Waipu Natural Health - Our daily bread

---

Who doesn’t love the smell of home-baked bread straight from the oven? Steamy and fluffy on the inside, crunchy on the outer. Who knows that smell any more?

Bread as we know it is a far cry from what it used to be. The nutritional gulf between a well-made organic wholemeal loaf and a commercial white sliced (or brown tinted) loaf is enormous. Commercially produced bread commonly contains additives to improve flavour, texture, colour, shelf life and ease of manufacturing, completely displacing time in the maturing of dough. 

Up until about a hundred years ago, sourdough was the only kind of bread available; wholemeal flour, water, salt, starter and the ever elusive time – five ingredients! In the late 1800s mass produced commercial yeast was invented, later refined to instant yeast, consisting of one strain only, which ferments bread much faster, compared to the veritable zoo of microflora found in slow activating sourdough starters.

Glyphosate-based (the active ingredient in Roundup) herbicides are commonly sprayed on wheat crops here in New Zealand. Glysophate is extremely efficient in disrupting important pathways required by beneficial gut microbes. Gut microbes/bacteria (also called probiotics) play a critical role in human digestion, immunity, synthesising vitamins, preventing gut permeability. Mounting evidence indicates the increase in use of glyphosate on wheat strongly correlates with the rise in celiac disease and autoimmune conditions (see online orgcns.org/1ycNtg8). Exposure to this chemical is on the rise with increased, collective use. Consider how many meals through the day include wheat products; cereal for breakfast, sandwich for lunch, pasta for dinner?

Chemicals aside - how a food is grown and processed makes a huge difference to it's nutritional profile. The Glycemic Index (a system for measuring how fast a food triggers a rise in blood sugar, used by dieticians around the world) of white bread scores around 70 compared to traditional stone ground wholemeal which scores around 30. (The GI takes glucose as the benchmark with a value of 100 and foods rated high, medium or low depending how they score.) 

According to the GI published by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, carrots from Romania eaten raw score a very low 16 compared to a rating of 92 with American peeled, boiled carrots. We will look into this subject more closely next month.

 Jan van der Lee is a Clinical Nutritionist based at Waipu Natural Health, phone 09 432 1325, or visit waipunaturalhealth.co.nz

Jan van der Lee