2024-04-28 03:20:00
If there is one basic food item that has accompanied humanity for thousands of years, it is bread. Even before grain cultivation was domesticated, there are already indications that it exists for human consumption. Specifically, crumbs are found around 14 billion years ago in northeastern Jordan, and although researchers suspect that at the time it was the product of sporadic consumption, consumption has since not stopped growing throughout history. Only recently, in the last few decades, has bread begun to lose its leading role the diet, accused, among other things, of being unhealthy and contributing to weight gain. Some experts consulted clarify that there is bread and bread, and depending on which one is in front of us, it can play a different role for health. Bakers insist that it is a healthy and digestible meal if, instead of a fast, inexpensive and highly industrialized bread, you choose a slow preparation, with whole grains and cultured sourdough. And anyway, you don’t gain as much weight as you are accused of, nutritionists warn.
In Daniel Jordà’s workshop, the smell of freshly baked bread permeates the premises from end to end. Tied to a floured apron, he has been kneading since two in the morning to serve 15 different varieties in his bakery in Barcelona, Panes Creativos. “I was born in an oven. “I’m a third-generation baker,” he explains. The craftsman advocates “differentiating himself with the quality” of the product. And how do you know what is good bread? Jordà replies: “When you go to a place that smells like bread, it means they are doing things well. And the loaves, which don’t have that much volume: you have to sacrifice beauty for quality.”
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According to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Spaniards consumed in 2022 1.3 million kilos of bread (almost 28 kilograms per inhabitant), but this figure has been declining for several decades: in 1964 The annual consumption per inhabitant was 92.5 kilos; in 1976, just over 76; and in 2008 it was 47 kilos. Ángeles Carbajal, professor of nutrition at the Complutense University of Madrid, spoke an analysis in 2016 that in the sixties it was “one of the best diets”, but since then “adverse changes have occurred which have had very negative consequences for health.” “The consumption of food products of vegetable origin and especially grains and bread has been reduced considerably. This decrease has come at the expense of the increase in others more processed food and rich in fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, simple sugars and with higher caloric intake and lower nutrient density and which have contributed to the deterioration of the nutritional quality of the diet.” As for the cause, the researcher cites another article who warns about the “dietary advice” of some specialists that “in the face of a patient’s intention to lose weight, the immediate axiom is: ‘Don’t eat bread’.” “It is yet another myth to regard bread as the exclusive culprit behind weight gain. But in addition, leaving people without bread robs them of one of the resources and foods that have sustained and accompanied them throughout their lives and history,” this reflection points out published in the magazine Alimentación, Nutrición y Health, from Danone. Institute, in 2010.
Carmen Vidal, professor of nutrition and bromatology at the University of Barcelona (UB), emphasizes this line and assures that there is “a dimensional perception of the calories” that come with bread: “It has been associated with a product with many calories when this is not the case: what goes into the bread has more calories than the bread itself.” The researcher also recalls that in recent years, “to try to reduce the amount of salt in the body, the salt content of the flour used to make bread has been lowered.”
In food, nuances are central, he points out Jordi Salas-Salvadóprofessor of nutrition at Rovira i Virgili University and principal investigator at the Network Biomedical Research Center (CIBER) for Physiopathology of Obesity and Nutrition: “Epidemiological studies that try to look at the relationship between bread consumption and body weight, they often see that people who eat bread more often have greater risk of obesity, diabetes and weight gain.The problem is that these studies were done with today’s bread, which is not the same as traditional bread, with sourdough and long fermentation: bread has a high glycemic index, but artisanal bread has more of a fermentation process and it does that the glycemic index is lower.”
In fact in a scientific review 2013 regarding the connection between bread consumption and weight loss, Researchers from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria concluded that “reduction in the consumption of white bread, but not whole grain bread, within a Mediterranean-style eating pattern is associated with lower weight gain and abdominal fat”. “It appears that the different composition between whole grain bread and white bread varies in effect on body weight and abdominal fat,” the authors noted. Salas-Salvadó insists: “The big message is not to stop eating bread, but to eat wholemeal bread.”
Baker Jorge Pastor, expert in innovation and research in baking and former president of the Richemont International Club, a sector group that promotes quality bread, is sharp about the link between bread and weight gain: “We stopped eating bread, but obesity has been triggered. This food is not responsible for obesity. Bread-substitute foods are not better, they are worse.” Salas-Salvadó remembers that overweight It is “multifactorial”, where dietary factors are combined with a sedentary lifestyle, sleep quality and exposure to hormone-disrupting substances: “It cannot be explained by bread. White rice, potatoes and white bread are high glycemic foods, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad, it just depends on how much you eat them and if you eat them alone. Ultimately, what we eat is a multi-food diet. It is difficult to isolate one of them from the rest, he points out.
