I’m eating my overnight oats and just am wondering what is the actual mechanism of oatmeal that reduces lipids in blood.
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There are two types of fiber, soluble and insoluble. Soluble fiber is acted upon by the normal bacteria in your intestines. Insoluble fiber is not digested by the body and promotes regularity and softens stools. Wheat bran, whole grain products and vegetables are good sources of insoluble fiber.
Soluble fiber appears to reduce your body’s absorption of cholesterol from the intestines. Oatmeal contains soluble fiber that reduces your low-density lipoprotein (LDL), the “bad” cholesterol that can increase your risk of heart attacks and strokes. This type of fiber is also found in such foods as kidney beans, brussels sprouts, apples, pears, barley and prunes.
In short, fiber. Rather than “sit” in your intestines where it will be absorbed, increased fiber helps “mop up” the cholesterol and carries it out in your stool. Imagine an oil spill in your pipes. If you send solid, hard material through, it won’t carry much oil out the other end. If you send a sponge-like material through, it will “clean out” the oil better by absorbing it and carrying it out the other end. Probably way over simplified but that’s my understanding.
there’s an added benefit to oatmeal/oatbran besides the ones already mentioned. it absorbs the excess bile in you bloodstream and your liver has to make more. it makes bile by using the cholesterol in your blood. kind of neat
Oil doesn’t mix with water, but your body needs to pull oil out of the food you eat and is made of mostly water. So the top of your small intestine adds a natural detergent called bile to help the oil and water in whatever you ate mix. Bile contains cholesterol, so you would constantly be losing cholesterol that way, but cholesterol is essential for life and is hard to make more of, so most of what’s lost in your bile is reabsorbed lower down in your intestines.
Oatmeal is full of fiber, and that fiber can trap the cholesterol from your bile and keep some of it from being reabsorbed. With less cholesterol available, your liver doesn’t package as much of it into lipoprotein particles, and your LDL-C goes down (there’s some debate about whether this is a good thing or not).
Does it also work when the oatmeal is in cookie form?
The fiber in oatmeal absorbs bile and pulls it along and out of your body when you poop creating a bile deficit. So, your liver, in order to create more bile, draws cholesterol from your blood. Over time, this constant bile deficit and your liver’s response of synthesizing cholesterol to make more bile lowers your blood cholesterol.
How much oatmeal is needed for this to have a meaningful impact?
Fiber is tough for your body to move through your intestines and it’ll soak up fat as it goes through your digestive tract. Your body will use some fat from your blood to “lube up” your intestines, and the fiber will also help prevent your body from absorbing some of the cholesterol in your current diet. So eating lots of good fibery foods will give your body time to gradually remove the buildup of cholesterol from a previous bad diet.
2 kinds of fiber, one that gets into your blood and one that stays in your gut. Fat(ldl) is like oil and oil doesn’t mix with water so you need something else to absorb the oil. Oats are fiber that act like a sponge in your blood to absorb this oil which can then exit the body
Bile sticks to t he oatmeal and gets pooped out. You take cholesterol out of your blood to replace the bile that would have been reused if it didn’t have fiber to stick to in your gut.
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