More oatmeal is eaten in January than in any other time of the year. As this month comes to a close, it’s the perfect time to squeeze in a little healthy celebration of National Oatmeal Month. That’s right: January is officially the month when this heart healthy food gets its due. Warm, healthy, filling and the perfect foil for an array of favorite tastes, this versatile food is as good in a bowl as it is a in a bar.

Oatmeal is the broad term for ground, steel-cut, crushed or rolled oats, and it is known for its many health advantages, including being a source for omega-3s, manganese and soluble fiber. It plays a serious role in lowering cholesterol, and reducing blood pressure, especially as an alternative to less healthy breakfast bowls. Other benefits, of course, include that stick-to-your-ribs feeling that helps you feel full until lunch, and it provides a necessary warmth on a cold winter morning.

But as National Oatmeal Month helps illustrate, oatmeal is not just for breakfast. This popular food is also a windfall for cookies, bars, and breads, adding nutrition and texture to all it comes in contact with. It gives new meaning to "oatmeal bar" by enhancing beer, it thickens soups and chili, and it even has less edible uses, including facial scrubs and shampoo.

You’re the Top

For all its uses, oatmeal’s Oscar-worthy role might be as the perfect foundation for a daily serving of fruit. It shines when combined with healthy berries – wild blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, apples and bananas all work well, but favorite toppings are a matter of personal taste. Some favorites include raisins, nuts of all varieties (try walnuts for additional serving of good fat), butter, brown sugar, milk, syrup, currants, cinnamon, cranberries, pumpkin puree, shredded coconut, citrus zest, and fresh ginger. Some oatmeal lovers have even been known to splurge with M&M’s, cream, and bacon!

A “Smothering” Boon

Top health professionals agree about the mysterious benefit of combining foods. It’s called synergy – it's nature’s way of increasing our health benefits naturally. Food synergy occurs when components within the same food, or components between different foods, work together in a way that is more powerful than their effects would be separately. Evidence suggests that the components in the foods we consume interact with each other to give our bodies extra disease protection and a higher level of health.  It may be why can’t yet seem to achieve similar health benefits from supplements – they are missing out on food combinations that provide healthy synergy.

Oatmeal provides the basis for perfect synergistic meal. According to Superfood doc Steven Pratt, there is synergy between wild blueberries and almost every other food, making smothering a bowl of oatmeal with beneficial berries a nutritionally smart move. Find more synergistic combinations for health and taste, such as berries and walnuts, an ideal oatmeal topping.

The Perfect Bowl

While instant oatmeal can be a preferred method for some, once you start making oatmeal from “scratch”, you’ll wonder why you ever to opted for instant. Simply use equal parts oats and liquid (milk or water) in a pot and stir for about five minutes until the desired consistency is achieved. For one portion, start with 2/3 cup of oatmeal and 3/4 cup of whole milk, then decide what texture you like best. Opinions on making the perfect bowl do differ – here’s Ehow.com’s recipe for perfect bowl. Or, try this Quintessential Blueberry Oatmeal from NYTimes.com. (That purple hue means nutrition!)

Oatmeal Recipes to Try This Month (and Next!)

• Fittingly, Quaker Oats has been celebrating with new flavors and recipes like this synergistic treat, Lemon Blueberry Oatmeal Muffins. They also remind us how to think outside the spoon with this Spicy Oat Crusted Chicken with Sunshine Salsa. And, they are a robust resource for health information that includes weight management, heart health and diabetes prevention. 

• Try this Blueberry Banana Oat Bread recipe Courtesy of the Examiner. (Go with frozen wild blueberries for best nutritional benefit and great taste.)  

• Huff Post does oatmeal indulgence with Blueberry Oatmeal Streusel French Toast with Warm Maple Rum Sauce.

• Oatmeal Raspberry-Jam Bars from Real Simple will expand your oatmeal horizons.

 According to Dr. David B. Agus, author of The End of Illness, we are on the cusp of a health revolution.

