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Health Benefits to Baking Your Own Whole Wheat Bread

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I think one of the greatest benefits received by baking your own whole wheat bread is the long term health benefits you reap. When you bake whole wheat bread you control every ingredient put into it. No artificial sweeteners, emulsifiers, no bleached then enriched flour and no other unnecessary additives that take away from the health of the bread.

Whole Grains

To see for yourself what I’m talking about, go get a loaf of bread that you’ve bought from the store, now read the ingredient list and google all of the really long words that don’t sound like natural ingredients. You will be shocked at what you discover.

For example, the ingredient “monoglycerides,” found in almost every store bought bread, is actually hydrogenated oil/fat otherwise known as trans fat. Hydrogenated oil is oil saturated with hydrogen at a high temperature. This creates tight bonds with the hydrogen which allows it to remain semisolid at room temperature and increases shelf life drastically by delaying rancidity. What allows it to be solid is how tightly the molecules of the fat bond to each other. In your blood stream this means the fat clumps to itself much easier and clogs your veins much easier.

This is why hydrogenated oils and trans fats have been labeled “the silent killer” because they dramatically increase the risk of coronary heart disease. The bread manufacturers try to be sneaky and put monoglycerides in the list of ingredients in place of hydrogenated oils to fool you. You could look at the nutrition panel on the same loaf of bread with the ingredient monoglycerides and under trans fats it will list zero grams. This is because under FDA regulations if the serving contains less than 0.5 grams of trans fat, the package is free to say it has zero.

But lets say you eat four slices of bread (with each serving containing 0.4 grams of trans fat) then you just consumed 1.6 grams of trans fat, despite the fact that the nutrition panel on your bread claims that it has zero grams of trans fat per serving.

You can’t trust store bought bread, it’s that simple. The bread manufacturing companies do what they can to save money in production of the bread but in the long run it costs you your health. The only solution that I’ve found is to bake your own bread. This isn’t as complicated as it sounds, it’s actually very easy once you learn how.

My favorite bread to bake is whole wheat bread because it’s so heart healthy and you get so many vitamins and minerals from it. If the whole wheat bread is made correctly you also get a really amazing tasting bread that can put store bought imitations to shame. I call them imitations because a lot of bread manufacturers actually use white flour to make “whole wheat” bread and then color it with caramel to make it look authentic. So again check ingredients on your bread. If the bread has unbleached enriched flour as the first ingredient you could actually be buying white bread disguised as whole wheat bread, look for caramel coloring in the ingredients list as well to prove this.

Other ingredients to watch out for:

Calcium sulfate: This is also known as plaster of Paris, this additive is used as a dough conditioner and firming agent. As it absorbs moisture and hardens quickly, one caution is that it can cause intestinal obstruction. It is banned in some countries.

Calcium propionate: This additive is used as a mold inhibitor but may be linked to migraines.

So do yourself a favor and start baking your own bread. It’s probably one of the greatest health choices you can make.

- Beth Scott

Beth Scott is the author of The Ultimate Whole Wheat Bread Baking Guide. For more information visit her Easy Bread Baking website.

 

Whole Wheat Bread vs White Bread – Which One Will Prevail?

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Junk food addicts argue with health food nuts, asserting white bread to be the best. The health food nuts retaliate exclaiming about how much better store bought whole wheat bread is than white bread.

The battle rages on…

On which side of this debate do you stand?

For that matter, which side should you REALLY be pulling for?

Lets weigh all the facts, the faults about each choice and determine which one we should honestly be proclaiming as “the honest to goodness best!”

The Faults of White Bread

  1. White bread is nutrition less. Even fortifying it with vitamins can’t replace half of the nourishment that is lost through the bleaching and sifting process that is used on the flour which white bread is make out of.
  2. White bread has a lot harmful chemicals and preservatives added to it to increase it’s shelf life, but they decrease your lifespan.
  3. White bread is practically tasteless. This is a pro to some people but a con to a lot of others who enjoy tasty food.

