Bread: Is it good for you or bad for you?

To answer this question properly, we need to examine what’s in a loaf of bread in order to get a clear idea about what you are putting in your body. Like almost every other food you find in your local grocery store, bread is being produced on a mass scale. In order to meet the demands of the ever growing population, food manufacturers have come up with clever ways to mass produce bread at the lowest possible cost. So let’s look at the ingredients bread traditionally was made from and compare it to what it is made from in today’s grocery stores.

A traditional loaf of bread is made from very simple ingredients: Wheat flour, water, yeast, sugar (for the yeast), and salt. The nutritional value of bread comes from its most important ingredient: Wheat. So let’s look at what is in a grain of wheat. A grain of wheat is composed of three components: The Bran, the Germ, and the Endosperm (See Figure). The Bran and the Germ is the nutritionally rich portion of in the wheat grain and it’s where you find the fiber, B-vitamins, vitamin E, and minerals. The Endosperm is the least nutritionally dense portion of the wheat and it’s where you find the carbohydrates, and protein. Unfortunately when bread is mass produced, they remove the Brand and the Germ in the manufacturing process.

So all you're left with is only the Endosperm, which is then used to make the flour and essentially

the bread typically seen on grocery shelves.

Since the most nutritious part of the wheat has been removed, the manufacturers try to compensate by adding chemicals to the bread in order to make it seem like the bread is highly nutritious. The net effect however is that your body absorbs very little nutrition from consuming the bread. What you end up consuming is basically carbs.

So what can be done? Should you avoid eating bread all together? Well not exactly. What you are better off doing is using this information to make more informed purchases at the grocery store. Here is the golden term you need to see on the bread's ingredients list to ensure that the flour that was used to made the bread was not stripped of its most nutritious ingredients:

“Made From Whole Grain Flour”

Under Health Canada, any product labeled as having whole grain flour in its ingredients is considered to have all 3 parts of the grain in relatively equal proportions. In other words, if you don’t see the term “Made from whole grain flour” on the ingredients list, the manufacturer has removed much of the Bran and Germ from the wheat in order to produce the flour.

So if you love bread and don’t want to stop eating it, then do yourself a favour. Next time you buy bread, look at the ingredients list. If it doesn’t say “made from whole grain flour”, don’t buy it.

Here is a link to Health Canada’s Website for your reference:

http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/nutrition/whole-grain-entiers-eng.php

#bread #wholewheat #wholegrain #Bran #Germ