Don't like Oatmeal? Alternative Ways to Enjoy This Superfood Item

Whether thinking about it makes you cringe or not, the fact is oatmeal is a good source of many good things for your diet and health. The soluble fiber helps lower cholesterol, and fight heart disease. Oatmeal is also a complex carbohydrate, which digests slowly and keeps hunger in check, and helps maintain a healthy body weight. Complex carbs also benefit the brain and keep energy levels up. And if that's not enough, oatmeal is also rich in vitamins, iron, calcium, and is low in sodium and fat. When it comes to power foods, oatmeal is on the list, but a lot of people find the flavor bland and unpalatable. If you are amongst them, try there ways to spruce up your morning cereal.

Peanut butter, cashew butter, or almond butter melts perfectly into hot oatmeal. Mixing anyone of the butter family in creates a thick and creamy breakfast cereal that is full of flavor. If you are a vegetarian, who has a hard time getting enough protein in your diet, peanut, cashew, and almond butters are a great source.

Almond or vanilla or another flavored extract can be added to oatmeal while cooking, and it really boosts the flavor. Adding extracts, along with a sweetener, such as brown sugar, or an artificial sweetener, if you prefer, upgrades that bland flavor to something savory.

If you like chunks, try throwing in dried fruit. Raisins, cranberries or blueberries are delicious in oatmeal. Put enough of them in and the oatmeal becomes a secondary ingredient, and all you get is flavor.

Grated lime or lemon rind in oatmeal, like dried fruit, adds a hint of "pow" flavor. It really undoes that bland thing, without adding anything unnatural or unhealthy.

Maple syrup, in its natural state (this means no Mrs. Butterworth), is one of the more healthy choices for sweetening. It's at least better than grain sugars. And if you can do honey, that's even better. Honey also boosts energy, and has health benefits, including minerals such as potassium and zinc, and antioxidants. The darker it is, the better.

Of course, it does not have to be all about what you put in oatmeal. There are also plenty of recipes where you can get this power fruit that you put the oatmeal in. Oatmeal raisin cookies are sugary, but they still deliver the health benefits of the oatmeal, and if you are going to be eating cookies anyway, an oatmeal raisin cookie offers considerably more health benefits than chocolate chip or peanut butter.

Even if you are adamantly anti-oatmeal, it is in your health's best interest to try to find a way to integrate it into your diet. The health benefits out rank the blandness of the flavor.