SOWING YOUR WILD OAT BRAN
By Harriet Posnak Lesser
Hold on to your clogged arteries, folks. Oat bran is back. Everybody’s once favorite grain could become the fat fighting fiber of 2015. At the end of the last century, health conscious consumers spent fortunes on oat bran cereals, breads, muffins, cookies and bagels. There were even plans for an oat bran toothpaste … “Give triglycerides the brush off”… and an oat bran shampoo …“Thinning is bad, but who wants fat hair?”
Scientists were also working on a wheat husk gasoline that roto-rootered your arteries while you inhaled fuel tank emissions. All that came to an end when studies showed that oat bran did not significantly lower cholesterol.
My old friends Harry and Chloe were typical of that time. They had oat bran with every meal and Chloe even bathed in it. I knew they had a problem when they invited me to Thanksgiving dinner. Chloe made canapes of oat bran, dyed black to look like caviar. There were real oats in the salad, which also included hay and alfalfa and was served in adorable little feed bags that we attached to our ears. (So much for nutritional neigh sayers.)
The main course was accompanied by mashed oat bran with margarine and oat bran glazed, stir fried and/or amandine. For dessert we had homemade apple pie with an oat bran crust. The evening ended with a parlor game. We took blood samples from each other and tested our cholesterol levels. The person with the lowest LDL was declared the winner.
That was the last time I saw Harry and Chloe. They left town when the oat bran fad fell into disfavor. I heard that they did a complete turnaround and switched to the Atkins diet. I received a letter several years back saying they’d bought a chain of gyms and were living off the fat of the land.
What will happen to the economy now if the Harrys and Chloes of America revert to their old nutritional and buying habits? The commodities market will suffer. Pork bellies will deflate. Soy, wheat and corn will go against the grain of international investors. We could be facing another great depression. It’s up to Washington to find an answer fast. Time to forget about politics and hire a think tank to deal with this pressing problem. (I’d recommend a fish tank, but evidence suggests that cod liver oil may not reduce the risk of heart attack.)
Or we can hope that some nutritionist, somewhere, will prove that chocolate, whipped cream, ice cream, mashed potatoes with real butter and other foods high in cholesterol are actually good for you. Do I think that will ever happen? Naaah. Fat chance.
copyright 2015 Harriet Posnak Lesser
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Harriet Posnak Lesser is an award-winning journalist and social satirist whose articles have appeared in Long Island’s The South Shore Record and Nassau Herald, The New York Times, Cracked Magazine and others.