Everything You Wanted to Know about Oats
Don't forget the Oats.
Old Fashioned Rolled Oats - These are made by steaming the groats and flattening them with a roller. The Quaker Old Fashioned Rolled Oats are very thinly rolled, as are the store varieties by the same title. If you look hard, however, you can often find rolled oats that are twice as thick as the Quaker variety, and these make a lovely, less creamy version of oatmeal than the Quaker ones do. Quaker sets the industry standard, so theirs is considered REGULAR Old Fashioned Rolled Oats. If they are thicker, they are called THICK Old Fashioned Rolled Oats.
Quick-cooking rolled oats -- These are made by flattening pre-cut groats. They cook in about 5 minutes.
Instant Oats - are usually packaged with salt and sugar. Don't indulge in the empty calories!
Commercial Cereals - Amazingly, Cheerios are made from oat flour and wheat starch, and Brody contends that they too are a nourishing cold cereal. A bit high in sodium (330 mg in 1-1/4 cup (1 ounce)
Granolas are simply overrated if you buy the commercially produced one. They just have way too much sugar and way too much trans fatty acids.
Which form of oats should I buy?
Anytime you do ANYTHING to a food besides "pick it off the stalk," you have processed it. Sears uses the term and says some of the oats are too processed, while Brody contends that oats are NOT processed, Brody meaning that the nutrients are not removed like they are in other grains. Our concern should be how much is done to the food item to break down the cell structure of the carbohydrate food. One way this can be done by cooking the food item. Cooking means that you have subjected it to heat, water or chemicals to break down the cell structure or inactivate certain enzymes. You can "cook" a food by chemically altering it (like fresh seafood being "cooked" by adding lime juice to it). The longer the cooking time, the greater the breakdown of the cell walls, and the faster that food can enter your blood stream and the faster your body will react to it by producing insulin to break down the carbohydrates (sugars) into simple, readily useable forms. Some grains you can begin the "cooking" process by soaking them, but even with the increase in size because of rehydration, the starch in the carbohydrate has not broken down and the food item will still taste...green. Raw.
What you are looking for is breaking down the starches just enough to make them tasty and easy to digest, but not so long that they become unfavorable, i.e. high on the glycemic index. So in Zoning terms, this means that the same food, cooked for longer periods of time, will have a higher glycemic reaction (insulin producing) than that same food cooked for a short time or not at all. The higher the glycemic response, the higher the insulin level and blood sugar level will rise, and since what goes up must come down, your blood sugar level will fall equally as low. The idea of Zoning is to keep your blood sugar level fairly stable: not too high, not too low. The low blood sugar is what will start up your cravings. The over production of insulin is what is going to slap that fat onto your thighs (and belly and fanny...). Therefore the less you break down your foods, the less the glycemic reaction will be, the more stable your blood sugar will remain.
So what form of oats should you buy? Sears says that it should be the kind that cooks in nothing less than 30 minutes. That would be groats, steel cut (and the various names) and Thick Old Fashioned Rolled Oats.
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