Oat Bran for Weight Loss
I grew up on oatmeal but gave it up a number of years ago for all the wrong reasons. While I still don’t eat oatmeal for breakfast on a regular basis, I consistently consume oat bran because it’s low in calories, full of nutrients, and contains properties that make oat bran a powerfully slimming food.
Oat bran has more antioxidants, protein, calcium, iron, thiamin, phosphorus, riboflavin, magnesium, and zinc than oatmeal.
Because of its high fiber content, oat bran satiates you. As soon as you ingest it, the fiber in oat bran soaks up saliva and then expands in the stomach absorbing up to 25 times its volume in liquid, making you feel quite full, quite fast. It also provides a prolonged feeling of fullness, so you eat less in between meals.
Another way oat bran helps with weight loss is a biological process called intestinal caloric loss where oat bran blocks the absorption of calories from the intestine.
Here’s how it works: when you eat food, it is broken down into its individual components of fatty acids, carbohydrate (glucose), and amino acids (the building blocks of proteins). The calories from these components are then absorbed into the body.
When you eat oat bran, it mixes with water in your intestine to produce a gel-like substance called bolus. The bolus absorbs some of the breakdown products, and then it is attacked by gastric juices and stomach acids that turn it into a pulp. This pulp becomes part of the stool, and thereby carries the calorie-dense components of fats, glucose, and amino acids out of the body through the stool. This process both slows down the assimilation of sugar (glucose) and removes calories from the body while keeping your blood sugar levels low and stable.
Add oat bran to smoothies, yogurt, oatmeal, meatloaf, hamburgers, muffins, pancakes, etc.
Here’s a few other facts worth noting on oat bran:
- Technically, oat bran is not a whole grain (since it’s actually only one part of the oat grain).
- Because of its exceptionally high fiber content, it can be considered a whole grain.
- A bowl of oat bran contains about 50% more fiber than the same size bowl of oatmeal, making it more effective at lowering cholesterol and in its weight loss properties.
- Because it is mostly fiber, oat bran has fewer calories than the same amount of oatmeal.
- A three-quarter-cup serving of cooked oat bran contains only 66 calories, compared to 124 calories in the same amount of cooked oatmeal.
Source and to learn more: https://processedfreeamerica.org/the-slimming-benefits-of-oat-bran/