Health and Nutrition Research – Is Our Daily Bread Making Us Ill?
Making bread as we know it is one of the oldest crafts in the world dating back to the Egyptian times over 5000 years ago and even more basic forms of bread were recorded over 10,000 years ago (Botham’s Educational Pages).
The breaking of bread is symbolic in many religions of sharing, giving and welcoming people to come together. Bread is the staple food in countries all over the world. For thousands of years bakers and families have been making and creating their own bread. It is an art form taken seriously by many international chefs and passed down from one generation to another.
Raymond Blanc, a renowned French chef is passionate about making bread from the finest ingredients and in an artisan way reminiscent of times past. If you go to Raymond’s fabulous restaurant Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons near Oxford you will be offered a variety of bread, all home made and fermented over time. There are even breads made from ingredients other than wheat (rice, maize, buckwheat and chestnut flour) and gluten free too.
The smell of freshly baked bread is very tempting. Visit your local supermarket and smell from the bakery comes wafting across the store – but that maybe where the goodness ends!
Twelve million loaves of bread are sold in the UK every day with thousands of people suffering from gluten intolerances and digestive problems such as bloating, celiac disease, IBS, constipation to name a few. Part of the problem with our daily bread today is the number of additives in the bread as well as the small amount to time given to the fermentation process which ideally should take place over several hours to allow the ingredients to become more digestible. The necessity to produce millions of loaves per day does not allow this process to happen due to the time frame to produce one loaf after another over and over again. As worldwide populations grow so the need to provide more food puts increased pressure to process and manufacture food such as bread to the detriment of our health.
Every effort is made by farmers to keep their grain as hygienic as possible but once harvested, grain is stored in large silos where it may be visited by an array of insects and rodents. This grain is later sprayed with antifungal preparations and chemical insecticides to kill off all unwanted ‘wildlife’. When the grain has been milled into flour additives and preservatives are used to prolong the shelf life of the bread. The use of enzymatic processing aids in processed bread ( http://www.realbreadcampaign.org ) increase volume and prolong softness, provide a darker crust, slow down the effects of bread becoming stale, promote crumb softness flexibility and elasticity, all artificially induced.
After huge batches of bread have been processed and manufactured it is wrapped in plastic bags and piled high on shelves with sometimes wild claims of nutrient value as well as the colour added to make it wholemeal bread appear brown – even if you add lots of multi grains and wholemeal to flour it does not make it as brown as the bread appears in the shops – next time you are in the supermarket take a walk down the bread section and see all the shades of brown bread!. As a carbohydrate bread ends up in your digestive system as sugar and sugar compromises your immune system so you need to think seriously about the amount of bread you are consuming each day.
We can’t turn back the hands of time – the increased population of the world and the western diet is now so dependent on cereals and especially bread but we can learn to be more discerning about what we are putting into our bodies in the name of bread. As a comfort food, to eat bread is your choice. Making your own bread is better because at least you know what is going into it. The next time you smell that warm crusty loaf at the supermarket think again about the long term effect it might be having on your health.
