Brown Bread vs Whole Grain Bread
Which one should you pick?
When there is a debate over consuming healthy brown bread, it points primarily to ditching the traditional white bread we have consumed since childhood.
Bread ideally are made from five constituents- flour, yeast, water, oil and salt. But pick up any commercial bread and you will be surprised by the ingredients. Have a look:
The bread available in the market contains tons of sugar or high fructose corn syrup, palm oil, artificial colours, preservatives, acidity regulators, emulsifiers and many more. But, it’s still ‘whole wheat bread’.
Instead of cleaning the unhealthy ingredients in this bread, the marketers blamed it solely on white flour. Hence, the white package bread is an "unhealthy" choice.
The white bread is made of maida, the processed, refined wheat flour that loses most fibre and the nutrients that bind to the fibre.
Most retailers took advantage of this crucial wheat fibre loss aspect and have promoted brown bread as healthy in ads. Many advertisements state the high nutritional values of brown bread and as incredibly healthy! But are the claims valid? Are brown bread healthy, or whole-grain bread is healthy?
What really is brown bread?
The proclaimed healthy brown bread is mostly a sham, and it is mostly nothing but white bread with molasses and caramel colour. You can see through the ingredients to confirm it.
Check the first ingredient on the back of the pack when you buy brown bread. If that is refined wheat flour or "maida", it’s really just white bread. Also if you find the ingredient INS 150 at the end, remember that is the technical name of the brown food colouring.
And then comes the whole wheat bread…
Technically the wheat grain has three parts- the germ, the bran and the endosperm.
However, during the refinement process, the germ and the bran, which contains most of the fibre, lose out, and what remains is just the endosperm. But the whole wheat bread has all three parts intact. And hence, it is more nutritious.
So the whole wheat bread is much healthy?
It is not as simple as it seems.
Once again, look into the ingredients. If the first ingredient in the ‘atta bread’, or whole wheat bread is refined wheat, stay away from it.
The marketers named it whole wheat bread, but how much of it is to be used is not mentioned, so they trick us! So when you purchase whole wheat bread, get the bread 100% whole wheat bread, and check out the ingredients in the back of the pack.
Trust this helps,