Here’s some motivation to replenish your oats supply.
From a 2013 Canadian human review:
“Review of human studies investigating the post-prandial blood-glucose lowering ability of oat and barley food products” https://www.nature.com/articles/ejcn201325
“Change in glycaemic response (expressed as incremental area under the post-prandial blood-glucose curve) was greater for intact grains than for processed foods. For processed foods, glycaemic response was more strongly related to the β-glucan dose alone than to the ratio of β-glucan to the available carbohydrate.”
The review found that people don’t have to eat a lot of carbohydrates to get the glycemic-response benefits of β-glucan. Also, eating ~3 grams of β-glucan in whole oats and barley will deliver the same glycemic-response benefits as eating ~4 grams of β-glucan in processed oats and barley.
However, the glycemic index used in the review is a very flawed measure. What’s the point of indexing healthy choices like whole grains to unhealthy choices that healthy people aren’t going to make anyway?
The reviewer somewhat redeemed herself by participating in a 2018 review:
“Processing of oat: the impact on oat’s cholesterol lowering effect” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5885279/
“For a similar dose of β-glucan:
- Liquid oat-based foods seem to give more consistent, but moderate reductions in cholesterol than semi-solid or solid foods where the results are more variable;
- The quantity of β-glucan and the molecular weight at expected consumption levels (∼3 g day) play a role in cholesterol reduction; and
- Unrefined β-glucan-rich oat-based foods (where some of the plant tissue remains intact) often appear more efficient at lowering cholesterol than purified β-glucan added as an ingredient.”
The review’s sections 3. Degree of processing and functionality and 4. Synergistic action of oat constituents were informative:
“Both in vitro and in vivo studies clearly demonstrated the beneficial effect of oat on cholesterolemia, which is unlikely to be due exclusively to β-glucan, but rather to a combined and synergetic action of several oat compounds acting together to reduce blood cholesterol levels.”
Another use of β-glucan is to improve immune response. Here’s a 2016 Netherlands study where the researchers used β-glucan to get a dozen people well after making them sick with lipopolysaccharide as is often done in animal studies:
“β-Glucan Reverses the Epigenetic State of LPS-Induced Immunological Tolerance” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5927328/
“The innate immune ‘training stimulus’ β-glucan can reverse macrophage tolerance ex vivo.”
I’ve curated other research on β-glucan’s immune-response benefits in: