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Pandemic life comes with a lot of things to deal with that we’ve never had to think about before. One of those things is “maskne,” or acne around the mouth and nose caused by wearing masks for prolonged periods of time.

Before we get into the causes and solutions, let me point out that this article is here to offer possible solutions for people who are dealing with mask-related acne. I won’t be addressing whether masks are warranted or recommended or any of that – you’d be better off discussing that with a virologist or immunologist. Not me. This article is for people who have to wear or choose to wear masks, and want to address skin irritation that may have cropped up because of them. 

So let’s get to it. Let’s try to figure out some solutions to this new and growing problem.

First of all, what is maskne?

The technical term for maskne is acne mechanica — clogged pores and pimples caused by friction and rubbing. Before this past year, most acne mechanica was caused by wearing sports equipment, bras, goggles, belts, and other things worn tight against the skin. All that changed with the pandemic. Never before in the history of the world had normal people been asked to affix masks over their nose and mouth for the majority of the day. Not only that, but often the same mask that you hastily dug out of your pockets, still greasy from the last time you wore it.

The big problem with tackling maskne is that it’s a new kind of acne mechanica (before mask-wearing became widespread, most cases were on other areas of the body) and the only research specifically geared toward it is observational. There are no controlled trials. There is just a flood of anecdotes that clinicians and researchers are wading through.

What can you do about it?

Try different masks.

Maskne is more than the friction. It can also be an immune reaction to the mask material. It’s also the lack of oxygen, the lack of air flow, the moisture build-up, the bacterial load accumulating. Different masks have different issues.

N95 masks are tight against the face and restrict air flow (by design). Things get hot and humid in there, and where the actual mask makes contact with your skin, the pressure is great enough to leave welts or bruises and stimulate true acne mechanica.

Disposable surgical masks aren’t as tight, but they’re tight and impermeable enough to create issues.

Cloth masks let air flow, for better or worse, but they also accumulate a lot of grease, grime, and bacteria.

Silk masks are also much easier on the skin, but their ability to filter viral particles is questionable at best.

Point being: all masks are potentially an issue. Try different types made from different material to figure out the issue.

Take frequent mask breaks.

Sometimes you have to wear the mask. Sometimes there’s just no getting around it, whether because of safety indoors or rules you must follow. If that’s the case, do your best to take breaks as often as possible. The American Academy of Dermatology Association recommends a 15 minute break every 4 hours, which is woefully inadequate in my opinion. Better is as often as you can.

Maybe it means pulling the mask down when there’s no one around or stepping outside to take an extended mask-free break.

Handle the basics.

Acne is ultimately an inflammatory condition. While mechanical maskne isn’t quite the same as hormonal or “internal” acne, it’s a safe bet to assume that you should at least shore up all the things that have shown to affect the latter.

Eat plenty of zinc (red meat, oysters, organ meats).

Get enough omega-3s: EPA (a long chain omega 3 found in marine foods) is usually lower in people with acne.¹ Eat fish or take fish oil.

Control your insulin: Since insulin can stimulate IGF-1 production, which in turn increases sebum production in the skin, chronically high insulin levels can cause clogged pores. Recent studies done during the COVID pandemic have found that acne and other inflammatory skin conditions are worse in patients with insulin resistance.² Funny how insulin keeps popping up, eh?

Try a mask bracket.

A mask bracket is a small accessory worn on the inside of your mask that creates airspace between your skin and the cloth. It may be just what you need to reduce friction and help with airflow near your mouth and chin, where mask-related breakouts are likely to occur.

Take sun breaks, take vitamin D.

A traditional treatment for acne was UV therapy, which was discontinued after dermatologists determined it to be “more harm than it was worth.” That’s nonsense, of course, as long as you’re getting natural “UV therapy” by actually being out in the sun. Furthermore, vitamin D plays an integral role in skin inflammation, so if it’s your only option taking supplements will help.

But actual midday sunlight on your face and body is ideal and will almost certainly improve maskne.

Remember: being cooped up inside has been terrible for our collective vitamin D levels. Is it truly just a maskne epidemic, or is it a sun deficiency epidemic?

Change and launder your masks.

If you have to wear a mask for a prolonged period of time, change to a clean mask part-way through the day. Remember to wash your cloth masks as often as you would wash your clothes, instead of storing it in the cupholder of your car between uses. And use fragrance-free, eco-friendly detergents to avoid irritation that’s caused by cleaning agents and scents.