Basic food
In the eyes of the specialists, bread is the key to nutrition. “It is a basic food item. No one can think that such an essential food is not good, suitable for consumption and easily digestible,” defends the pastor. Similarly, Rosa del Campo, a microbiologist at the Ramón y Cajal Hospital in Madrid, agrees in that bread “has been associated with people all their lives and is part of the diet”. The researcher, who has studied the effect of bread on the ecosystem of microbes that populate the intestine, warns that “industrial bread contains emulsifiers that kill many bacteria in the intestinal microbiome. “There are many types of bread and one must be careful when defining which is the healthiest,” these specialists point out.
In order to break down the role of bread in the diet and its impact on health, some of the consulted experts suggest starting by breaking down what kind of bread the citizens eat. Pastor promotes that “95% of the bread eaten is made from bread wheat.” That is, “low-extraction wheat, refined, flour from which the husk has been removed, which is the most valuable part of the wheat,” he explains. “We eat almost exclusively low-extraction wheat, and this has never been the case. In the countryside there are more than 9,500 different varieties of cereals and bread seeds, but the amazing thing is that although the source of ingredients has been infinitely variable, we only eat one type. Biodiversity in bread food does not exist, he reflects.
In practice, the same type of wheat is almost always used to make bread, and in addition the food production process has been mutated until in many cases it loses important procedures to achieve quality food, they warn. Traditionally, the bread that has accompanied human history was made by combining water and flour from some grain (wheat, for example), a mixture that was subjected to a spontaneous acidifying fermentation to naturally grow lactic acid bacteria and yeast there. However, this classic process declined in importance after the advent of industrial yeast and techniques to accelerate the processes.
Baker Daniel Jordà manipulates one of the flours they use to knead the product. Massimiliano Minocri
Pastor distinguishes between “slow bread”, made with cultured sourdough, without yeast and with a fermentation process of approx. 24 hours; and “quick breads”, which are cheaper and use industrial yeast to speed up the production process. Choosing one way or another to make bread triggers two completely different nutritional and health pathways, he says. “Fast bread is what we continue to consume in Spain: low-cost bread, highly industrialized, with little personnel. A two-hour bread, very fast, that has no bacterial activity or leaven [esa mezcla de agua y harina ya fermentada de forma natural]. To make bread that can withstand these processes, the stress of the machine, you need flour with a lot of gluten. We quickly eat bread with a high gluten content and gluten is very indigestible for a percentage of the population, he says.
On the other hand, a “slow bread” does not need flour with such a high protein content. “Instead of using flour with 15% gluten proteins, you can use 8% flour. Making bread with cultured sourdough is a slow process, with a high presence of lactic acid bacteria, where the sourdough reduces sugar and eliminates indigestible parts. And it is closer to the concept of healthy bread, explains the expert.
Potential impact on the microbiome
A study with mice in which Campo y Pastor participated compared the effect of an “industrial” bread, with wheat flour and a two-hour fermentation process, compared to a “Celtic” bread, with a composition of flour from five grains and five types of grain and a full day of fermentation. The research showed that industrial bread “causes significant changes in the gut microbiome of mice”. “The healthful properties of bread seem to depend on the ingredients and the production process,” they concluded.
Along the same lines, a pilot study tested the prebiotic potential of bread with about thirty patients who were in remission from ulcerative colitis, a disease that causes inflammation and ulceration of the membrane that lines the rectum and colon. The investigation compared the impact of traditionally baked breads with those made using modern procedures and found that traditional breadmaking “has a potential prebiotic effect” that improves gut health.
Del Campo emphasizes that slow bread “is preferred by microorganisms and is easier on digestion.” But health changes, if any, are subtle. “This is not appendicitis. You’re not going to eat the bread and pass out. But people already tend to have a weaker, poorer microbiome and don’t digest gluten well and cause inflammation. So since the microbiome is impaired, by eating it the bread, we weaken it more, and that is a problem, he says.
However, Vidal maintains his concern about the possible impact different types of bread can have on health. In fact, he does not believe that the production process or the raw material makes a big difference to health. – From a health perspective, whether it is prepared in one way or another does not have that much influence. The components are the same. White bread and refined flour have been questioned a bit, and yes, whole wheat is better, but that does not mean that refined flour is bad, the UB professor agrees.
In this sense, he also calls for caution with the interpretation of research that finds a connection with the gut microbiome: “Sourdough serves to improve taste, but finding health differences in the microbiome, which is so complex, seems to “It’s forcing the machine a little, he says.
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