toasted rolled oats vs. raw rolled oats

My breakfasts are usually pretty healthy as I eat muesli/granola (less-processed options bought from the supermarket), home made granola or a cooked breakfast mainly with veges. However, I realise my weakest point might be the stuff I buy from supermarkets - although I'm pretty selective with it, it usually contains more sugar than I really need.

I'm trying to get around this by making my own granola. So for approx every 7 cups of cereal mix, I add a heaped tablespoon of honey. The other day, my granola included the usual rolled oats, linseeds, dessicated coconut and puffed wheat. This time I included dried cranberries, dried apple, hazelnuts, pecans and almonds. It was delicious! I'm not going to cut out the dried fruit for their sugar content because I figure I'll be snacking on some sort of fruit throughout the day anyway.

My male body-building housemate told me that cooked rolled oats has less essential vitamins etc than raw rolled oats as the cooking process/heat kills the good stuff. As I need to make my next batch of muesli, I thought I'd look into it.

There's heaps of body building, nutrition and dieting forums that talk about this (like here and here). The original poster would ask whether there was any diff between raw oats and cooked oats. However, this would often be followed by a stream of posters saying 'I don't know, but I think raw oats taste good/bad... they are difficult to digest as evidenced by my friend who had stomach pains after consuming them... or I incorporate them into my diet by putting them into smoothies'. Sometimes posters said 'Yeah they are good for you', but provided no evidence or reasons why. These forums didn't contain any facts but just people showing off their diets and their experiences. I want facts, not personal experiences.

Livestrong.com did a comparison of nutrients of instant dry oatmeal to the cooked stuff using the U.S. Department of Agriculture nutritional tables and found that dry oatmeal has more antioxidants, vitamins, minerals. I particularly like an article on Veg Weight Loss that actually pulls out data from the USA website and compares them. I checked this against the original website. But the Veg website points out that the difference in nutrients may be because 100g of cooked oatmeal has a higher water content (and takes up a lot of the weight) than 100g of raw oatmeal.

But what about rolled oats? The Australian and New Zealand Food Standards website gives nutritional info for boiled rolled oats and raw rolled oats, so I put together a comparison table of this. The raw stuff has more energy, protein, calcium and more vitamins than its boiled counterpart. I'm not sure whether the info on the boiled oats would be affected by its higher water content.

	Oats, rolled, boiled	Oats, rolled, raw	Unit
Proximates
Energy, including dietary fibre	273	1572	kJ
Moisture	83	9.3	g
Protein	2	11	g
Nitrogen	0.35	1.88	g
Fat	1.4	8.7	g
Dietary fibre	1.7	9.5	g
Fructose	0	0	g
Glucose	0	0	g
Sucrose	0	0	g
Maltose	0	0	g
Lactose	0	0	g
Total sugars	0	0	g
Starch	10.2	58.1	g
Available carbohydrate, without sugar alcohols	10.2	58.1	g
Available carbohydrate, with sugar alcohols	10.2	58.1	g
Minerals
Calcium (Ca)	9	45	mg
Copper (Cu)	0.102	0.502	mg
Fluoride (F)	94.44	60.22	ug
Iodine (I)	1	4.3	ug
Iron (Fe)	0.9	3.73	mg
Magnesium (Mg)	24	131	mg
Manganese (Mn)	1.214	5.821	mg
Phosphorus (P)	80	411	mg
Potassium (K)	53	313	mg
Selenium (Se)	1.5	14.1	ug
Sodium (Na)	1	7	mg
Sulphur (S)	39	151	mg
Zinc (Zn)	0.42	1.92	mg
Vitamins
Thiamin (B1)	0.103	0.535	mg
Riboflavin (B2)	0.026	0.141	mg
Niacin (B3)	0	1.01	mg
Niacin Equivalents	0.42	3.29	mg
Pantothenic acid (B5)	0.06	0.34	mg
Pyridoxine (B6)	0.01	0.07	mg
Biotin (B7)	5.4	30.1	ug
Folate, natural	0	18	ug
Total folates	0	18	ug
Dietary folate equivalents	0	18	ug
Vitamin C	0	0	mg
Vitamin E	0	0.35	mg

Aus & NZ Food Standards links - raw rolled oats and boiled rolled oats

I'm not sure if toasting the oats in the oven would have the same effect on boiling oats in terms of their nutritional content. Nevertheless, I'll try mixing my raw oats with my toasted oats and see how I go.