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StumbleUponMore than 25 studies find that people who regularly eat whole grains reduce their risk of heart disease. In the Harvard Nurses' Health Study, which followed 80,000 women for more than 20 years, women who ate at least one serving of whole grain foods daily had about a one-third lower risk of heart disease than women who rarely ate whole grains. It's not just the soluble fiber in whole grains that provides benefit. Other plant nutrients, including tocotrienols (a form of vitamin E not found in most supplements), are also at work. Yet Americans average just one serving of whole grain foods a day. Ideally, however, you should get seven to eight servings a day. Here's how to get them:
Brave the brown. In one intriguing study, when a group of men swapped 220 calories of white rice for 220 calories of mostly whole grains, after 16 weeks their levels of homocysteine and oxidized LDL dropped nearly one-third. cutting their risk of heart disease significantly. Go brown by opting whenever possible for whole wheat bread instead of white, brown rice instead of white, and whole wheat pasta instead of regular. Stick with regular pasta and you're getting about the same amount of fiber as you'd get in chocolate or beer. Choose whole wheat pasta and triple the amount you get.
Be exotic. For a real fiber bang, explore shelves at your grocery store that you usually ignore. Those are the ones stocked with such "exotic" grains as amaranth, bulgur, whole wheat couscous, and wheatberries. Most are as simple to fix as rice, yet are packed with fiber and other nutrients. Mix in some steamed carrots and broccoli, toss with olive oil and a bit of Parmesan or feta cheese, maybe throw in a can of tuna or a couple of ounces of diced chicken, and you've got dinner.
Bargain on barley. Just a cup of cooked pearled barley (which doesn't require any soaking) contains nearly 10 grams of fiber. Mix it with a lamb-and-vegetable stew for dinner, sweeten it with raisins, eat it with sliced apples and cinnamon for breakfast, or serve it with chopped vegetables and an olive oil dressing for a lunch salad.
Opt for oats. There's a reason oat manufacturers are allowed to boast about the grain's cholesterol-lowering benefits. Oats are to cholesterol what a drought is to a pond. They contain a soluble fiber called beta glucan, which numerous studies find lowers cholesterol levels. In 1997 the FDA concluded that getting at least 3 grams a day of beta glucans from oats (about 11/2 cups of cooked oatmeal) reduced total cholesterol. Many people will see drops in LDL of 12 to 24 percent, depending on where they start. Choose quick-cooking or old-fashioned oats over instant oatmeal; it would take three packets of most instant oatmeal to get the obligatory 3 grams, and they're often loaded with sugar. Or try uncooked oatmeal in place of bread crumbs in meatloaf made with ground turkey, use it to make a crispy coating for oven-fried chicken, and mix it into baked goods (remember the oatmeal cookies of your youth?).
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