What Have They Done to My Bread?

All you need to make bread is yeast, water, and flour. Therefore, what makes sliced bread so light and fluffy and last so long? Looking at the ingredients on the plastic wrap I found a whole pile of ingredients that I had no clue what they were. My philosophy in buying food is that if you don’t know what the ingredients are you don’t buy it or eat it.

After some investigation, I found that in the late 1950s the U.S. discovered a way to avoid the centuries’ old process of making bread that required 2-3 hours of fermentation. They did this by incorporating air and water into dough and mixing it with intense energy in high speed mechanical mixers. This process however required the quantity of yeast to be doubled to make it rise; chemical oxidants to get the gas in; and hardened fat to provide the structure – without the fat, the bread collapsed in early experiments – but the process removed the intensive labor, reduced costs and provided much higher yields of bread from each sack of flour as the dough absorbed so much more water.

Chemical oxidants were incorporated into a premix of additives with soya flour as the carrier for the chemical ingredients. The improver or ‘flour treatment agent’ was the logical way to add the fats needed into the bread. Hydrogenated fat is used because of its high melting point that gives the bread the structure it needs; Hydrogenated fat contains trans-fat.

As the “process” involved it was found that emulsifiers provided a similar function to the fat. They plug the gaps, enabling the dough to retain more air while also slowing down the staling of the bread. The most commonly used group of emulsifiers in bread is the data esters, relatively novel and complex compounds, made from petrochemicals. Salt goes into the bread to add flavor, up to 0.5g per 100g for white sliced, making it a high-salt food.

In the late 1990s, many western governments banned the use of chlorine to bleach white bread which led manufacturers to find alternatives such as enzymes and other novel ingredients. Enzymes have been used for centuries in food preparation but today many of them used in baking today are produced by genetically modified organisms. It is the microorganisms that produce the enzymes however, rather than the enzymes themselves, that have been modified. As enzymes are destroyed in the baking process it does not needed to be listed on the label, because they are not there!. The bread is then finished off by spraying it with either potassium sorbate or calcium propionate – both antifungal agents which inhabit the growth of moulds. Potassium sorbate is a poly unsaturated fatty acid salt. Do you really want to eat this kind of bread?

So this is what goes into the packaged, sliced white loaf of bread but what’s taken out?

The whole grain consists of an outer fibrous layer of bran; the germ and the inner white endosperm. The bran contains the fibre, some protein, fats and minerals. The germ contains most of the oils, some protein and the highest concentration of vitamins and minerals. The endosperm is mostly carbohydrate and some protein. The oil of the whole grain has traditionally been one of the most important sources in the diet of essential fats, which are vital for a healthy brain and nervous tissue function, but when whole wheat is milled to white flour, the most nutritious part of the grain is taken away. During the milling of white flour, over twenty vitamins and minerals present in the original wheat grain are reduced by half or more.

When you stone-grind flour the grain goes in at the top and comes out the side twenty seconds later. You know you have the whole lot. Also white flour can be matured by careful storage and does not need additives and enzymes. For thousands of years grain was milled this way. It’s a relative gentle process that leaves most of the nutrients intact. But a pair of stones can only grind 250 kilos of flour an hour which is why commercial bakeries have abandoned the process. While you can get excellent bread made from scratch from local independent bakeries, most purchase their flour from the big agribusinesses such as General Mills. Make sure you know what kind of flour was used in your bread.

Don’t forget too that there is extensive use of Pesticides and Fertilizers on wheat. Some of the main chemicals (insecticides, herbicides and fungicides) used on commercial wheat crops are disulfoton (Di-syston), methyl parathion, chlorpyrifos, dimethoate, diamba and glyphosate. Although all these chemicals are approved for use and considered safe, consumers are wise to reduce their exposure as much as possible. Besides contributing to the overall toxic load in our bodies, these chemicals increase our susceptibility to neuro toxic diseases as well as to conditions like cancer. Many of these pesticides function as xenoestrogens, foreign estrogen that can reap havoc with our hormone balance and may be a contributing factor to a number of health conditions. For example, researchers speculate these estrogen-mimicking chemicals are one of the contributing factors to boys and girls entering puberty at earlier and earlier ages. They have also been linked to abnormalities and hormone-related cancers including fibrocystic breast disease, breast cancer and endometriosis.

Much of this article was rewritten or excepted from Not On The Label by Felicity Lawrence; chapter four

Sources

http://www.mercola.com/2003/jul/26/avoid_wheat.htmf
http://www.weightlossresources.co.uk/food/labelling/not_on_the_label.htm
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11712
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3675/is_199606/ai_n8747244#continue
http://www.arrowheadmills.com/products/category.php?cat_id=63
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/felicity_lawrence/profile.html