Minnesota Science
Vol. 45, No. 1
It's Okay for Us to Like Oatmeal Again
by Larry Etkin
Oats! As a kid the word conjured up extreme views, positive or negative, of a hot morning cereal. But oats became one of the most promoted and popular foods of the past decade. Despite some questioning nutritional studies, that status may well continue in the '90s.
It's almost all positive for Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station researchers. As oat breeder Deon Stuthman says, "It's out of the category of a forgotten crop. It's getting us some attention now. There's more discussion and more research money available than there was five years ago. And it's now okay, if not more than that, to admit that you had oatmeal for breakfast."
But getting farmers to grow it requires making money doing so. The situation is improving, says Joe Warthesen, a University cereal chemist in Food Science and Nutrition, and member of the American Association of Cereal Chemists oat bran committee.
"Some of our Minnesota commodities have suffered due to consumption patterns," says Warthesen. "This one is going in the right direction." Minnesota is the second largest U.S. producer of oats.
It's going that way because of the reported cholesterol lowering properties of its soluble fiber, and the fact that food processors heavily promote that presumed benefit on behalf of a growing array of products. "Oats is in an enviable position," says nationally known University food scientist Joanne Slavin. "It's the thing to have right now, so if you can associate anything about you or your product with oats, you are in!"
Slavin has done nutritional studies on fiber from many crops. "When people say they want to do a human nutrition study on fiber, what they really want to do is run themselves off against oat bran," she says. "It's the standard right now. Rather than find out what their fiber can do in a human, they want to know how it compares to oat bran."
The only problem possibly facing oats could be the sheen wearing off its current fad. "I don't think any other fiber will lower cholesterol more than oats. Maybe some are comparable, but it's probably got as good a composition to lower cholesterol as any," she says.
But she tempers her enthusiasm with a caution. "What could knock it down and really effect sales would just be people recognizing that the literature on cholesterol lowering is maybe not as strong as they thought it was."
Also facing the industry is protecting the nutritional image of oats from being diluted by promotional zeal. "What's happening to the oats market lately, is it has been fueled by the nutritional implications of putting more oat bran into a variety of foods," says Warthesen.
"Oat bran is not an item of commerce easy to define," he says. "In the milling process it could be diluted with oat flour, or oat hulls. Those are probably not going to have the same nutritional impact as oat bran itself. There's some concern that if it's oat bran it ought to be the most nutritionally significant oat bran."
The quality of oats can also be diluted with weed seeds and field residues, though Minnesota's is some of the cleanest, according to Ray Lottie, a manager of cereal grain operations for General Mills. "By and large, Minnesota farmers do a pretty good job of harvesting oats so they come off pretty clean of foreign material such as wheat seeds and chaff and straw," he says.
Filling our growing domestic needs with Minnesota and U.S. oat production may, however, be difficult under current federal farm policy. Stuthman and Slavin represent the views of many when they say they think it's economically too difficult for many farmers to risk reducing their base acreage in price supported crops to speculatively plant alternatives such as oats. But even that may change. With Congress considering ways to promote "sustainable agriculture," Minnesota, which once grew a substantial amount of oats to feed people and livestock on farms, may someday again count oats among its more important crops.
PHOTO CUTLINE: Protecting Research Goes Low Tech. Balloons colored with hawk
and owl like eyes, anchored just above a crop canopy, provide some Minnesota
Agricultural Experiment Station oat fields with "low tech" protection
from scavenging birds. They are part of an effective arsenal of non-lethal anti-avian
techniques that include perimeter strips of noisy wind-flapping ribbons, using
falcons to disburse birds, providing alternate feeding sites, and even trapping
and relocating some. Agronomist Deon Stuthman says it's an effort to avoid offending
people. "Our preference would be that the birds would just leave us alone,
but in urban areas especially, that preference isn't honored by the birds."
Since the second world war, 20 oat varieties have been released by the experiment
station.