The Faults of Store Bought Whole Wheat Bread

  1. Store bought whole wheat bread would be extremely healthy and good for your body IF you could find a loaf made without fattening and nutrition less sweeteners like sugar (but no store that I know of sells any such thing).
  2. Store bought whole wheat bread contains, unfortunately, the same chemicals and preservatives that white bread does, also to lengthen shelf life.

On light of this information which viewpoint do you now hold to?

Neither hopefully. There is only one thing you can do to make sure you are getting the best tasting, highest quality and healthiest bread. And that is…

Bake your own whole wheat bread! Read why you should below.

The Virtues of Home Baked Whole Wheat Bread

  1. Home baked whole wheat bread tastes good. Home baked whole wheat bread has a very delightful taste that is probably the main reason (even more so than it’s health aspects) people prefer home baked whole wheat bread to it’s bland counterpart, white bread or unhealthy store bought whole wheat bread.
  2. Home baked whole wheat bread contains vitamins and minerals your body needs. Medical studies have proven that all the B vitamins in whole grain foods help you to have a healthy heart, and guard against heart disease.
  3. Baking your own whole wheat bread is not the least bit “difficult” either. Just learn the basics to baking bread along with a few proven recipes and you’ll be set.

- Beth Scott

Beth Scott is the author of The Ultimate Whole Wheat Bread Baking Guide. For more information visit her Easy Bread Baking website.

 

Is Your Bread Slowly Killing You?

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If you eat white (or any kind of store bought) bread, then here are a few things you should know before you put that next slice in your mouth.

For example…did you know that the inclusion of hydrogenated oils, artificial preservatives, emulsifiers, additives and other chemicals in bread became standard practice in the mid 1950′s?

Sliced Bread by Ciprian Dumitrescu

At this same time whole wheat flour was replaced by bleached, enriched white flour. In this process, grain is bleached and sterilized with chemicals to make it white and soft.

It is then artificially enriched by adding vitamins, minerals and other materials destroyed in the chemical process.

Despite what you may have been told, trying to ”enrich” something with the very vitamins and minerals that were removed from it in the first place, does not make it even half as healthy as the natural unrefined version.

When you think about this, it doesn’t even make much sense.

It is also a growing practice in many bread producing factories to replace white flour with substances like alum, ground rice, and whiting.

Alum is the most commonly used of all these substances, because it gives the bread a whiter color and causes the flour to absorb and retain a larger amount of water than it would otherwise hold.

This enables the factories to produce bread which imitates bread made from a higher quality flour.

This tainting of your bread with harmful chemicals, such as potassium bromate, emulsifiers (both commonly used in bread production), and alum, jeopardizes your health.

Do you know why your store bought bread has such a long shelf life?

The mysteriously prolonged shelf life is because of a particular emulsifier used in making the bread. This emulsifier is mainly used as a softening agent and tends to deceive buyers as to the real age of their bread.

This emulsifier can hide the signs that your bread is rotting (it certainly doesn’t stop the rotting) for a few extra weeks, but the harm it does to your body (and the harm in eating the half rotten bread) makes the cost for this ”convenience” very high.

Is it any wonder then, that every year a growing number of people just like you and I, are being hospitalized with illnesses and incurable diseases?

Is it possible for you to protect yourself and your loved ones against unhealthy and harmful bread?

Well, buying bread from a store is certainly not the right choice to make. Even if you buy commercially produced whole wheat bread you’re not getting healthy food.

A lot of times what passes for whole wheat bread is actually white bread colored with caramel.

If the first ingredient in a loaf of whole wheat bread is unbleached enriched flour, then you’re not truly buying whole wheat bread at all, just white bread (loaded with chemicals) that is disguised as whole wheat bread.

There is only one true solution to ensure that you avoid poisonous, toxic bread. And that is to bake your own healthy whole wheat bread.

This is no where near as difficult as it sounds. In fact it’s dead set simple. All you need is a good proven recipe, and an expert guide to teach you just once what to do.

- Beth Scott

Beth Scott is the author of The Ultimate Whole Wheat Bread Baking Guide. For more information visit her Easy Bread Baking website.