Through biomedical engineering, understanding our DNA, and mapping the proteins in our blood, we’ll know 1) our predisposition for a variety of illnesses 2) our nutritional deficiencies, and 3) our nutritional prescription for preventing those diseases. According to Agus, this revolution will endow us with the data we desperately need to optimize our individual health.

If we’re lucky, such personalized medicine will be available in our lifetime. But until we all have access to our biological profile, along with the sound medical advice to parse the data and allow us to individualize our nutrition, we must opt for the best health and nutrition advice we have – the kind known to work best for a broad population.

We know that improving the way we eat can be the best preventative medicine. Real foods deliver nutritional benefits the most efficient, safest way: without shortcuts. While we wait for science to help deliver the perfect, tailored preventative diet, eating real food to get the nutrition we need, and staying up-to-date about new technologies that can improve our health is our best strategy.

Part of that strategy includes absorbing health research that applies to you. Not sure what does? You probably already know a lot about your personal health. You may know if you have a genetic predisposition to certain illnesses. You know if you are experiencing health challenges. You also know that you are committed to prevention that will lengthen your life.

That knowledge is the first powerful step toward creating your own personal health profile and eating a diet that prevents and battles illness.  

Health News That Might Just Be Crucial to Your Health

What recent research impacts your personal health? The following list includes some valuable new research about health, and their common denominator is wild blueberries. Their anti-inflammatory phytonutrients and powerfully concentrated nutrients make wild blueberries an ideal Rx for general prevention, as well as for body weight issues, maintaining heart health, bowel and digestive problems, and a particularly rare form of breast cancer.

Body Weight & Heart Health. Torching belly fat is not just a matter of looking good– there’s much more at stake than fitting into your skinny jeans. Belly fat is an indicator that you may be at risk of heart disease and type-2 diabetes. Belly fat boosts inflammation and hardens arteries. And, If your waist size is more than half your height, you're at higher risk for developing diabetes. Phytonutrients, which are responsible for the dark pigment in fruits like blueberries, are uniquely helpful in lowering the risk of heart disease and type-2 diabetes. Wild blueberries in the diet also correlate to lower cholesterol and improved glucose control, and offer concentrated nutrition for few calories (just 42 belly-flattening calories in ½ cup).

Bowel Health. If bowel health is a concern for you, you are among thousands of suffers. As Western diets proliferate throughout the globe, the numbers appear to grow. A new report published in Nutrition
about the nutrition and bowel health connection provides some promising news for those suffering with a common bowel disorder, Inflammatory Bowel Disease. Recent research shows broccoli or blueberries (both were studied in this research performed on mice) may decrease bacteria strains, reduce e. coli, and improve intestinal damage. Colon inflammation tended to be lower for both broccoli and blueberry-fed mice, and tended toward being even lower for those fed blueberries.

This comes on the heels of research into blueberry and gut health that shows that wild blueberries may support intestinal balance and may be helpful in increasing beneficial bacteria (particularly in studies of blueberry powder).

Triple-Negative Breast Cancer. We reported this groundbreaking City of Hope study in a recent post,  which explains the promising conclusions that blueberries may slow down the growth of, or stop, triple-negative breast cancer tumors. Triple-negative breast cancer is one of the most aggressive types of breast cancer. It doesn’t respond to traditional cancer treatment, and there are few effective drugs available to combat it. Such a discovery would have a major impact on those with this devastating disease, and those at risk for it.  

But there’s no need to wait to start a disease-fighting regimen: there is overwhelming agreement in the scientific community that efforts to lower the risk of breast cancer should involve eating blueberries, along with a variety of fruits and vegetables. Initial studies credit, again, phytochemicals, found in uniquely high concentrations in wild blueberries, for evidence that they might suppress the proliferation and migration of these cancer cells in humanly-consumable doses. In a world of quick-fix supplements and bottled nutritional tinctures, that a preventative for this deadly form of cancer is widely available seems nothing short of a miracle.

A Bit About Wild

While some research focusing on the power of blueberries utilizes the high-bush berry, many target the wild blueberry, or low-bush blueberry, for their nutritional research. Rightly so. It is important to understand that the smaller wild blueberry (wild blueberries will always include the “wild” moniker) has advantages that the cultivated, or high-bush blueberry doesn't. If you are interested in amplified nutrition (not to mention amped-up taste), choosing the smaller, nutritionally-concentrated wild is essential.

