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Comment by YeGoblynQueenne | Hacker News Reader

I think there's some fudging of the terms here. When the article is talking about "bread" being healthy- well, there's bread, and then there's bread. Supermarket bread (sliced, packaged) typically lists a couple dozen ingredients. Ordinary bread... you know, bread-bread, like the one some of us bake at home, is made of: flour, water, salt, leavening agent (yeast or sourdough for those as have the patience). Bread-bread is probably healthy especially if you make it with (expensive) wholemeal flours. But supermarket bread? I don't think so.

Same goes for breakfast cereals and breakfast cereals. e.g. there's oatmeal and weetabix that are basically just a bit of fiber, not the healthiest thing you can eat but won't kill you. And then there's ... well my favourite poison is Kellog's Smacks and it's basically just as nourishing as eating cardboard with sugar on top.

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Nova makes this distinction already. “Freshly made” bread is considered category 3 (processed). That said, what distinguishes supermarket bread from freshly made bread?

Literally the only difference is typically some sort of preservatives, some added vitamins, and possibly a dough conditioner.

In general, bread is just not that healthy if you make the fluffy white kind. The preservatives and slicing have little to do with it. If anything, the added vitamins may make it healthier than something you make at home.

The biggest nutritional change in bread in what type of flour is used (and if any other grains/seeds are used). The bran and germ of the wheat berry contain a decent part of it's nutritional value in protein, fat and insoluble fiber. The more refined a flour is the less of those parts it contains. Even unbleached white flour naturally has a decent micro-nutrient profile of vitamins from the endosperm.

What really sets apart the typical white flour seen in most processed products in the US is the bleaching process, which mostly serves to make the flour more visually appealing. It also destroys a large percentage of the micro-nutrients. For many flour products the added vitamins you mention are added back in making the flour "enriched", but really this is just trying to match the nutrient profile of unbleached white flour. It's unlikely the added vitamins you see in the nutrition label alone would make a bagged, commercial pan loaf healthier than even the equivalent you would make at home.

Lack of whatever mythical micro-nutrition you speak of in bleached white flour is not going to meaningfully make any difference in folks dietary outcomes. It's certainly not what is making people fat, or what is making them crave to eat too much bread.

the root cause, at least for bread, is pretty simple; US supermarket bread has a lot more sugar than freshly baked bread, because sugar is a preservative.

You’d be wrong about that, though.

Wonder bread white has 140 calories, 1.5g of fat, 5g of protein, and 29g of carbs for two slices. 5g of claimed added sugar.

In comparison, a recipe I’ve used to make very good white bread (the zojirushi recipe for their bread maker, for reference) has, for an equivalent weight of bread: 137 calories, 2.2g of fat, 3.9g of protein, and 24.8g of carbs. The recipe has roughly 2.5g of “added sugar” per that bread weight.

I wouldn’t consider 4g more of carbs per equivalent weight, or 2.5g more sugar, to be a “lot” more sugar.

I mean, that’s double the added sugar. The US recommends only 50g of added sugar per day. And you’re generally not eating only two slices of bread; in the US breakfast mainstay that is peanut butter and jelly, both the peanut butter and jelly also usually have sugar.

> And you’re generally not eating only two slices of bread;

Aren't you? What meal typically has more than 2 slices of bread? A sandwich is two. Breakfast meals where toast is used is typically 2 slices.

And, if we limit ourselves to the 50g of added sugar a day, I'd say 10% of that for a component of one meal is pretty reasonable.

I was regularly eating around 8 to 10 thick slices per day of bread at one point

* 4 for breakfast as toast

* 4 for lunch to make 2 sandwiches (1 sandwich would be too small and I would be hungry all afternoon)

* sometimes another 2 with soup or an evening snack.

I think that speaks more to your diet than anything else. Regardless of the amount of added sugar, that’s an absurd amount of carbs to be getting just from bread and cannot be particularly healthy, no matter the type of bread.

That is a surprising assertion, given that eating the majority of one's calories in the form of bread was the normal human experience for thousands of years - practically since the beginning of agriculture - throughout Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa!

"Give us this day our daily bread", the old prayer goes: because bread was food, and everything else was accompaniment.

What is your point? That doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Thousands of years is literally nothing on an evolutionary scale. Modern humans have existed for at least 100,000 years.

Bread became ubiquitous because it didn’t require hunting or gathering, i.e. it supported ever growing communities of stationary humans. Not because some ancient nutritionist decided it was good for you.

