There’s nothing quite like a tiny clinical trial that makes big declarative headlines. For instance, a small clinical trial, the results of which were published in the journal Nature Communications, found that people who ate nothing but mostly plain oatmeal for two straight days saw a significant reduction in “bad” cholesterol, and those effects lasted for weeks.
This is of particular interest to me, a relatively young person with what I would classify as a better-than-average diet who, thanks to family history, has the cholesterol numbers of an old man on the verge of a massive heart attack. The study gives people like me a shred of hope. Maybe, just maybe, if I went on an extreme 48-hour diet consisting of 100 grams of rolled oats boiled in water three times a day, topped with a limited selection of fruits and vegetables, and with no salt or sweeteners of any kind, maybe I won’t die in like a year.
A control group followed a calorie-reduced “healthy” diet that did not include oats.
As you would expect, both groups cut their calorie intake roughly in half in only two days. But the rolled oat group saw much more dramatic changes. With oatmeal, total cholesterol dropped by about eight percent, while the aforementioned “bad” cholesterol, LDL, the one most closely associated with heart disease, fell by around 10 percent. Participants also lost a modest amount of weight and saw some small reductions in blood pressure.
While that is an incredible drop in cholesterol numbers, senior author Marie-Christine Simon of the University of Bonn says that it’s impressive but still not comparable to the results you’d see if you took high-dose statins, a.k.a. cholesterol management pills like Lipitor.
Is Oatmeal the Key to Low Cholesterol?
The short-term drop is cool, but what’s much more impressive is that the effects stretched on for weeks. Six weeks after participants returned to their normal diet, LDL levels in the oat group were still below their starting points. The researchers think this has something to do with the all-important gut microbiome. Stool and blood analysis showed that eating oats boosted certain kinds of intestinal bacteria that broke down oat compounds. One of those byproducts is dihydroferulic acid, which seems to reduce cholesterol storage and, in previous studies, has been shown to improve cholesterol metabolism in animals.
The same team ran a second trial with a less restrictive diet in which participants ate 80 grams of oats every day for six weeks. That one produced milder benefits, but benefits nonetheless. Eating boring old plain oatmeal three times a day isn’t the most glamorous diet, but if you want to see a near immediate drop in your cholesterol numbers, a concentrated blast of oats in your system just might do the trick.
One caveat, alongside the fact that it’s a small clinical trial, is that the study was partly funded by German cereal industry groups, but the researchers report no conflicts of interest and said that its funders played no role in their research. Larger versions of the study are going to be needed before anyone can definitively determine whether bombarding your body with oatmeal is a good short-term cholesterol-fighting tactic.
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