Oats and porridge

Porridge feels like the obvious breakfast for a sore gut. Warm, soft, plain, no chewing required. It is also one of the most contested foods in the whole of this diet, and the reason is worth understanding.

The disagreement

The leaflet this book follows lists porridge among foods to avoid, as does the Leeds low-fibre sheet. St George's classes porridge as medium, to be treated with care rather than excluded. Milton Keynes, writing about a high-output stoma, lists oats among the starches that help thicken output.

None of those three is careless. They are answering different questions. Oats carry a fibrous husk that stays fibrous however finely the grain is rolled, which is the obstruction argument for keeping them out. Oats are also unusually rich in soluble fibre, which forms a gel, slows transit and firms loose stool, which is the argument for putting them in when the problem is output rather than blockage.

The same logic applies after a low anterior resection, where soluble fibre is often deliberately added back to reduce urgency, the opposite of what a narrowed bowel needs.

What this book does

Follows the leaflet. There are no oats in any recipe, no porridge, no oatcakes and no flapjacks. Where a recipe wants that texture it uses fine semolina, which is milled wheat with the bran removed, or pudding rice, or cornflakes. Semolina with stewed apple is the nearest thing to porridge here and is a genuinely good substitute rather than an apology.

What you should do

Ask, particularly if you have a high-output stoma or you are dealing with urgency after a low anterior resection, because those are the two situations where your team may actively want you to eat oats. If they do, that instruction outranks everything on this page. If your situation is a narrowed bowel or the weeks after surgery, expect the answer to be no, and use the semolina.