What Are They Doing To Our Bread?!

Have you looked at a bread label lately? I don't shop at the "regular" grocery store anymore, so when a loaf of our local grocery brand bakery bread showed up on the lunch table at work, I thought I'd check out the ingredients...out of curiosity. It was, in a word, disturbing.

When I was newly married, back in the stone age, I used to bake my own bread rolls. (They were delicious!) I know what should be in bread-- flour, water, yeast, a little sugar, a little salt, and (don't faint) lard. Of course lard was vilified years ago and replaced by shortening, which is much worse but has the good fortune of having an outstanding marketing program that hides all its faults and praises the fact that it doesn't come from an animal, so that's what I used before I knew better. Six ingredients for bread--that's it.

In today's world, however, there's a thing called "shelf life," which is currently sixty-seven and half years, give or take a decade, and to achieve this, a few additional ingredients are necessary.

Here is the makeup of that innocent-looking loaf of Vienna style "bread"...labeled "Fresh," in case you were concerned about that. Whereas my aforementioned home-baked bread is only fresh the day it comes out of the oven, they can label this bread "fresh," because it has been engineered to appear fresh indefinitely.

Wheat flour enriched with
      Niacin
      Reduced iron
      Thiamine mononitrate
      Riboflavin
      Folic acid
Malted barley flour
Water
Vegetable shortening [partially hydrogenated soybean, cottonseed and/or canola oil]
Salt
Sugar
Diacetyl tartaric acid esters of mono-diglycerides [DATEM]
Soy flour
2% or less of mono-diglycerides
Potassium bromate
Ascorbic acid
L-cysteine enzyme
Azodicarbonamide [ADA]
Fresh baker’s yeast
Yeast
Starch

This isn't bread, it's a chemistry experiment!

Lets take a look at the additional ingredients. What are they? Why are they there? And what's wrong with them?

• Enriched with...(five synthetic nutrients):  The refining process strips flour of its nutrients. Flour that has been enriched trades out the natural nutrients for synthetic substitutions. Synthetic vitamins may or may not be better than no vitamins at all, but understand that synthetic vitamins are not whole vitamins - they are isolated fractional parts of whole vitamins. Vitamins naturally occurring in your food are always better.
• Malted barley flour:  Used as a dough conditioner to get a softer bread. It contains some tannins which may aggravate headaches in people sensitive to migraines.
• Shortening:  contains trans fats (trans fats make you sick and fat)
• DATEM:  a chemical emulsifier used to create a springy, chewy texture (no real health studies done, but "considered safe" by the FDA); often derived from genetically modified soy bean oil
• Soy flour:  Soy beans are one of the largest agricultural crops in the U.S. We are producing so much of it, the soy industry is working hard to find as many uses for it as possible. Soy is one of the top eight food allergens and yet it is showing up in one form or another in nearly every manufactured food product. Even though soy is touted by its industry as a "health" product, there are many problems with it, chief among them its role as an endocrine disrupter. Soy flour is not a good bread flour, so its purpose in bread is likely as a filler.
• Mono-diglycerides: These are emulsifiers that contain trans fats. We should all know by now how bad trans fats are. They are associated with heart disease, inflammation and obesity.
• Potassium bromate:  A dough conditioner added to strengthen the dough and make it raise faster when low-quality flour (such as soy flour) is used. Potassium bromate is known to cause cancer! 
• Ascorbic acid:  An oxidizer - produces a lighter loaf of bread, but reduces flavor; speeds the raising process.
• L-cysteine:  Another ingredient to aid in the quick-raising of the bread, this ingredient very likely comes from China and is derived from human hair (from barbershop floors?), duck feathers, and hog hair.
• ADA:  It's a dough conditioner that also bleaches the flour. It's banned in Europe because studies have shown it may cause asthma and allergic reactions.
• Starch:  Wheat flour already contains starch; it's hard to say why this is an added ingredient-- you can decide for yourself whether or not it's an acceptable additive.

Fifteen additives to your loaf of store-bought bread.

But take heart. There are still purists in the world making good bread for those of us who just don't have the time or energy to make our own. Here is the ingredient list from a loaf of bread made in the bakery of my local "health food" store:

Unbleached hi-gluten white flour
Water
Honey
Yeast
Salt
And a light egg-wash

They also make an excellent sour dough bread and a wonderful spelt flour & flax seed loaf-- my favorites.

Bread doesn't need chemicals. Yes, you'll probably have to freeze it and take out only what you will eat from day to day because this kind of bread, like grandma's, doesn't have a shelf life as long as, well... Grandma. When I get a loaf of bread nowadays, I pull out my parchment paper, tear off about five narrow strips, cut each into four squarish pieces and separate each slice of bread. Then I return the separated loaf to its original bag and stick it in the freezer. Easy peasy...every slice as fresh as the first. (Bread will keep in your freezer for a few weeks--much longer than that and it will dry out or freezer-burn.)

Actually, I'm still on the fence about bread altogether. There are real problems with white flour and what it does to the body. The best flour, of course, is freshly milled flour-- because the deep nutrition of wheat is in the wheat germ. And the wheat germ loses its nutrient levels very soon after being crushed-- within a day or two. Flour that has been milled, sifted clean of the wheat germ and stored for weeks or months will not have any appreciable nutrition. It will, however, still contain gluten, which is difficult to digest, carbohydrates, which are responsible for stimulating insulin production, and anti-nutrients (phytic acids that block mineral absorption) ... I will be talking more about this in a forthcoming post.

But who doesn't love the taste of real traditional bread. Warm from the oven or toaster, plastered with a thick slab of pasture butter. YUM! I don't think I'll ever be able to give it up completely.

At the same time, I will never again trust a loaf of bread without a label-- that I didn't make myself.