Be Good to Your Gut by Eve Kalinik

Author:Eve Kalinik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

why bread isn’t all bad

Poor bread. When it comes to nutrition, it has had a bad rap in recent decades. The low carb diet obsession didn’t help, and bread is also often called out for its ability to make people bloated and put on weight. But is that really the case? For millennia, all bread was leavened using naturally occurring yeasts. However, after the introduction of commercial yeasts, bread became more widely available, but it was also more manipulated and tasteless, with a long list of additives and other suspect ingredients. The majority of bread today is prepared and processed in a completely different way from its naturally fermented ancestor – sourdough.

Sourdough is made with minimal ingredients and like other fermented foods uses a starter culture that allows bacteria to flourish. In the case of sourdough this is a mix of flour and water that is left in a warm place to ferment and multiply. As its name suggests, sourdough has a distinctive sour taste that comes from the airborne wild yeasts and Lactobacilli bacteria that develop in the starter: the slightly ‘off smell is the result of those bacteria and the acids produced during fermentation simply ‘doing their thing’. Once the starter is good to go you can make your sourdough. It is the long fermentation process that makes sourdough generally much more digestible than other types of bread, as the lactic and acetic acids work to predigest starches in the grains. These same acids also help to neutralise phytates, some of the chemical ‘anti-nutrient’ substances mentioned in Chapter 4. These occur naturally in grains and can create digestive discomfort as well as affecting the absorption of nutrients that sourdough has to offer, which include iron, zinc, magnesium and folic acid.

Furthermore, because of this fermentation process, the gluten in the flour is almost entirely degraded into amino acids so it becomes easier to digest and less likely to cause reactions. This has been demonstrated in studies where individuals who usually react to gluten showed normal values of blood and intestinal markers when consuming fresh sourdough.

All of this goes to highlight the fact that even where food allergies or intolerances are concerned it is a lot more complicated than simply ruling out food groups that can have lots of nutritional benefits. This leads us nicely on to the other big debate: dairy.

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