Brown Bread ( Bran Or Just Colour ) & Weight Loss – Bread a popular food in our daily life or we can say a part of our daily life has been present since the dawn of agriculture as one of the earliest artificial food. It has been used as an easy source of breakfast e.g. sandwiches, bread omelet, pizza, bread butter etc.
Process & Ingredients of BREAD
Conventionally bread was made by fermenting four ingredients- flour, yeast, water & salt and then baking it. Nowadays every process is automated and so is this bread making. By the rising industrial revolution companies are playing with our health and thus for taste and competitive prices they are adding hazardous chemicals like calcium propionate, amylase, chlorine dioxide and L-cysteine hydrochloride.
BROWN BREAD
There are many versions of bread available in the market and one of them is brown bread. A bread which is light brown in color contains whole wheat flour, germ & endosperm. The bran or the outside covering of seed is full of vitamins and fiber. The germ is rich in vitamin E, protein & fat. The endosperm consists of wheat’s protein & carbohydrate. Many of us would be eager to know that what makes the bread brown???? It is because whole wheat contains raw wheat germ and bran and is not treated with bleaching chemicals as white bread.
Here again companies play game and these lazy manufacturers for their profit-share and competition add color to the white bread by adding caramel.
Now white bread contains added sugars and high fructose corn syrup and is often bleached with harmful chemicals like chlorine dioxide, potassium bromate or benzoyl peroxide and with bare any nutrient left the slice of bread acts as a table sugar for your body which results in increased insulin levels. Added caramel means add on health issues as there will be now more glycogen in your body.
So don’t get fooled brown bread is just a marketing gimmick.
How to choose the brown bread
The simple rule of thumb while buying bread is we should not go by color of the bread for knowing its nutritional value but look for ingredients. The first ingredient must be whole wheat (Atta) or whole meal flour. Should not buy if only wheat flour or refined wheat flour is written and whole wheat flour is mentioned as fourth or fifth ingredient. If the ingredient reads “enriched”, the bread is same as white bread.
Reasons to avoid bread
- First of all bread has nothing to do with essential nutrients like in fruits and vegetables. So if you are hungry then eat something which provides nutrients to your body
- It contains harmful substances like high corn and fructose syrup, preservatives and bleaching agents which can directly raise the sugar level in your blood.
- Bread is full of gluten. Studies showed that gluten can cause health problems like bloating, harm to the intestinal walls and stool inconsistency
- It raises bad cholesterol level in your body
- Maida in bread contains alloxan, added as a bleaching agent or formed as a byproduct of bleaching. Alloxan is a toxic glucoseanalogue, which selectively destroys insulin-producing cells in the pancreas (that is beta cells) when administered to rodents and many other animal species. This causes an insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus .
So people who want to stay slim should not include bread as their major part of their diet.
Then what’s the better option over bread?
We like to prefer bread over leftover food. We actually can eat 2 days before made slice of bread but not the leftover ROTI from last meal. According to Guru leftover roti is more desirable than bread as it is prepared form flour from which roughage is not removed as bread. Moreover the absence of yeast in roti also makes it a healthier option as yeast can cause digestion problems.
So if you miss bread so much than you can have it occasionally but not regularly.
