Meanwhile, a 14-year study from Harvard University, published in the medical journal JAMA in 2015, that looked at the health of 100,000 people found that those who ate the most wholegrains, such as porridge, seemed to be protected from many illnesses, including heart disease.
The researchers went so far as to say that regularly eating wholegrains could extend life expectancy. Dr Grimble agrees: ‘I think if everyone ate porridge we would certainly significantly cut rates of heart disease and possibly also bowel cancer.’
Despite its complex benefits, porridge is a simple food. The oats are made simply by stripping the outer husk of the oat grass, leaving the wholegrain oat. With so much going for it, it’s hard to see why porridge fell out of favour. The problem was people have struggled to find the time to stir away at the stove over bubbling oats. A properly cooked porridge can take around half an hour to make, says Jenny Stringer, deputy managing director of Leiths School of Food and Wine.
Yet speedy porridge — ready-to-eat pots and sachets — has helped transform that. Porridge is hip again, with cafes dedicated to the cereal; a Mintel survey from 2013 found that almost a fifth of British adults named porridge their favourite breakfast, with sales doubling since 2008.
It’s not just standard flavours that are popular — Pret a Manger’s ready-to-eat coconut porridge now accounts for one in five of its UK porridge sales. But are the newer takes on porridge as virtuous as you might think?
Certainly they are still essentially oats, although the instant porridge you get in sachet form are made by milling the oats more, so that they swell faster when mixed with fluid. And the catch with this, says Professor Peter Wilde, a food research scientist at Quadram Institute of Bioscience in Norwich, is that instant porridge is likely to have a higher glycaemic index (GI).
One of the advantages of traditional porridge oats is their low GI, meaning the energy is released slowly into the bloodstream, leading to a small release of insulin and avoiding spikes in blood sugar.
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