Oat Bran: The Elixir of Living a Longer Life : It Can Be Dull, Tasteless--but It’s One Food That’s (Mostly) Good for You
As I understand it, oat bran is the hottest health fad since the Oprah Winfrey Diet, which basically can be duplicated by locking yourself in the trunk of a car for several months.
Still, oat bran is terrific news for anyone who worries about staying fit. I became concerned about fitness during a recent flight to New York, when we went into a power dive that indicated an unscheduled stop in Flushing Bay.
Apparently our pilot thought he was back in World War II on an Allied bombing run over Dresden.
Yet the moment I began squeezing my complimentary oat bran muffin in terror, the plane leveled off and we arrived without further incident.
A Charmed Quality
So maybe there is something to the charmed quality of oat bran after all. All I know is, I now sprinkle some on my forehead each time before leaving the house.
The hullabaloo over oat bran comes because of a study showing it helps fight cholesterol, especially if you are that noblest of civil servants, the laboratory mouse.
In the study, one group of lab mice was fed pancakes, sausage, home fries, toast, coffee and two packs of Lucky Strikes daily. The other group of mice had oat bran.
That went on for 10 years until finally the mice confined to the oat bran diet started banging their food bowls and shouting: “Hey, what is this, Weight Watchers? When are we gonna get some real chow?”
But the scientists were too busy to notice the uprising, as the other mice, the ones eating like truck drivers and smoking two packs a day, were dropping like flies.
At first the scientists suspected it might be the cigarettes. Then they received a reassuring call from the tobacco lobby.
Although muffled laughter was also heard on the line, the gist of the lobbyist’s message was: Don’t be such worrywarts. Cigarettes do not cause cancer. Or heart disease. Or emphysema. Understand?
Well, that settled that. So now the scientists turned their attention to those lumberjack breakfasts that the mice had been consuming.
Finally they concluded this: If the stupid mice would only lay off the coffee, or drink Sanka or something, they’d be OK. It also wouldn’t hurt to substitute oat bran for pancakes occasionally, although now the scientists were sure to catch some flak from the Aunt Jemima people.
When that news was released, oat bran sales soared. Soon the stuff was practically walking off supermarket shelves, with people talking about it in the same reverential tones normally reserved for the Salk vaccine.
The major problem with oat bran is that no one will ever mistake it for a powdered jelly doughnut, if you catch my drift.
By that I mean that oat bran tends to taste sort of bland, in the sense that sawdust tends to taste bland. Actually, certain types of sawdust taste like filet mignon compared to the oat products I have sampled.
A Good Horse Feed
Which should not be surprising, as they used to feed this stuff to horses. The horse population of the United States must be laughing itself silly over the fact some people would rather eat oat products than a good pepperoni pizza.
Anyway, glancing quickly at the Coronary Tote Board, here’s how things stand as we close out 1988:
Red meat can kill you. Booze can kill you. Coffee can kill you. Smoking can kill you, even if it didn’t kill (wink, wink) those aforementioned mice.
Sex can kill you; maybe not the effort, but there are diseases now that make typhoid fever look like a 24-hour virus.
But oat bran is good for you.
Doesn’t seem fair, does it?
Still, oat bran has enthralled the “baby-boomer” generation, which has always been of the opinion that it is not cool for anyone to die before the age of, oh, 163.
All I can say is, it’s a good thing Ponce de Leon is not around today blabbering about that Fountain of Youth business.
The man would need an unlisted phone number and round-the-clock security. He’d need to travel around in an armored personnel carrier. He’d be bigger than the Pope and Springsteen combined.
By the same token, who knows how long this oat bran craze will last?
What if they come out with a study that claims the best way to fight cholesterol is to pump more lead in your diet?
Pretty soon people would be tossing their oat bran in the trash and chewing on No. 2 pencils.
So if I were a heavy-hitter in the oat bran industry--Quaker, Kellogg, General Mills, etc.--I would enjoy this while I could.
Because when a new health fad comes along, my best customers might again be horses.
And they don’t spend worth a damn.
