Do you have questions about nutrition? Send them to us at comer@lavanguardia.es, our nutritionist Aitor Sánchez will answer all your questions.
Hello. My question is if the oats lose their fiber when blended. (Rebeca Iraira, reader)
Oats will only lose fiber after grinding when they are filtered. For example, oat-based vegetable drinks have removed most of the fiber because after grinding the soaked oats, it is filtered to remove all those solids in suspension and thus leaving a much more homogeneous liquid without floating solids.
If you want to do this process at home, it can be done without filtering, simply by grinding the oats in a food processor or with a blender.
My recommendation is that if you do this, it is especially to use these oats for some homemade baking recipe, or to make a smoothie in any case. In those examples it doesn't look bad that it has all those solids in suspension.
It must also be taken into account that oats are a cereal that has a lot of soluble fiber, which we can perceive when we soak them and they swell, greatly increasing their volume, as for example in oat porridge. This is due to the beta-glucans in this cereal, a very interesting nutrient that is associated with good cardiovascular health results.
Hello, Aitor. What sausages can I eat more frequently? (Juan González, reader)
All sausages are foods to be restricted in our diet, but as can be clearly deduced from your question, not all of them are equally harmful.
In this entire family, those that are most harmful are those that contain a low percentage of meat and largely replace the product with starches, starches, sugars, connective tissue... Examples of this less interesting range would be sausages, mortadella, cold cuts...
At a slightly less harmful level we would find traditional sausages in which the amount of meat is reduced by mixing it with the animal's fat, as would happen in the case of salchichón, fuet, chorizo...
Among the sausages that include the minimum amount of harmful elements, we could highlight two with their own names: Serrano ham and sausage loin. In these cases the products have received nitric salts and a drying process. Nitric salts continue to be a risk factor for colorectal cancer, and they also contain excess salt. For this reason, and despite being the least harmful sausages, which was the reason for your question, we should not eat them too frequently or in high quantities either.
In addition to these generic classifications that I provide you, within the world of sausages and charcuterie I would also like to highlight that the preparation method can turn this category into a much more harmful one. For example, when nitrates are heated to high temperatures in the presence of a protein food such as meat, a compound known as nitrosamines is generated, which is especially linked to cancer processes. For this reason, preparing sausages on the grill, in the oven or on the grill makes them even more harmful.
Here we would also have to include other processed meats that include another additional step such as smoking. The example of fried bacon marks it out as a particularly harmful meat.
