Fine oats benefits and recipes

Matt Turner explains the benefits of fine oats and why they make such a good addition to your diet and gives some ideas on how you can cook with them. From a young age my Grandma use to make me eat porridge. This put me right off it. However, when training for my first distance event, the key advice my sports science professors gave me was to get a good night's rest and eat a hearty breakfast. This led to eating oats in a variety of forms, mainly muesli with milk or yoghurt or as porridge with nuts and fruit. I found this did help sustain my hunger and provide a good source of long-lasting energy, so I can't recommend it enough. Using a product like GoNutrition's Pure Fine Oats is one way to boost your oat intake.

What are pure fine oats?

Pure Fine Oats are 100% oats that have been milled to a very fine consistency while retaining all of their goodness. They do not need to be cooked so can be mixed with cold water or milk making them perfect for adding to a morning protein shake. The discovery of their healthy cholesterol-lowering properties has led to wider appreciation of oats as human food. When consumed, the outer casing (called oat bran) lowers the level of the low-density lipoprotein (LDL) - or bad cholesterol. Oats contain more soluble fibre than any other grain, resulting in slower digestion and an extended sensation of fullness. Oat protein is nearly equivalent in quality to soy protein, which World Health Organisation research has shown to be equal to meat, milk, and egg protein (Lasztity, 1999).

Pure Fine Oats benefits

Pure Fine Oats provide a prolonged high quality energy release making them ideal for your pre-workout meal or supplement, especially if you intend to train or compete for an extended period of time. They are a great choice for endurance athletes who have high energy requirements and can be used for carb loading. In order to build strength and lean muscle a calorie surplus is required. Pure Fine Oats offer a fantastic way to help you achieve the increased macronutrient targets required for lean mass and bulking. They are ideal for adding to your protein shake to create your own weight gain or meal replacement formula. Cooking with fine oats Despite the benefits of oats, eating muesli and porridge did get tiresome, so I started adding oats to protein shakes in the morning. I found I got the nutritional rewards I wanted, but didn't enjoy the taste, especially with little milk. So I started researching a few different ways of incorporating oats in my diet. Many of my Google searches came up with the idea of putting fine oats into bath water to help alleviate dry, itchy or inflamed skin, but I didn't really fancy that. Eventually, I did find quite a few interesting recipes that used fine oats, including:

• Salads
• Soups
• Oat bread
• Granola
• Oat fig stuffing
• Healthy fruit crumbles
• Flapjacks
• Cookies
• Cakes

Protein oatmeal cookies recipe

My favourite recipe is Protein Oatmeal Cookies. Although you can purchase Go Nutrition Protein Cookies, I wanted to make my own. This is especially handy if you have a sister or other family member who loves baking, as you can always persuade them to do it for you. Plus it keeps them busy while you're out training. The long-lasting energy provided from oatmeal, the functional muscle benefits and hunger suppressing capabilities of protein sounded like the ideal combination. Although I like the idea of "no bake" cookies, my attempts at putting them in the fridge failed. Instead of coming out like chewy brownie-like cookies, they came out just as they went in - like a gooey mixture. I've now perfected my recipe.

My recipe for oatmeal protein cookies

• 150g of fine oats
• 100 raisins
• 150g of Go Diet Whey Protein
• 4 tablespoons of Go Nutrition Liquid Egg Whites
• 100g of mixed crushed nuts
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
• 50g of Go Nutrition Almond Butter or 2 teaspoons of Go Nutrition Coconut Oil
• Optional: shredded coconut, mashed banana, honey, Go Nutrition Peanut Butter

Directions

• Pre-heat your oven to 160°C.
• Grease a cookie tray.
• Mix all the dry ingredients and wet ingredients separately, then combine.
• Form approximately 24 cookies.
• Bake on the tray for 10-15 minutes until slightly browned.

The result

OK, so I may have burnt them a slight bit and gone abit over the top with raisins and nuts, but they tasted really good. More significantly it took me ages to eat a single one, and one actually sustained my hunger for the entire morning. [caption id="attachment_1570" align="aligncenter" width="530"] Fine oats also make a great addition to bread recipes.[/caption]

Oat bread

My second favourite alternative idea to using fine oats is to make bread. Even though most of us try to cut out the carbs in our training, but for a healthier more nutritional rich alternative to wheat bread. Oat bread contains more protein, calcium, iron, zinc and than the average wheat bread. But what's more significant, is that oat bread contains more essential and non-essential amino acids, which can help utilise protein and can contribute to fat loss.

Further reading on fine oats

Jianping, Z. (2006). Study on naked oats nutrition components and functions. Food and Fermentation Industries, 32(11), 128. Lasztity, Radomir (1999). The Chemistry of Cereal Proteins. Akademiai Kiado. Meydani, M. (2009). Potential health benefits of avenanthramides of oats. Nutrition Reviews, 67(12), 731-735. Webster, F. H., & Wood, P. J. (2011). Oats: chemistry and technology (No. Ed. 2). American Association of Cereal Chemists, Inc (AACC).