The experiment halved energy intake at minimum and still provided 30+ grams of fibre then kept doing it until the gut emptied, which I reckon most people would expect to nuke and replace the gut microbiome, but did oatmeal have any specific advantage?
Their hypothesis for the mechanism is "gut bacteria" but these people in the study all had a trifecta of "high" body weight (overweight? obese? not specified in this article), high blood pressure, and hyperlipidemia.
So we've got some unhealthy people, we cut their calories to less than half, we jack their fiber way up (most likely - we don't know their baseline diet but with those biomarkers we can make some educated guesses), we restrict the timing of when they eat and remove all junk food.
So is this oatmeal specifically? Fiber? Calorie deficit? Meal timing effects? Removal of processed food for two days?
The idea that you can "shock" your body to better biomarkers like this and have it last over a month is extremely cool, but I wonder how they can be certain that this is some oatmeal thing versus a general "eat way less and limit yourself to a food that is high in fiber" thing.
The low protein here is a problem when in a calorie deficit, for example, because if you don't have enough protein you're likely to lose weight as muscle mass rather than fat. If you could do the same technique with legumes your protein would be way better.
It's an intervention for people with metabolic syndrome, characterized specifically by those traits. Quoting the first sentence of the paper:
"Metabolic syndrome (MetS), characterized by the co-occurrence of central obesity, dyslipidemia, elevated blood pressure (BP), and dysglycemia, ..."
I did a similar unscientific experiment in the past where I did a juice fast for two weeks and had bloodwork done before and after (similar bodytype, unhealthy, overweight, high blood sugars, high cholesterol etc). Basically the doctor was shocked how all my numbers became the same as someone really healthy during the fast. So I think the lack of junk and calorie restriction is doing more than the fiber.
> Oats offer an interesting and promising approach for treating MetS due to their unique composition characterized by a high fiber content, especially β-glucan, essential minerals and vitamins, and various bioactive substances, including phenols which exert antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects that may improve metabolic function. Furthermore, oats are an accessible and sustainable food item.
I eat Bob's Red Mill steel cut oats for breakfast every day; 1/2c dry is about 88g. That's a pretty decent meal. 3.5x that is probably most of what you eat that day.
I'd guess the easiest way to get it down would be to just blend the oats into water without cooking so you have something that you can just drink like water.
The oatmeal put them on a crash diet of 1000 calories a day. And filled them so they didn’t reach for non reported snacks.
6 weeks of 'oatmeal for breakfast every day' was less effective than 2 days of 'stuff yourself with oatmeal'.
88g dry may get much heavier after adding 3/4 cups water
The original paper describes two protocols, short-term and long-term (2-day and 6-week respectively) of 100g dry oats and 80g dry oats prepared for each meal. That's a generous but not outrageous serving size, and the former comes out to 300g oats per day over three meals.
Indeed they suggest that the difference may be due to changes in gut microbiome caused by oatmeal.