Is Oatmeal Healthy?

As long as you aren’t allergic to oats, oatmeal is healthy. It’s a grain. If you are adding sugar, yogurt or dairy milk to your oats, you’ve made it unhealthy.

People may be confusing oats with granola. Granola’s main ingredient is oats, but granola contains oil and sugar too. Granola is unhealthy and fattening, while plain oats are a low-fat healthy grain you can eat every day if you want.

The container of oats, shown below, from Vons supermarket states right on the canister that oats are “a low-fat part of your heart healthy diet,” which is true. A low-fat diet is good for your heart.

To be able to use the “heart healthy” symbol, the food needs to meet the U.S. government’s requirements for low fat, low saturated fat, and low cholesterol, which it does.

The foods high in saturated fats and contain cholesterol are dairy, fish, meat, poultry and eggs: those are the foods that are unhealthy and what you want to avoid, not oats.