Do whole grains help prevent heart disease?
Wholegrain foods include a whole range of products such as wholegrain wheat, rice and oats. The term wholegrain includes milled wholegrain such as oatmeal and wholemeal wheat.
A recent systematic review (Link) showed that for wholegrain oats, but not other wholegrains, there is an improvement in blood lipids i.e. cholesterol. There is evidence that oatmeal can help to lower cholesterol levels such as low density lipoprotein - which is a bad type of cholesterol associated with coronary heart disease.
This works even in the short term when taking more oatmeal in a diet. We would expect that this would have beneficial outcome on heart disease although long-term data is not available yet. Essentially more research is needed to clarify this, but essentially eat up your porridge and oats in your muesli, as this is likely to be good for your health!