Comment by strken
4 hours ago
I'm left wondering what happens if you feed people 300g/day of barley, shredded wheat, brown rice, or any other wholegrain. For that matter, what happens if you do the same thing with legumes?
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?
Yeah this is a really wild experiment.
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.
> people in the study all had a trifecta
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, ..."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-68303-9
The paper does a better job explaining why oats were chosen:
> 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.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-68303-9