Avoid or limit harsh facial products.

Alcoholic aftershaves, chemical peels, acne treatments that dry the hell out of your skin, exfoliants, salicylic acid—these products are made with the mask-less face in mind. They likely weren’t tested on people wearing a tight-fitting, nearly-airtight mask for half the day. It’s a whole new world out there.

Avocado oil with tea tree oil.

Blend a couple tablespoons of avocado oil and two tablespoons of MCT oil with some tea tree oil. Start low with the tea tree oil and slowly titrate up to confirm your skin can handle it. The avocado oil is good for your skin (and can even speed up the healing process), the MCT oil is anti-fungal and anti-bacterial, and the tea tree oil is effective against the acne-causing bacteria (even compared to pharmaceuticals)³. Don’t slather it on, though. You don’t want to get oily. A few drops rubbed into your face before and after mask-wearing will do the trick.

Put bacteria on your face.

Not all bacteria are bad. Just like our guts, mouths, and even nasal cavities have microbiomes, our skin has a microbiome—a colony of beneficial bacteria serving a vital role. As a recent letter to the editor regarding COVID-related maskne suggested, maskne-prone skin probably has a dysfunctional or unbalanced microbiome, and regular acne-prone skin definitely has lower levels of ammonia-degrading bacteria.⁴ Enter Mother Dirt, the probiotic skin spray that colonizes your skin with the ammonia-degrading bacteria that acne-prone skin is missing. Ammonia-degrading bacteria can modulate the skin’s immune environment, potentially nullifying the formation of acne.

Mother Dirt hasn’t been formally studied in the treatment of maskne, but it’s worth trying. Can’t see it hurting.

Nasal breathing (or mouthwash).

One ancedotal fix for maskne I’ve seen around the Internet is using mouthwash before donning your mask. Reason being, this kills the bacteria in your mouth and prevents you from contaminating the inside of your mask with it through constant mouth-breathing. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not.

Instead of mouthwash, why not try exclusive nasal breathing? It’s healthier, anyway, and it may even improve your ability to fight off potential COVID viral particles.⁵ And you won’t be breathing out oral bacteria all day long.

(Mouthwash might be worth a shot, too)

Chew gum.

If the “breathing bacteria into your mask” hypothesis is true, then chewing gum while wearing a mask should also improve maskne by promoting nasal breathing and reducing pathogenic bacteria in the mouth.

Xylitol gum will help reduce bacteria.

Don’t wear makeup under your mask.

Makeup is designed to be worn in open air. You know, where it can be seen. Wearing a mask over makeup just pushes it deep into the pores, promoting clogs and the formation of acne.

What’s the point, anyway, if no one can see it?

Only wear the mask when necessary.

I may get guff for this, but here goes: I have not seen much evidence that suggests that going mask-less outdoors in an open space is particularly risky. If you have evidence to the contrary, feel free to leave a link to the medical literature in the comments. Sure, if you’re shoulder to shoulder in a crowd, wear a mask. Sure, if you’re face to face with someone whose immunological status you can’t confirm for a long conversation, wear a mask. If you’re in an area where mask-wearing is mandatory outside, like a zoo or theme park, follow the guidelines. But in the vast majority of outdoor situations, going mask-less is fine. Hiking? Don’t need it. Briefly passing by someone on the sidewalk? Don’t need it. A study out of Italy (one of the areas hardest hit by COVID) found that “outdoor air in residential and urban environments was generally not infectious and safe for the public.”⁶

If you must wear the mask outdoors on pain of death or imminent prosecution, wear the mask. If it’s a matter of showing respect and making people feel safe, I get that. But as far as infection risk, from what I gather it is very low.

But this has to be the first line of defense because the mask is the proximate cause of the acne. Limit the mask-wearing only to when you must wear it and you will limit the amount of friction and irritation applied to your face.

What about dedicated acne products?

I’m sure there are other products out there. A quick search of Youtube produces hundreds of beauty anecdotes from people who used baby shampoo or dandruff shampoo or a pharmaceutical formulation to fix their acne, but there’s no way to vet those. Taking more “natural” steps and replacing the lost bacteria that protects against other kinds of acne seems like the most evolutionarily-congruent path.

