Oatmeal Kids (Of All Ages) Will Love

Oatmeal has gotten a bad rap.  Kids (and adults) may view it as a health food with all the flavor of drywall.  There are a lot of ways to get kids of all ages to wake up and WANT oatmeal for their breakfast of choice.

Of course, the health benefits are clear.  I’m 34, and while I don’t worry about this kind of stuff, my family history of very high cholesterol had me wondering about the claim Wilford Brimley made about Quaker oats removing cholesterol from your bloodstream.  So I decided to run a little self-experiment.  In one year, my cholesterol dropped from over 300 down to 164.  Call me a believer.

But what about that drywall?

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I found that oatmeal is one of the most versatile breakfasts you can imagine.  Because you’re cooking it (as opposed to dry cereal which you just add milk to), there are any number of things you can work into the pot.  My personal favorite combination is a scoop of peanut butter, a handful of raw, unprocessed cacao nibs, and some shredded coconut.  I have experimented with all of the following, and would heartily recommend them in just about any combination:

• Cacao nibs (raw, unprocessed chocolate).
• shredded coconut
• peanut butter
• raisins
• freshly ground flax seeds
• crumbled almonds and/or walnuts
• cinnamon
• nutmeg

Top with just about any kind of fruit and some yogurt, and you have yourself a meal made for a king, in under 10 minutes for the whole family (faster if you use ‘quick oats’).
Scott Cooney is the author of Build a Green Small Business:  Profitable Ways to Become an Ecopreneur (McGraw-Hill) and looks forward to his organic oatmeal every morning.

Twitter:  ScottCooney

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