The benefits of eating a humble bowl of porridge – plus the healthiest types and toppings, and the ones to avoid. When it comes to traditional British breakfasts, you can’t beat a comforting bowl of steaming porridge oats . But unlike the much maligned fry-up or artery-clogging black pudding, porridge manages to pass muster with both finger-wagging dietitians and chefs alike.
Nigella likes hers cooked with butter – “so much for oats being good for cholesterol” – and liberally sprinkled with sugar. Though if you really want to polish up that health halo, a dusting of cinnamon and dollop of nut butter is just as tasty. While sugar-laden modern breakfast cereals have long been banished to the naughty step, the humble bowl of porridge remains in the nutritional good books, by dint of its simplicity.
Being made with just oats and water or milk, or, if you really want to go to town, a dollop of cream, it has been a dietary staple for millennia. The first traces are thought to date back to a cave in Italy 33,000 years ago but it remains one of the most commonly eaten breakfasts in the country. So is it something we should be eating more of to improve our health?.
