There are so many great first-meal options! I still like oatmeal, but sometimes it's sprouted grains and legumes with whatever veg from the local farm that no one else is going to eat, and beets. I make most of the family meals and because I'm recovering from GERD also I make my own different lower-impact meals (without garlic, onions, tomatoes, citrus, coffee, chocolate, or alcohol), usually in the microwave on lower power for longer (cubed beets cook well this way: 8-10min at 30% power in a 1100W microwave), otherwise too much water leaves as steam. I'll add nutritional yeast and homemade kimchi for taste, or the yeast and some soy sauce in the evening (the last batch of kimchi has some garlic in it, and I'll risk eating small amounts earlier in the day).
Hydration: I've noticed that I'm not so thirsty anymore, eating meals with so much vegetable matter, possibly because there's a lot of water in amongst the fiber and it gets freed up during digestion?
As someone with chronic GERD, I am really interested to know your recipes, how many meals you take and your food preparation technique. Are these any cooking websites/channels you would recommend?
In my university years, I used to eat whatever was cheap and available easy, the result was my GERD symptoms were so bad most nights I couldn’t get full night sleep. Over time I noticed some common triggers. Black pepper, garlic, raw tomato (weirdly cooked tomatoes don’t trigger as much symptoms), any citrus fruits, carbonated drinks to name a few. Mostly it was learning by suffering. I make conscious efforts now to avoid food with these triggers and manage the symptoms quite a bit when I am not traveling. But some nights still end up waking up with intense upper esophageal pain. Honestly over the years the sad truth I have now realized is fasting is sometimes better than consuming types of things now a day that we call food.
I hear you- it really sucks when I eat too much/too late in the day/the wrong thing and also am too tired to stay awake and digest. Sometimes I have fallen asleep in a comfortable chair as a workaround, and I've started using antacid tablets now and then but they're uncomfortable and I don't want to rely on them. I used omeprazole for a cumulative month while I rehabituated to eating smaller, more frequent meals and stopping around 4pm.
I don't have any GERD-specific resources to suggest, as I have a solid foundation from childhood of eating minimally-processed food from the garden and local farmers. To cook for my family I use the NYT Cooking app because it's easy, and cookbooks from the library. Ayurvedic cookbooks, Instant Pot cookbooks, anti-inflammation cookbooks; all have some good options.
I absolutely love eating, not just in the moment but how I feel after a good meal. When I'm stressed, however, I tend to eat easy foods that are less healthy; feels good in the moment, but not so great afterwards, kinda like Rand al'Thor (in Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time) might feel reaching through that oil-slick taint (a difficult word to use with a straight face here...) to access the Source. So, I work to take care of myself in general so that the gestalt is positive; better action begets better actions. It doesn't always work, and when it's a downward spiral the best I can do is forgive myself, not let my failures get in the way, and keep at it. Good luck!
There's foods that trigger GERD for me, and I used to roll around the floor every night in agony, not knowing quite what was going on, as it was my norm.
To fix late night issues, I just have to eat before 6pm.
Chew properly. Soups kill me. And anything tomato sauced based is out.
Also weirdly oatmeal can trigger issues for me. But I can get away with it in the morning. I think it's also a chewing issue.
A huge amount of digestion happens in the mouth. So now I get my partner to pre-chew most of my foods for me.
It was a joke, of course I don't get my partner to chew my foods for me. The blending is not so much the issue. It's the saliva being an important part of the digestive process that counts. Blended soups can upset my gut, probably as I don't chew.
"Hydration: I've noticed that I'm not so thirsty anymore, eating meals with so much vegetable matter, possibly because there's a lot of water in amongst the fiber and it gets freed up during digestion? "
That's one reason. The other reason is, that the more sugar you eat, the more water you need.
I'm getting better at not eating "just because" or based on what time of day it is or that I won't be able to eat for a few hours (trying out fasting a few times helped me be okay with going without- I'm not going to die that easily. Probably has roots in a stressful childhood where eating was an escape from family strife). Sugary foods are so easy to eat and a difficult treadmill to dismount. So far it's like a local maximum that's still too easy to roll off of but it feels so good up there when it all comes together.
Fasting is the most easy for me, when I am busy (preferable in nature on a hike). But when I am at home, surrounded by all kinds of food and kind of bored - then yeah, it can be hard.
There's instant oatmeal. The kind that comes in packets and you just add water. Often has sugar added, often slathered with sugar. Possibly worse than a bowl of corn flakes. Highly processes with most of the starches and cellulose (fibre) reduced to simpler forms and readily and rapidly converted to glucose in the gut. High GI. Almost like candy.
There's quick-cooking AKA minute oatmeal. Gelatinizes in 3 minutes on the stove or the microwave. Still processed so the starches are easily digestible (that was the point when it was invented). Slightly better than instant oatmeal and corn flakes but still mid-level GI and GL.
Finally, there's oat meal. Steel-cut oats are just the seeds of the oat plant lightly crushed into large pieces. Not pre-cooked. Most palatable when cooked overnight. Very high in non-digestible fibre, mostly still complex starches that take considerable time to convert into glucose in your digestive system. Low GI.
