Ah bread. Was ever a finer food invented? Whether toasted golden brown with a smear of butter or gently torn and dipped into a warming soup, this staple food is the epitome of comfort and pleasure. Yet walk down any supermarket aisle and you’ll see what horrific and torturous things we’ve done to this once noble food.

Bread at it’s simplest is flour, water, yeast and salt. Sometimes there may be the addition of whole food ingredients like fruit, seeds, olive oil, eggs and milk, but look at the ingredient list on a mass produced pan loaf and you’ll see a whole lot more going into them, many of which you wouldn’t find in a regular kitchen.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist who thinks that “big food” is out to poison us all with toxic chemicals or that e numbers are all automatically evil. I know these additives are well tested and considered safe to consume and many of them are extracted from natural food products. But the effects of eating highly processed food are subtle and may have a deleterious long term impact on our overall health.

One of the big things in nutrition these days is gut health and gut bacteria and while eating highly processed foods like these breads may not be poisoning us, it is having a negative impact on the rich ecosystem of bacteria in our guts. Highly refined and processed foods weaken and reduce the variety of our gut bacteria. Whole foods strengthen and increase the variety. This has been linked to a whole host of health improvements and general wellbeing improvements.

With that in mind, swapping out highly processed bread for freshly baked breads utilising smaller amounts of ingredients and the use of whole foods where possible will do us a lot of good. If you have the time and patience to regularly make bread from scratch then that’s superb, you can completely control what goes into it, but that’s not always practical so finding a good bakery that is producing it’s own bread from fresh ingredients is the next best thing. Just beware of supermarket bakeries and the like who ship in part baked frozen breads then just “finish” them in store. These are just as full of additives as the ones on the shelves wrapped in plastic.

In our home we tend to like wholegrain sourdough as it has a great flavour and texture and is full of fibre and wholegrains, but if that’s not to your taste then any sort of freshly made bread is going to be an improvement over a store bought mass produced one.

Did you know that quite often the mass produced sourdough breads make use of vinegar, other acids and additives to produce that slight tang rather than the hours of slow fermentation that is supposed to be used. This bypasses a lot of the goodness that this process would otherwise produce.

Making this simple switch can go a long way towards moving away from a processed died towards one rich in whole foods. You’re also likely to consume less calories as a thick slice of crusty airy wholemeal is a lot more satisfying than a dense soft slab of square white pan loaf.

Hopefully this has given you some food for thought, or at the very least made you crave a nice hunk of proper fresh crusty bread as it has me while writing it!

Thanks for reading,

Matthew

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