Applied Nutrition Protein Critical Oats Porridge (HALAL) (3kg) Golden Syrup 50 Servings

However, the real benefit of Critical Oats comes from the soluble fibre in the organic oats. The fibre, a form known as beta glucan, is present in other grains such as barley and rye, but is found in highest quantities in oats.

It forms a thick gel in the gut, which is what gives you that full, satisfied feeling. But as well as helping switch off appetite, it has many other specific health benefits, including feeding the healthy bacteria in your gut, so helping your immune system, lowering cholesterol, and even potentially protecting against cancer.

Good for you: Containing only 1.38g of sugar and providing manganese, copper, iron and B vitamins in our oats you cannot start your morning any better in our opinion!.

There are two types of fibre — the insoluble kind, found in, for example, fruit and vegetables and wholemeal bread, and which helps improve the transit of food through the body. And soluble fibres, such as beta glucan from cereals and pectin in fruit, which also help with food transit.

But the main claims for beta glucan centre around its cholesterol-lowering benefits. The thick gel — like wallpaper paste — that it forms in the gut helps reduce the absorption of cholesterol as well as boosting the excretion of bile salts.

These salts are made of cholesterol, so the more bile salts your body gets rid of, the more cholesterol is used to make more bile salts, so in turn reducing the amount of cholesterol circulating in the blood.

Studies have found that eating 3g of beta glucan a day (around what you’d get in a 60g bowl of oats) can reduce your levels of harmful LDL cholesterol by around seven per cent. That’s similar to the results you you get from taking a statin. Yet unlike a statin it has no potential side-effects.