The Benefits Of A Diet Without White Bread

White bread is the staple food of choice for many people, and for many different reasons. It's cheap, available almost anywhere, and serves as the base for wonderful sandwiches. If you have ever made your own white bread, you know that nothing compares to the smell of a loaf baking in your oven, and that it's hard to find something as tasty as your own lovely white bread — the kind with a crunchy crust and a soft, squishy center.

Is bread that great? You'd think so when you are confronted with the figures. Bread made up 40 percent of the diet among the British poor in 1911, but today that percentage has risen to as much as 50 percent. The situation in other developed western nations is similar. Refined flour products lurk everywhere, so it's not just about bread. Though white bread obviously harbors refined flour, the same holds true for pasta, cakes, donuts, pancakes, breaded meats and vegetables and even sauces.

Something is wrong with this picture. While your body certainly needs carbs, there are much better sources than refined-flour products — and the real heart of your diet should always be fresh fruits and vegetables, which can provide you with all the necessary vitamins and minerals. If white bread makes up a large portion of your diet, you are likely to be both deficient in essential nutrients and overweight.

What's worse, you may not even be better off if you consciously choose to buy bread and pasta that contains “whole wheat”, because the labels on our food can be surprisingly deceptive and your products are highly likely to contain mostly white, refined flour despite a whole-wheat label.

Why Refined Flour Products Are Bad For You

Whole wheat grains offer many nutrients — vitamins B2, B3, and B6, vitamin E, folic acid, iron, magnesium and calcium — as well as fiber. The refinement process essentially serves to strip flour of all the things that could benefit your health. During this process, 93 percent of vitamin E is lost, as well as 87 percent of Vitamin B6, 81 percent of Vitamin B2, 80 percent of Vitamin B3 , 70 percent of iron and 56 percent of calcium! In addition, white flour is much lower in the fiber you also very much need to be healthy than wholewheat flour. 

What do refined flour products contain instead of nutrients and fiber? A large amount of high-glycemic index (GI) carbohydrates. Yes, the starch in white bread and pasta is definitely a complex carbohydrate, but despite the good reputation of complex carbodydrates, that doesn't mean these foods are OK.

The glycemic index categorizes carbohydrates in a manner that gives us a better insight into what actually happens to the body when we consume these products. High GI foods (those with scores of 70 or higher) such as white bread and other refined flour foods lead to a rapid rise in blood glucose levels. 

Research that indicates that high glycemic index foods increase the risk of ovulatory disorders and colorectal cancer is also underway. At the same time, there is evidence that eating an abundance of low-GI foods (with scores under 55) reduces the risk of developing these diseases, and encourages weight loss at the same time. Highly-processed, high GI foods are foods that are best limited, in other words.

That isn't to say that bread, as such, is bad for you — you just need to look for wholegrain bread that has not been processed to remove all beneficial contents. Unfortunately, that's harder than you might think. In the next section, we'll discuss what some of the food labels really mean, and what you can do to improve your diet. 

How To Avoid High GI Carbs And Choose Health Instead

What The Food Labels Aren't Telling You

So, you are a health-conscious consumer who prefers wholegrain bread to highly processed and high-glycemic index white bread and refined flour products? You want the fiber, the nutrients, and the heart-healthy, anti-diabetes foods that will not make you overweight? You may be happy to see many labels that give you encouragement at the grocery store:

• "Made with whole grains"
• "Multigrain"
• "Whole wheat"

Unfortunately, the labels you find on your flour products may be misleading. Just like "made with real fruit" can mean there's only a tiny amount of real fruit, "made with whole grains" doesn't mean you have a healthy loaf on your hands, since you don't know how much whole grain was used. "Multigrain" simply means several types of grain were used to manufacture the bread, and even plain old "whole wheat" can actually indicate that there is plenty of refined flour in your bread. 

To locate products that are, in fact, whole wheat products, you'll need to do a bit more research. Look for "100 percent whole grains" and also keep an eye out for the Whole Grains stamp that the Whole Grains Council created if you are committed to eating the healthiest possible kind of bread. 

If the first listed ingredient is a whole wheat flour, the product will almost always be made predominantly with that ingredient. Products that were "made with whole grains" but that do not list these whole grains first may contain as little as one percent worth of whole grains, though they may also have as much as 49 percent. 

If you're dealing with a multigrain product, reading the ingredients list to check which types of grain were used is a little trickier. That's why the Whole Grains Council created the Whole Grain stamp, which is being used more and more widely and which gives much more information. 

How You Can Improve Your Diet

Don't let a fear of white bread and misleading food labels allow you to quit using bread at all — your average adult is still advised to eat three servings of grain a day, and whole-grain bread is a good way to make up at least one serving. When you have a bread-based meal, include plenty of vegetables and lean meats or other protein sources. Don't just slather some jam on your bread and call it a day. Healthy sandwiches and soups served with a side of bread are both good choices.

Now you know what to look for to ensure that your flour product is as healthy as possible. But you will still want to be aware of the fact that even genuine whole-wheat products can contain many other, unhealthy ingredients that will undo all that hard work for you. Whole-wheat cookies probably have a high sugar content, and could also contribute to your saturated-fat intake.

Anyone who is serious about healthy eating should also make absolutely sure that their diet contains a sufficient amount of vegetables and fruits. You can eat all the whole grains you want, but your diet isn't going to be balanced unless you consume between five and 12 servings of fruit and vegetables a day.