Granola

In granola the oats are usually the least of it. What decides a given brand is what was added: dried fruit, honey, apple juice concentrate, cashews - each of which is high here on its own. Read the fruit and nut line before the grain line. This food is not among the 55 grain products behind the per-portion FODMAP figures, so its level is a placing and not a measurement.

Granola often adds fructose through dried fruit, honey or fruit-juice concentrate. A version sweetened with glucose or maple syrup is easier to tolerate in fructose malabsorption.

The oats are the least of it. What brings chains to a granola is what was added: dried fruit fructans, cashew GOS, inulin declared as fibre - three different oligosaccharides in one bowl, from three different ingredients. This is a PREPARED food, and that is the difficulty on this axis: the oligosaccharides come from whatever went in - onion, garlic, a legume, an added fibre - not from a single plant that could be looked up. The level follows work on fructooligosaccharides in prepared and preserved foods for that reason. The survey behind this ranks by PLANT FAMILY rather than by food: the Compositae highest in total fructooligosaccharide, then the Allium species. A prepared food takes its place from whichever of those went into it - onion and garlic are Allium, artichoke and chicory are Compositae - and the survey names no prepared food itself.

Granola is bound with syrup - that is what makes it clump - so the sugar is structural rather than optional. Dried fruit stirred through adds more.

Oats are low in salicylate, but granola is rarely just oats — dried fruit, nuts, honey and cinnamon are all moderate to high, and a bowl combines several of them.

Granola is oats and nuts, the two things at the top of the nickel table, bound with syrup. Nothing in it is extreme on its own; the combination and the bowl size are what put it here.

Granola's oxalates come mainly from its nuts, seeds, cocoa or wheat bran, so check the mix. A nut-light granola is lower in oxalate.

Granola is low because it is oats and nuts baked dry, with no wet stage for bacteria. Baking and drying are the two processes that end the amine question rather than starting it - heat kills the bacteria and dryness stops the rest. A sourdough proved for two days is the counter-example.

Granola is oats, and oats are counted as a gluten cereal by the law even though the protein they carry is avenin rather than wheat gluten - both regulations name oats explicitly. On top of that they are almost always grown, harvested and milled alongside wheat, which is why gluten-free oats are a separate and more expensive product. What a label may promise is set by regulation and not by a recipe: 828/2014 allows "gluten-free" at or below 20 mg/kg, sets the conditions oats must meet, and admits wheat-derived ingredients in a gluten-free food provided the finished product stays under that ceiling. It measures nothing — it says what a food must meet to carry the claim, which is exactly what a food name cannot tell you.

Granola picks up sorbitol from what binds it - apple juice concentrate and dried fruit both carry it, and both are common here. The oats themselves do not.