Eating Oat Bread Every Day Has An Unexpected Effect On Your Cholesterol

If you're someone who struggles to keep your cholesterol within a healthy range, a great place to start is by looking at your diet. Unfortunately, not everything you eat is good for you, so you may need to scale back on the delicious-but-unhealthy stuff and increase your consumption of healthy food. It may be a good idea to include oat bread in your daily diet: In addition to being rich in antioxidants and fiber, oat bread also plays a key role in lowering cholesterol.

According to a 2014 study published in ARYA Atherosclerosis, oat bread consumption has a significant enough impact on lowering cholesterol levels that researchers advise that those suffering from hypercholesterolemia be given bread that's been infused with oat flour. Another 2014 study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that eating 3 grams or more of oats every day can reduce cholesterol levels.

While eating oat bread alone won't work miracles on your cholesterol, it's definitely an important part of the equation, along with other cholesterol-lowering foods and healthy lifestyle choices. So if you want to stave off having to turn to Lipitor for as long as possible, oat bread can help you with that.

When it comes to oat bread and how it lowers cholesterol, it's all about beta-glucan or, as it's more commonly known, soluble fiber. According to a 2019 study in Frontiers in Nutrition, beta-glucan does its job in the intestines by binding to bile (which contains cholesterol, among other things) in the digestive tract so it can't be reabsorbed into the body. When this happens, the low-density lipoprotein (LDL), the so-called "bad" cholesterol, is removed from the body when you poop.

But because the body needs bile to properly digest food, the liver creates more of it from the remaining cholesterol, which ultimately means cholesterol levels decrease. In fact, because there's been enough research on the subject that has proven that oats really do help in lowering cholesterol, the FDA has even allowed some oat products to have a seal on their packaging stating that they're heart-healthy.

If you're not a fan of oat bread, giving other oat-based foods a try is something to seriously consider. (And, no, the instant oatmeal that's loaded with sugar doesn't count.) According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a diet that's high in saturated fat and cholesterol can increase a person's risk of heart disease.

Every year, roughly 17.9 million people die from cardiovascular disease, making it the number one cause of death across the globe, reports the World Health Organization. Women are especially at risk for heart disease because far too often their symptoms are dismissed as something else, both by healthcare professionals and even women themselves. Because of this, heart attacks are more likely to be deadly in women due to too much misinformation surrounding heart disease and women, according to a 2016 study in Circulation.