Your mother was right: Porridge is good for you

So it seems our mothers were right after all — if you eat up all your porridge, you could enjoy a long and healthy life.

The mothers of the nation didn’t need a scientific study to tell them what they already knew, but the clever folks at Harvard University in the US have, for the first time, examined how wholegrains impact on long-term life span.

The researchers followed more than 100,000 people for well over a decade monitoring their diets and health outcomes. Every subject in the study was healthy in 1984 when it began, but more than 26,000 had died by 2010 when a follow-up was carried out.