Bread is the most affordable food and the best thing about it is the ease of consumption. It’s a quick-fix solution for odd-hour hunger pangs and also proves to be the right combination with other food items.
We won’t mind having a loaf of bread with almost everything such as butter, peanut butter, jam, sauces etc. Even if you are sick, a slice of bread can be taken with a cup of tea or coffee.
At times, you won’t even think twice about picking a few slices of bread with healthy meals such as a bowl of salad.
Not just us in India but globally, bread is a staple breakfast in many households and also acts as a ‘jugaad’ food when nothing exciting is available to eat.
Unfortunately, bread is not as healthy as we imagine it to be. Don’t believe me? You only need to look at the ingredients on the back of the wrapper.
Ingredients & Their Impact On Body
Before penning this column, I ordered a few packets of bread from different, top-selling brands — white bread, brown bread and whole-wheat bread.
The first thing you notice is that whole-wheat bread is not solely made of wheat. In the majority of top-selling brands (every brand that I checked), whole-wheat bread contains wheat flour (atta) only between 54-62 per cent.
As per FSSAI’s latest rules, bakers need to ensure that whole-wheat bread is made of at least 75 per cent whole-wheat flour and brown bread contains at least 50 per cent whole-wheat flour. Check the packet of bread at your home to see if your brand follows the same.
On many packets of white and brown bread, I found refined wheat flour (Maida) — without mentioning the quantity (in percentage terms) used in the product.
Refined wheat is made after refining (as the name suggests) the good parts of wheat grain. These good parts include a majority of vitamins, minerals, and fibres. What is left is sticky, stretchy, nutrition-less and sugar-spiking maida/refined wheat.
Experts believe that refined flour is as bad as sugar for spiking blood-sugar levels. Even if blood-sugar levels are normal in the present years, it creates insulin resistance in the body, setting the stage for the onset of Type 2 diabetes in the coming years.
Nevertheless, bread also includes “extra added sugar”. While natural sugar boost coming from fruits, milk, and vegetables is good for our body, added sugars are definitely not good.
Bread containing refined wheat/maida is also blamed for increasing cholesterol levels, again setting the stage for heart diseases in future.
Refined oil and salt
We are already aware of the side effects of consuming oily food, especially made of refined oil. The packets of bread mention ingredients such as “edible vegetable oil, refined soybean oil and refined palmolein oil”. While they do not mention the quantity of these oils used, the recipes on YouTube will give you a fair idea.
Another ingredient in your bread loaf is salt, mentioned as ‘iodised salt’.
Eating bread on a daily basis or almost regularly — as part of breakfast or routine diet — may lead to excess consumption of per day sodium (salt).
The American Heart Association and the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend consuming no more than 2,300 milligrams of salt per day.
Bread contains salt in the range of 450 to 492 milligrams per 100-gram serving (which is equivalent to 2-3 slices of bread). In a rough calculation, if you eat 4-5 slices of bread with butter, mayonnaise, ketchup or sauces, you will end up eating more than 1000 milligrams of sodium in just one shot. This means that ultimately, when you eat other meals of the day, you will end up exceeding the salt intake.
Exceeding salt consumption is extremely unhealthy as it leads to hypertension and heart diseases in future.
According to an analysis made by researchers at Queen Mary University, bread turned out to be the top contributor of dietary sodium in the US and many other countries around the world.
A global team of researchers analysed the salt content in 2,000 breads sold in 32 countries and regions. “More than a third of the loaves exceeded the maximum salt target for bread,” they found.
Emulsifiers, Preservatives, Acidity Regulators & More
Here’s how to keep your decision-making easy: If the packet of bread at home claims to have an “emulsifier or stabiliser”, it falls under the category of ultra-processed food (UPF) products.
According to Dr Arun Gupta, a nutrition expert, breads made in local bakeries only from wheat flour, water, salt and yeast are processed foods and better for health. Bread — whose lists of ingredients also include emulsifiers or colours — fall under ultra-processed, which are extremely unhealthy.
Examples of other UPFs are soft drinks, chips, namkeen, packaged soups, canned fruits, and cheese among several others.
As a rule for a healthy lifestyle, UPFs should not be consumed as part of regular diets but occasionally. Why? Because these foods are usually high in sugar, salt or saturated fats.
The easy way to understand if a product falls under UPF is to read the list of ingredients behind the food packets.
Always bear in mind that foods containing flavourings, colourings, emulsifiers, and other cosmetic additives are UPFs. Experts suggest that for items which have more than five ingredients, there is a high chance that they are UPFs.
There is evidence to prove that such food is extremely unhealthy. Sample this: Two large European studies published by the medical journal The BMJ in 2019 found positive associations between the consumption of UPFs and the risk of developing heart diseases and death.
Harvard professor Jerold Mande wrote a strong opinion piece — published on March 1 in Harvard Public Health — saying that “processed foods are making us sick” and he claimed that about 6.78 lakh Americans die each year from chronic food illness.
He used an instance from a recent study conducted by the National Institutes of Health to discover the cause of sharp increases in obesity in the United States.
Under the study, people on the ultra-processed diet ate an additional 500 calories per day and began to rapidly gain weight. The same people were later assigned to eat a minimally processed diet and they started losing weight.
Mande from Harvard said the study throws an important finding as it hints at the possibility that it could be the “additives and processing” which go into UPFs that make us sick. He concluded by saying that “more research is urgently needed”.
It means there is a lot about UPFs which is still unknown as it contains ingredients that we may not know fully about.
Until we find out the real impact of processed foods, it will be wiser to consume such foods occasionally, especially when the genetic makeup of Indian bodies is more prone to developing diabetes, heart diseases and other metabolic syndromes. We are already the ‘diabetes capital of the world’ with close to 80 million people battling the disease and also the ‘chronic heart disease capital of the world’.
With an increasing subset of people struggling with non-communicable diseases, it’s time to fix things up.
Let’s start by breaking up with your beloved bread… Because your health matters.
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