Wild blueberries have a long health history. They are an indigenous fruit grown wild in barrens of Maine and parts of Canada for hundreds of years, and their natural resistance nurtured by rugged soil and challenging weather has made them an enormously powerful fruit with naturally intense nutritional benefits. There is simply no reason not to choose wild—wild blueberries have an increased concentration of these beneficial phytonutrients, and that means you are consuming more health benefits per serving. Opting for berries other than wild is a nutritionally senseless compromise.

An Ounce of Prevention: Today’s Pound of Cure

While scientists continue to conduct research into cures for challenging illness, they often come up with more mysteries. As many nutrition researchers indict environment, Western diets, and genetics, cures remain elusive. It is prevention that will lengthen our life. Fortunately, prevention is achievable by taking advantage of the readily available foods that surround us, both in their fresh, and equally beneficial frozen states.

Until we can take targeted preventative measures based on our personal health profile, health and nutrition gained through real foods offer their own innate, naturally powerful benefits. Eating wild blueberries as part of a broad color spectrum of fruits and vegetables, may be one of the best preventative tactics we have available to us.

Gail J. VanWart and Blae at Peaked Mountain Farm.

There’s something about being a Maine wild blueberry farmer that makes you want to spread the word about the unique fruit to which you have devoted your life. That’s just the way it is with Gail J. VanWart.

Her most recent book gets the word out in the form of a children’s book. It’s called Ellery Didn’t Know That, a charming story about a bear’s adventures searching for wild blueberries. The tale tells of Ellery Bear, an adventurous, amiable creature who pays a visit to a Maine family and in doing so, sends the very worthy message to young readers that Maine lowbush wild blueberries are a natural, native fruit rich in attributes.

VanWart lives in Dedham, Maine on Peaked Mountain Farm, where she maintains the native Wild Blueberry fields as a proud fourth generation steward. The author and publisher named her main character "Ellery" for her grandfather who lived and cared for the Dedham Farm before her. The book sends a perfectly delicious and healthy message with a delightfully furry messenger to help send it.

VanWart’s previous book, Life Raked In is a collection of poems, recipes and thoughts on life inspired by the Wild Blueberry fields on the family farm. She is a self-proclaimed huge wild blueberry fan, dedicated to spreading the word about wild and the wild lifestyle. (You can buy the book and see her appearance on Good Day Maine).

Gail VanWart’s Mid-Winter Treat: Wild Blueberry Gingerbread

VanWart was kind enough to share a favorite recipe with Wild About Health from Life Raked In. Her Wild Blueberry Gingerbread is an ideal mid-winter treat that uses frozen wild blueberries to achieve gingerbread nirvana. Enjoy!

Gail’s Wild Blueberry Gingerbread

2 cups flour
½ cup shortening
½ t. salt
1 cup sugar
1 egg
½ t. ginger
1 t. cinnamon
1 t baking soda
3 T. molasses
1 cup sour milk*
1 cup Wild Blueberries (fresh or frozen)

3 T. sugar
to sprinkle on top before baking

Confectioner’s Sugar
to sprinkle on top after baking

½ cup fresh Wild Blueberries
for garnish, if available

Cream shortening and add salt and sugar gradually. Add unbeaten egg and beat until light and fluffy. In separate bowl, mix flour, ginger, and cinnamon. In another bowl, mix baking soda with sour milk, stir until soda is dissolved. Then add dry ingredients and sour milk mixture alternately to the creamed mixture. Add the molasses and fold in the cup of Wild Blueberries. Turn into a greased and floured pan (either a 9” x 9” square or 10” round pan works well). Sprinkle top with 3 tablespoons sugar and bake at 350 degrees for 45-60 minutes. When done, turn onto rack to cool. When cool, place on a plate and sprinkle with confectioner’s sugar and garnish with fresh blueberries.

*If you don’t have sour milk on hand, add 2 tablespoons vinegar to one cup of whole milk.