Look: you could go to a dermatologist (in your mask) and come home with a sack of pharmaceuticals. Maybe that would work. Maybe that’s a last resort. But I’d highly recommend that you do the best to attack the problem at its fundamental core.

I’d love to hear from you folks. What’s worked against maskne? What hasn’t? What’s made it worse?

Take care, everyone. Be safe out there.

References

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28025036/
2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32969629/
3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31012999/
4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29594974/
5. https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1513/pats.201007-050RN
6. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412020322108

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When you first start following a keto diet, overthinking is pretty much part of the package. For better or worse, keto newbies spend a lot of time learning what they can and can’t eat, meticulously weighing and measuring food, and tracking everything that goes in their mouths.

Weighing, tracking, and restricting become understandably tedious after a while. I do know some people who are happy to maintain this level of dietary vigilance for months or even years, but most people fizzle out. Those who don’t want to return to a more relaxed way of eating like Primal look for a compromise position—a keto diet without all the fuss.

This raises the question: is monitoring and careful control of your food intake simply part and parcel of keto, or is it possible to follow a keto diet intuitively?

What Does Intuitive Keto Even Mean?

There’s an apparent contradiction between eating intuitively and keto dieting. Eating intuitively means listening to your body, honoring the signals it sends you, and not controlling or restricting your food intake based on external rules. Keto diets come with an inherent set of rules and restrictions.

At the very least, keto diets have to be low-carb by definition. In practice, this means there are many high-carb foods that you can’t eat in any appreciable amount. Even a small serving could interfere with ketosis. Many folks also set parameters around their keto diets, like they have to be gluten-free or sugar-free. As I have explained previously, that’s not technically true, but those are common values in the keto community.

If your inner voice urges you to eat a couple candy bars, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread, or even a large bowl of mango, you can’t comply and still be ketogenic. You can’t listen to your intuition. Thus, if such a thing as an intuitive keto exists, it has to involve some sort of compromise.

That said, I believe when people say “intuitive keto diet,” they mean keto without all the fuss and micromanaging. That is possible. Lots of people do it by:

• Eating mostly animal products, vegetables, nuts and seeds, and fats (all low-carb foods)
• Eating when they are hungry, not rigidly adhering to a set eating window
• Allowing hunger to guide how much and how often they eat in any given day
• Not tracking macros

That’s how I would define an intuitive keto diet, anyway, and the definition I’ll use for the rest of this post. One could argue, though, that that’s neither keto nor intuitive, not really.

Eating Intuitively Versus Intuitive Eating

It’s impossible to talk about intuitive keto without clarifying the difference between eating intuitively and Intuitive Eating (with a capital I-E for clarity). The former is loosely defined as eating according to your body’s hunger cues and desires for different foods. The latter is a specific eating philosophy developed in the mid-1990s by two registered dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, that is still popular today.

Any kind of purposeful keto diet, no matter how relaxed, is antithetical to an Intuitive Eating approach. Intuitive Eating specifically rejects dieting, particularly that which focuses on dieting for intentional weight loss. Moreover, one of Intuitive Eating’s core principles is giving yourself unconditional permission to eat any foods in any amount your body wants.

Theoretically, someone could practice Intuitive Eating and naturally arrive at a keto diet over time if their body feels best eating low-carb foods. However, it’s impossible to be Intuitive-with-a-capital-I if you start with keto macros. So it’s crystal clear, any version of intuitive keto I discuss here is entirely separate from an Intuitive Eating approach.

Does Intuitive Keto Work?

It depends on your goals. Intuitive keto can work for people who want to follow a low-carb diet, don’t want to overthink it, and don’t necessarily care about being in ketosis all the time.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible to stay in ketosis and eat intuitively. You could very well stay in ketosis without monitoring your macros if you eat mostly animal products and low-carb veggies. However, if you include a greater variety of vegetables, fruits, and nuts, plus maybe some dark chocolate and wine, you’ll have to be ok with living in what Mark calls the “keto zone”—moving fluidly in and out of ketosis depending on your daily carb intake, meal timing, and exercise.

Can You Lose Weight on an Intuitive Keto Diet?

Maybe. If you naturally eat in an energy deficit without tracking your food, then yes.

