The Truth About Bread | Is it bad for you? | What bread does to your body

In this post I will be talking about bread. Even if you’re a carnivore you probably love bread.But we have to be careful. Bread is not what it used to be. Bread is basically a highly refined, processed, hunk of sugar. Let’s talk about that. 

We’re told, especially back in the 80s and 90s, with nutrition and dietetics that complex is better than simple. You’ve heard that right? “Complex carbs are better than simple carbs.” 

Well, what does that actually mean? A complex carbohydrate is simply that the plant has taken sugar molecules and hooked them together, creating a polysaccharide. It made a chain of those. So think of a chain of a bunch of sugar units hooked together. We know that as starch or complex carbohydrate. But when you consume complex carbs or starches they taste bland, why? Well, that’s because in our mouth, the glucose units are still hooked together. We start to break that down slowly in our mouth, if you actually held some starch in your mouth like rice or pasta for a while you would actually start to taste sweet. 

Bread gets stored as fat

So it’s complex. We’ve been told that for years. That’s what these dietitians say. So you think you’re good, not so fast. Bread is a whole bunch of complex carbohydrates. Yes, but it’s not the same as a whole food like rice, potato, legumes, beans, peas, lentils. Bread is going to break quickly apart into glucose units very rapidly. Can you slow that down? Certainly with fiber, with protein, with fat, for sure, but it still ends up being what’s called a very high glucose load in your body. You eat bread and get all this starch that quickly breaks down and popped apart into a bunch of glucose units that goes to the liver, and our liver has to decide what the heck am I gonna do with this? If I can’t burn it off? What does it have to do? It has to change that glucose into triglyceride to get prepared for where? Fat storage. A lot of your bread is going to quickly go to fat storage, because most of us are not elite athletes. We’re not running marathons. We’re not active enough to burn it off readily. So that’s one issue with bread. 

2% Whole Grains

Another big thing is that most bread is made from wheat, you can get gluten free, but the bread most people consume is wheat, and that is a huge genetically modified crop. I’m not vilifying farming by any stretch, they help feed to feed the world, farmers are awesome. However, we have to admit and be honest with each other that modern farming has produced what I would call Franken foods, very processed, and overly adulterated foods and one of those is wheat. 

Wheat is a GMO crop. It’s going to be heavily sprayed with pesticide. The wheat that you’re consuming is not the same as it was 100 or 200 years ago, even what they consume in the rest of the rest of the world, like in Europe. The wheat we consume in America is going to be hybridized into a different type of grain in order to produce certain textures for that food manufacturer. So in other words, it’s a highly refined product. There’s almost no fiber and in fact, your whole grains when you see whole grain on the label. The USDA allows manufacturers to put 2% Whole grains in that product and label it a whole grain so you’re getting 98% white flour and they will use caramel coloring in wheat bread, it’s not real wheat bread, it’s gonna be bread that has been dyed with caramel coloring and caramel coloring is a pretty nasty little dude. 

They take sugar in and scorch it with ammonia.. Which doesn’t sound like something I want to eat. 

Then to add more insult to injury, bread has a lot of yeast in it now. Which has been consumed for a long time, back in even biblical days and before that, they used yeast. The problem is that so many people nowadays, especially a huge percentage of the patients that I test, have a huge problem with yeast overgrowth. So we’re adding more yeast to the problem, and unless you break that cycle, it’s going to be really tough to heal your body. 

So that’s just some of the things that make bread an issue. I’m not saying it’s the worst thing in the world, but you have to be careful with your bread. That includes: pasta, wraps, pancakes, its all bread no matter which way you slice it. And last thing I’ll end with too is that all that low fiber starchy kind of goop creates a glue in your gut, full of gluten. Gluten destroys the gut. We can talk about that another time. But gluten is a really huge health bomb for most people. But that sludgy type gunk will often stick to the inside of the intestine creating impacted wastes and it really slows down motility. You’re not going to be able to eliminate or poop as much, it’s going to really cause a lot of problems. So I’d be really careful with consuming bread. Even your gluten free breads you gotta be careful. Those are still made with potato starch, rice, so you’re still not getting a lot of health benefits from gluten free bread, although less gluten is still better in my opinion for most people.

Hopefully this was helpful. Rethink bread a little bit, try to replace it with more whole grain, sprouted oats, and brown rice.

Let’s work together on your health!

Dr. Jason

Naturopathic doctor in Lansing, MI