cereal and give you a steady supply of energy that can keep you going you morning.

Oats and other grains are full of excellent nutrition including valuable minerals such as magnesium and zinc often in short supply in the typical American diet. Unfortunately, much of magnesium and zinc is unavailable due to phytic acid. Phytic acid binds to minerals in the digestive tract and escorts them out of your system before they have a chance to be digested. It is estimated that only about 15% of these nutrients are absorbed. You can double this by soaking your grains before cooking. If you add a tablespoon or two of weak acid pr cup of grains in the form of yoghurt, kefir, lemon juice or apple cider vinegar, this will further help reduce phytic acid levels and improve mineral absorption. Ideally you should soak your grains overnight before cooking.

Optimizing mineral absorption from grains may be more important for vegetarians, who are more vulnerable to zinc deficiency. Zinc is found mainly in animal foods. USDA estimates suggest over half the country doesn’t get enough magnesium or zinc in their diets. Doesn’t it just make good common sense for all of us to soaks our grains?

Alan Inglis MD
American Country Doctor