Realistically, though, weight loss isn’t the best use case for intuitive eating. With intuitive eating, the goal is to let your body be in charge. Intentional weight-loss efforts usually involve overriding your body’s cues and eating set amounts instead of eating according to hunger. You can simultaneously work on eating more intuitively and also hope to lose weight, but trying to lose weight with intuitive eating is paradoxical.

Side note: I’ve also known people who consistently undereat on keto because they simply aren’t hungry. That’s not good either. Intuitive keto also wouldn’t be ideal for these folks. They’re better off at least loosely tracking food intake and making sure to eat enough.

Can You Eat Intuitively and Get the Cognitive Benefits of Keto?

Again, maybe.

Some people enjoy noticeable boosts in focus and mental clarity on a keto diet. Those benefits depend on being in ketosis, and they might only be noticeable above a certain ketone level (which differs from person to person). If you want to guarantee ketosis, you’ll either have to track your carb intake or strictly limit yourself to very low-carb foods.

A possible workaround is eating a more relaxed, intuitive keto diet but supplementing with MCT oil or exogenous ketones.

Can You Eat Intuitively and Still Be Fat-Adapted?

Yes. Ketosis isn’t a prerequisite of being fat-adapted. A low-ish-carb Primal diet is all it takes to become a fat-burning beast. There’s no need for diligent macro tracking or keto-level carb restriction.

Pros and Cons of Intuitive Keto Compared to Typical Ketogenic Diets

Pros:

• No food tracking means intuitive keto is less time consuming
• Eating more mindfully can help you reconnect with your internal wisdom around food and learn to trust your body’s signals
• “Dieting” isn’t for everyone, especially people who have struggled with unhealthy eating behaviors in the past
• Thinking less about food frees up mental space for other activities and interests

Cons

• May move in and out of ketosis if carb intake doesn’t stay low enough
• Doesn’t allow you to control food intake or manipulate macros, which may be desirable for weight loss, certain health conditions, or self-experimentation (as my friends Tyler Cartwright and Luis Villasenor from KetoGains say, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”)

How to Eat an Intuitive Keto Diet

Even if intuitive keto is your ultimate goal, I’d suggest starting with the Keto Reset approach: Start by eating Primally. Decrease carb intake gradually and intentionally until you are consuming less than 50 grams of carbs per day. Then, spend at least three weeks monitoring what you eat, ensuring that you stay below this threshold. This gives you some time to become keto-adapted.

During this time, pay attention to what you’re eating. Note which foods in your repertoire have the most and fewest carbs and which are the most satisfying. Practice eating more mindfully.

Once you have a good handle on what a typical day of ketogenic eating looks like, you can start to loosen up on the food tracking. See how you feel and whether you’re still making progress toward your goals, whatever they might be.

As a compromise position, you could consider a period of lazy keto. Ignore how derisive the term is; lazy keto simply means that you only track carb intake. Otherwise, you let food intake vary from day to day based on hunger and what sounds good. It’s not truly intuitive since you’re enforcing a carb limit still, but it’s more relaxed than a keto diet where you adhere to set macros (carbs, fat, and protein).

Is Intuitive Keto an Oxymoron?

Having said all this, one could argue that intuitive keto is an oxymoron. On one side, strict keto dieters might say that your diet isn’t really ketogenic if you aren’t making sure to keep your carbs down. On the other, intuitive eating proponents will probably point out that there’s nothing intuitive about any way of eating that starts with enforced carb restriction. There’s certainly no such thing as intuitive keto in the way Tribole and Resch use the word intuitive.

This is both a semantic and a philosophical argument. If you eat only certain foods or food groups, but you eat as much of them as you want whenever you want, is that still eating intuitively? I can’t answer that definitively. (By the same token, could someone ever eat an intuitive carnivore or an intuitive vegetarian diet?)

Although keto purists might disagree, I do think it’s possible to eat a more chilled-out version of keto that:

• Doesn’t involve meticulously weighing and tracking your food
• Doesn’t restrict calories or overall food intake, but allows you to listen to your body’s hunger cues and respond accordingly
• Makes room for occasional excursions into higher-carb eating if constant ketosis isn’t important to you (there aren’t any keto police to confiscate your keto card)

Ultimately, intuitive keto probably isn’t the best term for it since both words already come with strong connotations. Flexible low-carb that doesn’t involve micromanaging but still gets the job done is too wordy. We’ll stick with “keto zone” around here for now, but I’m open to suggestions for what to call this. Let me know in the comments.

