The Real Foodie

I was excited to buy these whole oat groats with the intention to sprout them to neutralize some of the phytic acid. I assumed that if they were whole and from a good small farm brand like Shiloh Farms they must not be heat treated, after having learned that most commercial oats are heat treated to preserve shelf life and therefore will not sprout. I was wrong! I called the company to ask and they were in fact heat treated. I did more research on phytates in grains and discovered that rolled oats are the lowest in phytates because rolling removes part of the bran which has the highest amount of phytic acid.

The subject of phytates is complicated and I am still not sure how healthy it is to eat any grains at all, so I only eat them on occasion. It is also very time consuming to soak the grains overnight or longer, or to sprout them and not worth it if only part of the phytic acid gets removed. For now I will stick to the sprouted oats I’ve been using by Living Nature, which I like because I can decide in the morning if I want to have oatmeal instead of having to plan a day in advance. I also don’t like the sour taste that soaking in water with yoghurt gives the oats. I used to boil my previously soaked oats in water and then add butter but it is much tastier to boil the sprouted ones in whole, grass-fed, pasteurized, unhomogenized milk, which is one of the rare exceptions when I use pasteurized milk, as the enzymes already get destroyed through the cooking process.