The Bread of Life

The quick answer:  Your bread should be like your breakfast cereal, whole grain with more natural fiber than added sugar.

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Connecting

Peering into the distant past in search of ancestors can be fascinating.  The TV program Who Do You Think You Are?, follows celebrities as they discover their origins.  Reba McEntire, the country music singer, followed an ancestor from the 1700s that came to America as an indentured servant.  He came at the tender age of ten but survived to prosper in the New World.  Reba traced his steps back to England to learn his story.  Walking in the footprints of our ancestors helps us to understand who we are. 

Want to connect with your ancient ancestors by doing something they did?  Make bread.  There’s something primeval about making bread, especially if you hand knead.  The traditional ingredients—flour, water, yeast, salt, honey, and oil or butter—have scarcely changed in mankind’s history.  One pillar of the food reformation is the rediscovery of traditional whole grain breads.

Americans eat their weight in flour each year, roughly speaking.  Most of this flour is eaten as bread but only 10% of flour, on average, is eaten whole; 90% is refined.  Whole flour is rich in vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fiber, and other needed nutrients.  So this post is about the importance of whole grain bread.

Standard Bread

How did flour, and bread, lose these needed nutrients?  They were lost in man’s restless and relentless search for the next new thing.  In the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair flour from a new invention, the roller mill, was introduced.  The roller mill efficiently separated the bran and germ from wheat, leaving flour that was white and sweet, but lacking in nutrition.  Pastries made of this refined flour became a new taste sensation and healthier flours were soon pushed to the sidelines.  Brown bread was out; white was in.

With each generation, as human health declined, reform movements called for a return to whole grain flours.  Governments are indifferent to the health of the people except at wartime.  Wars can’t be won without strong bodies.  In England, before World War I, the Bread Reform League restored whole grain breads with a law defining standard bread.  It’s said you can still buy standard bread in the UK.

In the U.S., at the start of World War II, the poor health of army recruits was a concern.  Congress quickly approved enriched flour, in which synthetic forms of a few of the missing ingredients were returned as additives.  For better or worse, we still use this so-called enriched flour, though further adjustments have been made.

Waking Up In The Bread Aisle:

Last year the beautiful wife and I spent a Friday night in the bread aisle of a typical grocery store, searching out the healthy breads.  It was our most widely commented food post.  We applied two criteria to the breads:

1. The flour must be whole grain.
2. The grams of natural fiber must exceed the grams of sugar.

The first rule was more for information because natural fiber can only exceed added sugar, if whole grains are used.  Of the 70 breads available that night, just five met the rule.  Three were from Oroweat; Milton’s and Food For Life each had one. 

In a recent post, The Good Breakfast, we applied the more-fiber-than-sugar rule to breakfast cereals.  The rule is a good guide for all cereal products regularly eaten.

In this post, we shared a reader’s time-tested recipe for whole wheat bread.

Please comment.  What is your family’s favorite bread?  Do you have a great recipe to share?  Any bread making tips to share?

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.

Waking Up in the Bread Aisle

In the last post we promised to check our local supermarket for breads that met Healthy Change #9:  Your daily bread must be whole grain, with more grams of natural fiber than added sugar.  To do this we spent a Friday evening studying the labels of 70 different breads; the short answer is just two bakeries met the rule and one came close (their fiber wasn’t all natural):

• Food For Life offers their Ezekiel 4:9 sprouted-grain breads, named after the Bible scripture with a bread recipe.  A slice typically contains 3 grams of fiber and no sugar—the only company we found that doesn’t add sweeteners.  Price $4.49; on sale for $3.99.  (In some stores their bread is kept in the frozen food section to preserve freshness.)

• Oroweat offers bread at all the quality levels (but watch the sugar in some of their whole wheat breads, it's often equal to the fiber). Their Healthfull brand (Nutty Grain, 10-Grain, and Hearty Wheat) had 4 grams of fiber and 2 grams sugar.  Price $4.59; on sale for $2.99 

• Milton’s Whole Grain Plus had 5 grams of fiber and 3 grams of sugar per slice.  (Three grams of fiber are all you can usually get from a slice of whole wheat; breads offering more may not meet the natural fiber requirement.)  The sugar was a combination of brown sugar and honey, so give them a point for slightly better sugars.  Price $4.59; on sale for $3.49.

The bread companies are in a difficult place; people generally have a dim view of store-bought bread and the low-carb diet folks think bread is unhealthy.  The store manager approached me in one store (after all, I was standing there looking at his goods and making notes in a black notebook).  “I’m looking for your healthiest bread,” I told him.  His response was interesting: “Is any bread healthy?”  I laughed with him but answered, “Yes, a few are”. 

I asked him how they decide which breads get the best shelf space and he answered, “Simple, slotting fees.  I think we make more on renting out the shelf space than we do selling the bread”.   I looked down the aisle and saw Oroweat had the biggest space followed by the store brand and then Sara Lee.  There was a small section for Wonder bread on the lowest shelf, a sign of its fall from grace.

The bread aisle is a strange place.  First, it doesn’t smell like bread, it smells chemical, kind of like plastic.  Second, in a desperate attempt to get our attention over 70 different kinds of bread are offered, each with the most extravagant label claims the FDA will allow.  Labels that say “100% wheat” aren’t actually whole wheat.  And the label that says “With Whole Wheat” may only have a little whole grain mixed in with the refined grains.  Third, there is the issue of past fibs, like Wonder bread building strong bodies, 8, 10, then 12 different ways.  Is it any surprise the public is properly skeptical?

Here’s another issue:  Is there a premium for healthy bread?  The answer is “Yes”.  The healthiest breads were the highest priced, around $4.59 unless on sale, though the difference in ingredients only makes a slight difference in material costs.  Is the cheapest bread the least healthy?  Again, the answer is “Yes”.  The cheapest bread was sold under the Supervalu label, price $1.39 but on sale for $.99.  It’s not actually that much cheaper per pound because the loaf is lighter.  And it has the worst ingredients, including high fructose corn syrup.  (The store manager whispered in my ear that Supervalu was controlled by the store—they just didn’t want their name on the worst bread.) 

Would you want to eat 99-cent bread?  It’s a trick question, because you can bake your own perfectly healthful bread for about this price, not counting the cost of firing of the oven.  Yes, I know what you’re thinking—this presumes the cook isn’t getting paid for her hour of work.  But we know the answer to that—the pay she (or he) receives is dearer than money.  In a later post we’ll share our favorite of the bread recipes you submitted. 

For the times when it’s not possible to bake your own bread, here are my personal favorites, though they’re not available where I live:  One is Great Harvest, which sells through franchise stores.  Prairie Grain Bread Co. is the other.  The whole wheat breads meet the fiber rule and have just five or six ingredients.  (The typical store-bought breads have 12-20 ingredients, many of them chemicals.) 

A last comment from the store manager on slotting fees:  “If you really want to see how these fees work, visit the chip aisle.”  So on my way out I visited the chip aisle—I’ll save what I learned for the next (and last) post on converting our diet to whole grains. 

If this post is helpful, would you please share it with your friends?  It’s a way to thank my wife for spending her Friday night in the bread aisle.