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Does original thought exist? Have we covered everything, or are there thinkers out there who aren’t in the box? I know my friend David Weck down in San Diego is changing the game when it comes to running, but when we get down to the nitty-gritty of strength training, we all regurgitate the same things while adding our particular flare?

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A lot of foods exist on a spectrum of suitability, from “really bad” wheat to “not so terrible” rice. Well, what about the rest of them? Since I get a lot of email asking whether oats and oatmeal are good for you, I figured I would dig into that question for this post.

Though I was (and still mostly am) content to toss grains on the “do not eat” pile, I think we’re better served by more nuanced positions regarding grains. Not everyone can avoid all grains at all times, and not everyone wants to avoid all grains at all times. For those situations, it makes sense to have a game plan, a way to “rank” foods.

Today, we’ll go over the various forms of oats and oatmeal, along with any potential nutritional upsides or downsides.

First: What Is an Oat?

The common oat is a cereal grain, the seed of a species of grass called Avena sativa. Its ancient ancestor, Avena sterilis, was native to the Fertile Crescent in the Near East, but domesticated oats do best in cool, moist climates like regions of Europe and the United States. They first appeared in Swiss caves dated to the Bronze Age, and they remain a staple food crop in Scotland.

Forms of Oats

There are seven forms of oats that are typically available for purchase:

• Whole Oat Groats. The “whole grain” form of an oat is called a groat and is rarely sold as-is, except maybe as horse feed or in bird seed mixes. Instead, they’re sold either as steel-cut, rolled, or instant oats.
• Scottish Oats. These are stone ground, which are thought to make a creamier oatmeal than steel cut.
• Steel Cut, or Irish Oats. Steel cut oats are, as the name suggests, cut into a few pieces per grain with a steel blade. These retain the most nutrients (and antinutrients like phytic acid) and taste nuttier and chewier than old-fashioned oats, quick oats, or instant oats.
• Old-fashioned Oats, or Rolled Oats. Rolled oats are steamed and then rolled into flat flakes.
• Quick Oats. Quick oats are rolled thinner than old-fashioned oats for quicker cooking.
• Instant Oats. Instant oats are rolled even thinner than quick oats, so they can be cooked with only hot water.
• Oat flour. Oat flour starts with the whole oat groat and is ground into a fine powder.

Why Some People Avoid Oats

The main problems with oats are the phytic acid, which has the tendency to bind minerals and prevent their absorption. (Ingestion is not absorption, remember.) Another concern is the avenin content, which is a protein in the prolamine family (along with gluten from wheat, rye, and barley, and zein, from corn). As far as phytic acid (or phytate) goes, oats contain less than corn and brown rice but about the same amount as wheat.

Recipe to try: Noatmeal with Blueberries and Collagen

How to Reduce Antinutrients in Oats

Some say soaking is sufficient for removing a portion of the antinutrients in oats. Others say you need lactic acid fermentation to neutralize the antinutrients.

Soaking

Soaking involves soaking the oats overnight in water with a tablespoon or so of acid, either from lemon juice or from apple cider vinegar.

Lactic Acid Fermentation

As I understand it, you can further reduce antinutrients by lactic acid fermentation. I’m not sure the degree to which phytate can be deactivated, but one study does show that consuming oats that underwent lactic fermentation resulted in increased iron absorption.

Other sources claim that simple soaking isn’t enough, since oats contain no phytase, which breaks down phytate. Instead, you’d have to incorporate a phytase-containing flour to do the work; a couple tablespoons of buckwheat appear to be an effective choice for that. Combining both lactic acid bacteria (whey, kefir, or yogurt), companion flour (buckwheat), water, and a warm room should take care of most of the phytate… but that’s a lot of work!

Avenin in Oats

Avenin appears to have some of the same problems as gluten in certain sensitive individuals, although it doesn’t appear as if the problem is widespread or as serious. Kids with celiac disease produced oat avenin antibodies at a higher rate than kids without celiac, but neither group was on a gluten-free diet. When you put celiacs on a gluten-free diet, they don’t appear to show higher levels of avenin antibodies.

