The Truth About White Bread

Every time I see a commercial advertising its white bread or its bleached flour “enriched” with vitamins and minerals, I can’t restrain a laugh or two.

It’s shocking and appalling how widespread the lie is; “Enriched” white bread, despite a common misconception, is not good for you, for a wide variety of reasons.

Firstly, it is vital to understand how white bread is made. The good things from the grains involved are extracted through a volatile process (but that’s for another article), then the grains are bleached to make them all white and pretty; then, the vitamins and minerals are forced back into the grain, and starched, to assure consistency in the texture of the bread. If it was not for this starching, the bread might feel like gum in your mouth.

The process of the extraction and reintroduction of the vitamins and minerals (the good) out of and back into the bread denatures some of the nutrients, rendering them useless to your body. It’s a reasonable estimate that about half of the nutrients listed for white bread never enter your body and are used as they were intended by nature to be.
So, we have established one of the reasons, and not even the only reason, for not eating white bread: diminished nutritional value for equivalent or higher amounts of calories and starchy carbohydrates.

What of the starchy carbohydrates?

For one, they are not the kind that your body can use efficiently. When the grain was processed and artificially starched after being bleached, the starch used was not the grain’s natural starch. It was altered, unnatural starch that naturally does not go with the grain it has been paired with. The grain and the starch do not interact well. Never mind the fact that the starch is an unnecessary carbohydrate placed in the bread to make it mimic real bread, and can only barely be utilized by the body as energy, but is still able to be converted into fat.

The starchy carbohydrates in this white bread result in an insulin spike. Insulin serves several purposes involving blood sugar regulation, and such. But for most Americans, it is unknown that insulin serves another purpose: it regulates the ability of the body to use fat for energy.

When your body is pumping insulin into the blood so it can process all the altered, unnatural lies-of-carbohydrates you shoved into it, the insulin prevents your body, for several hours following consumption (and that’s if you don’t eat any more similar carbohydrates–given today’s society, that’s highly unlikely) makes it much, much harder than it should ever be to shed fat, even given intense exercise.

The artificial starchy carbohydrates in the white bread make it harder for you to lose fat, but they do not make it harder for you to gain fat. And because of the nature of these carbohydrates, they are almost immediately put into fat storage.

There’s also the consideration of what the white bread does when it enters the body. White bread is not like normal, real bread, and this is one more reason why. Have you ever just let a piece of white bread sit in your mouth for a while? It gets very sweet, like sugar. This is because that’s what white bread breaks down into: sugar. Not just natural sugar, artificial or altered sugar, that only serves to further the insulin spike that the unnatural starchy carbohydrates started initially.

It’s a little known fact that sugar not only gives you energy, spikes insulin, and then makes you crash when the insulin does, but it also inhibits muscle repair (yes, that’s right.) and can even impair muscular strength levels, and, in severe cases, actually result in the burning off of muscle as fuel for the body (as the extremely heightened levels of insulin make it impossible for fat to be utilized, and the given carbs are of little to no use).

Long-term white bread consumption has been linked to diabetes and the recently discovered metabolic syndrome X, among other insulin-related problems.

Next time, go whole-grain. Or get a (real) corn tortilla.