It's oat meal that is most associated with glucose and blood pressure control, not so much oatmeal. Rule of thumb: the longer it takes to prepare, the more it takes to digest and the better it is for you if you're concerned about a healthy diet.
But the point is that oatmeal is not oatmeal, and discussing it as if it is is always going to be misleading.
I'm a type 1 diabetic and get to monitor my blood sugar level, and there's just not much difference in between these oatmeal styles when it comes to digesting the carbs.
My point was I've eaten cereal most of my life, in the form of rolled oats or steel-cut oats (and now increasingly using oat groats), not the sweetened stuff that comes in little packets, and recently been happy to branch out, inspired in part by memories of breakfast in Japan.
Maybe it's a regional thing, but "breakfast cereal" is exclusive of "oatmeal" where I'm from (despite oats being a cereal grain). Breakfast cereal is crunchy and served cold, neither of which applies to oatmeal (even overnight oats are cold but not crunchy).
Overnight oats / bircher muesli is served cold and requires no cooking. The time aspect is to give the oats time to absorb the liquid - cold oats swimming in freshly poured milk isn't the most appetising way to eat oats.
Of course you can "speed up" the process by blending them into a smoothie.
You can (overnight oats), but it's still not crunchy.
If you toast the oats first to make them crunchy, it's no longer the dish called "oatmeal" (which is a porridge) but now it's a kind of granola, which can be used as a breakfast cereal.
It contains protein and is low sugar (unless you cover it in honey and fruit everyday, but even then, at least you’d be getting some actual nutritional value)
Here are the UK figures for Cheerios multigrain and Quakers rolled oats. Cheerios have 17x the sugar. I think they used to be worse in the past before UK sugar regulations led to lots of changes to breakfast cereals.
I use 100g because they have different servings amounts. In the UK, the serving size is just 30g not 39g.
I would note that reducing such foods to tables can miss the point. They make me feel very different to eat. One is a very moreish sugary frankenfood that makes me lose control of my appetite. I can eat it by the box. The other is something that makes me feel good but if I make too much, I'm done and can't finish it. Eating an excess is physically hard.
I haven't seen a sugar-free variety in UK supermarkets. Standard Cheerios have always been sweet. I would call the "sweet" varieties things like Honeynut which have 22.4g of sugar per 100g.
The "low sugar Vanilla O's" sound ridiculous but contain comparable sugar to base Cheerios.† Presumably they have more vanilla flavoring.
† Which is to say, there's still a bit of added sugar, but not much, just like in the base Cheerios. (The rolled oats have no added sugar. The difference between "1g" of sugar in 40g of American rolled oats and "1.1g" in 100g of British rolled oats must be down to either different oats or rounding errors.)
I feel like the constant addition of relatively small amounts of sugar to random foods that aren't even supposed to be sweet might be a bigger issue than the inclusion of big heaps of sugar in foods that are supposed to be sweet. It's difficult to find beef jerky that is less than 10% sugar by weight. Rice Krispies are also 10% sugar by weight. There's no good reason for this.
If you ask for Cheerios in the UK, this is what you get. If you get an own-brand Cheerio knock off called "Hello Loops" or something, they will have also the same level of sugar.
Might explain some of the confusion in this thread.
Cereals are typically more processed than oatmeal (especially when we talk about uncut oat meal). If we talk about instant oatmeal vs cereal, then I don't know it matters a lot, sure.
0g sugar per 60g serving size. Do I now conclude that you were trying to fool me into thinking oatmeal contains less sugar than cereal when in fact it contains much more?
No, that's nonsense, oatmeal is a kind of cereal. The amount of sugar in it isn't even related to whether it's oatmeal.
Oatmeal (if unsweetened/unflavored) has about the same GI as orange juice or cake made from some Betty Crocker boxed cake mixes and is just slightly lower-GI than the American formulation of Coca-Cola (see #333 Oatmeal (Canada), GI value of 54 ± 4 in the table at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652...).
I think oatmeal and other high-GI foods are promoted as low-GI in hopes of helping wean diabetics and pre-diabetics off of even worse foods (e.g. something really bad like powdered donuts), akin to how methadone is used to try to help heroin addicts. But genuine low-GI foods would be things like eggs, cheese, or chicken breast (all with nearly 0 GI) or some raw veggies like raw broccoli or the greens in a leafy salad (in the neighborhood, roughly, of 10-20 GI). Cooking low-GI vegetables like broccoli defeats the purpose and raises its GI to around the same value as oatmeal.
I wrote oats, not oatmeal (I don't think we really use that term in the UK). AIUI "Oatmeal" can refer to various things, including high GI porridge.
I only buy steel-cut oats, which various sources on google say are around 42 GI [0][1]. I do concede that any form of oats are on the upper-end of low and/or medium, and aren't some magic super food and one should not focus just on GI.
Steel cut oats are definitely better than most breakfast cereals however.
Joel Fuhrman in his book on reversing diabates also recommends small portions of oats (but mostly says to eat veggies).
It's literally a "cereal grain". It's found alongside the sugar pops, bran flakes, and cheertios on grocery aisles.
YOU might not think it's an alternative, but it very much is a cereal.
Hydration: I've noticed that I'm not so thirsty anymore, eating meals with so much vegetable matter, possibly because there's a lot of water in amongst the fiber and it gets freed up during digestion?