It looks like once you remove gluten, other, potentially damaging proteins become far less dangerous. One study did find that some celiacs “failed” an oats challenge. Celiac patients ate certified gluten-free oats, and several showed signs of intestinal permeability, with one patient suffering all-out villous atrophy, or breakdown of the intestinal villi. A few out of nineteen patients doesn’t sound too bad, but it shows that there’s a potential for cross-reactivity.

Do Oats Contain Gluten?

Oats are often cross-contaminated with gluten because they often grow close to one another in the fields, and seeds don’t always stay where you put them. Certified gluten-free oats are not processed in the same facility as gluten grains, and they are grown far away from wheat fields.

So, if you have celiac disease and you are going to experiment with oats, make sure they’re certified gluten-free.

Why do oats get so much praise from health organizations, like the American Heart Association?

Oats contain a specific type of soluble fiber called beta-glucan that increases bile acid excretion. As bile acid is excreted, so too is any serum cholesterol that’s bound up in the bile. (That’s the idea behind the bean protocol, which we covered earlier.) The effect is a potential reduction in serum cholesterol.

In rats with a genetic defect in the LDL receptor gene – their ability to clear LDL from the blood is severely hampered – there’s some evidence that oat bran is protective against atherosclerosis. Of course, the very same type of LDL-receptor-defective mice get similar protection from a diet high in yellow and green vegetables, so it’s not as if oat bran is a magical substance.

Like other prebiotic fibers, oat bran also increases butyrate production (in pigs, at least), which is a beneficial short-chain fatty acid produced by fermentation of fibers by gut flora with a host of nice effects. Overall, I think these studies show that soluble fiber that comes in food form is a good thing to have, but I’m not sure they show that said fiber needs to come from oats.

Nutritional Profile of Oats and Oatmeal

Oats also appear to have a decent nutrient profile, although one wonders how bioavailable those minerals are without proper processing.

A 100 gram serving of oats contains:

• 389 calories
• 16.9 grams protein
• 66 grams carbohydrate
• 10.6 grams fiber (with just under half soluble)
• 7 grams fat (about half PUFA and half MUFA)
• 4.72 mg iron
• 177 mg magnesium
• 3.97 mg zinc
• 0.6 mg copper
• 4.9 mg manganese

Oatmeal is a perfect example of the essentially tasteless, but oddly comforting food that’s difficult to give up (judging from all the emails I get). It’s tough to explain, because it’s not like oatmeal is particularly delicious. It’s bland, unless you really dress it up with dried fruits, sweet syrups, and other blood-sugar spiking ingredients that Primal, paleo, and keto folks would rather avoid.

I suspect it’s more than taste. I myself have fond childhood memories of big warm bowls of oat porridge steaming on the breakfast table. I’d add brown sugar, dig in, and head out to adventure through blustery New England mornings with a brick of pulverized oats in my happy belly. The nostalgia persists today, even though I don’t eat the stuff and have no real desire to do so.

Still, since I had some steel-cut oats laying around the house from a past houseguest who absolutely needed his oats, I decided to give them a shot. To self-experiment. To – gasp! – willingly and deliberately eat some whole grains. They were McCann’s Irish oats. Raw, not steamed, and of presumably high quality.

It was… okay. The liberal amount of butter I added quickly disappeared without a trace, and I had to stop myself from adding more because that would have been the rest of the stick. The berries and cinnamon looked and smelled great, but they were swallowed by the blandness. I even added a tablespoon of honey but couldn’t taste it. It was satisfying in the sense that it provided bulk in my stomach.

A half hour after, I felt kinda off. It’s hard to describe. A spacey, detached feeling? Slightly drugged? However you want to describe it, it didn’t feel right. Only lasted half an hour or so, though. My digestion was fine, and I never felt bloated besides the initial “brick in the stomach” feeling.

That’s my experience with oatmeal. Yours may be different.

My opinion of oats as a food? Better than wheat, worse (and more work to improve) than rice. I won’t be eating them because I frankly don’t enjoy them, there are numerous other food options that are superior to oats, and I don’t dig the weird headspace they gave me, but I’ll admit that they aren’t as bad as wheat. If I want starch, I’ll go for some sweet potatoes.

What about you folks? Do you eat oats? Would you be willing to soak, ferment, and cook them? Let me know how it works, or worked, out for you!

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