Ingredient Spotlight: Oats

Let's take a quick look at Avena sativa aka oats, oat straw, milky oats.

Oats are more than just an excellent breakfast choice. They are an herbal ally with a solid place in your spring skincare and wellness plan. Maybe you have taken an oat bath to soothe a particularly bad sunburn or made a sticky paste seeking relief from itchy hives? Oats are used topically, benefitting the skin with it's calming, emollient (barrier restoring) and supportive for sensitive complexions nature. Oats are way more complex and versatile than just calming inflammatory skin conditions though. They are the ultimate mundane superfood.

Did you know ALL parts of the oat plant are useful?

Oats (as in the food) are full of essential vitamins and minerals, specifically calcium. Calcium is a very important mineral for healthy 🦴&❤️&🧠

It gets better, they also contain vitamin D which is required to efficiently absorb calcium. 👏👏👏

Aside from that, thoughtfully grown oats also contain mineral VIPs like

magnesium💤&🧠

Silica 💇‍♀️ &💅

Iron 🩸&💪

Phosphorus 🦴&🦷

And vitamins A, C, E and several of the B’s ⚡️⚡️⚡️

*Supplementing with calcium on its own can cause problems if the body doesn’t have enough vitamin D to facilitate proper absorption. Freely circulating calcium can aggregate together causing serious problems, like kidney stones and gallstones.

Oat straw is the leaf and stem of the oat plant. Abundant in

Iron 🩸&💪

Manganese 🦴&💃❤️🕺&🧠

Zinc 🚫🦠

My favorite way to consume it is as part of a smoothie with lots of vitamin C rich fruits, since vitamin C unlocks iron most efficienty and complements zinc so nicely. Its an excellent breakfast additon to get digestion started, improve brain function, and fortify immune system. You can definitely brew it as a tea too and still get plenty of mineral support in these systems, but I say why not get some insoluble fiber in too and just eat it.

Milky oats are the unripe seeds of the oat plant. They look unassuming but burst with a thick white goo when crushed. This goo is a miracle for the anxious, depressed, or just plain burnt-out type. In addition to all the badass minerals and vitamins found in ripe oats and oat straw, these little seeds contain handy structures called Indol alkaloids. There is a whole wide world of indol alkaloids but these particular ones resemble serotonin and benefit the brain in similar ways, like mood stabilization. The high mineral content and indol alkaloids work together to tone the nervous system, creating balance in the structure and therefore function of the nerves not chemical reliance like other depression and anxiety treatment options. That’s not to say you can forgo other depression and anxiety remedies like adequate exercise.

*Sedentary lifestyle is very likely to have contributed heavily to the acid-base balance issues that made brain function go awry in the first place. Leave a 😱 in the comments if you would like more details on this very interesting phenomenon.

Also (perhaps obviously?) this plant contains a good amount of both soluble and insoluble fiber which is essential for a well-kept colon 🧹💩🚽 In fact, oats are a good source of a really neat type of insoluble fiber called beta-glucan. Beta-glucans are found abundantly in only a few things like mushrooms, some whole cereal grains, some yeasts, seaweed, and algae. This specific soluble fiber is beneficial for things like insulin resistance, cholesterol, and the notorious leaky gut. I like to imagine the slippery, demulcent fiber coating the irritated and abused walls of the colon, preventing cholesterol from barging in, quieting down the unruliest of the microbial members, and maximizing digestion by slooowing things down making the large intestine a nice neighborhood again.

In short, don’t let a bit of this herbal ally go to waste, it’s too useful!

You can find oats in all forms in our spring products. Look for it in Oatmeal Hug tea, Mind Support tincture, Essential face polish, Strawberry Patch face polish, and Fertile Earth cleansing mask.