My point? If you think a staple food vast numbers of human beings have relied on for literally all of recorded history (not to mention thousands of years prior) is "not particularly healthy", then perhaps your definition of "healthy" is a little too exalted for everyday use.

Again, “literally all of recorded history” is literally meaningless. I also find it bizarre that you would find something as simple as a well balanced diet (i.e. one humans enjoyed for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the agricultural revolution) as an “exalted” definition of healthy.

Let’s not use thousand year old traditions based on poorly understood nutritional science to guide today’s practices.

If you get the majority of calories from bread then you are, at best, eating far from the optimal amount of protein and lacking some useful nutrition. At worst, you’re eating a poorly balanced diet that will lead to overeating or malnourishment (or both).

You can't really tell how much sugar there is in baked bread simply based on the amount added in a recipe.

Yeast ferment sugar, so depending on how much yeast you have, how active they are and the fermentation time, a small amount of sugar can easily be long gone by the time the bread comes out of the oven.

That goes for both store bought and homemade.

most definitely not. sugar doesn’t even make top-10 list

Not saying it’s the top ten ingredients of supermarket bread but it certainly has more added sugar than homemade bread

Subway "bread" had too much sugar to be classified as a bread in Ireland

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/03/919831116/irish-court-rules-s...

I can't eat supermarket bread for that reason. I didn't grow up in the US and find the bread here too sweet. (i.e. any added sugar)

I bake my own bread (can't remember the last time I bought some) without sugar.

You don't need sugar if you use sourdough starter with an overnight fermentation in the fridge.

> Even unbleached white flour naturally has a decent micro-nutrient profile of vitamins

That doesn't match my experience, at least in the US. Per 1/4 cup:

KA organic unbleached white flour - 0 vitamins or minerals

Arrowhead Mills organic unbleached white flour - 5 mg calcium, 36 mg potassium

Bob's Redmill organic unbleached white flour - 7 mg calcium, 41 mg potassium

Caputo 00 - 9 mg calcium, 0.2 mg iron, 48 mg potassium

These levels aren't remotely close to decent.

There's a cool book I didn't finish White Bread by Aaron Bobrow-Strain. It talks about the history of store bought bread supplanting home baked bread, and the marketing wars waged both for and against store bought bread. I'm gonna start it up again and I recommend it.

> But supermarket bread? I don't think so.

Why? The point of the quotation was to question if this was a problem in the quantities listed. I know I’d rather eat whole grain enriched supermarket bread than refined white flour bread from some low protein source wheat.

The whole grain bread is definitely preferable, but it is still very likely to have added oils, gums, and/or preservatives. I think their main point is that supermarket bread is rarely made of just bread. There are exceptions but that requires one to first take the time to identify them and then fork up the extra dough (punintended).

In Australia, our supermarket bread almost always has “vegetable oil” in the ingredients. They can’t even be bothered sticking to one type of vegetable oil or listing which ones they use.

I’ll take the home bread

In NZ pretty much every supermarket bakes their own bread which to me seems same like bakery or home bread.

Because they use the oil for how it changes the texture, not for the taste. So corn oil is just as good as soy oil is just as good as canola... and they're going to use whatever is cheapest.

Yup. This is standard in the US for most product ingredient listings I'd say.

Where I live, our supermarkets bake "bread-bread" every morning and once in the afternoon! We also have bakeries here that do the same.

I bake bread at home nearly weekly, it goes stale and crumbly in about 3 days at room temperature and moldy by 7. I bought some pita and didn't use it all up. It was still soft, pliant, mold-free after 2 weeks. I tossed the thing, never going to buy it again.

Why? Are you scared of perfectly good products?

If you added preservatives to your bread it wouldn't stale quickly either. Add a small amount of white vinegar to your bread and it will stale much less quickly.

The question is what kind of preservatives. Formaldehyde is a preservative. Acetic acid is a component of long-ferment lean dough such as sourdough, and an insignificant component of short-ferment (~2 hours) enriched dough, such as sandwich bread. It will not help with enhancement and preservation of texture, in this case the gelatinization of starch in the finished product.

Unless you're suggesting that the pita bread you threw out was preserved with formaldehyde, there isn't much of a question here. Taking issue with bread keeping its freshness is in-and-of itself no bad. If you have issue with a specific preservative, perhaps discuss that specificity.

Let us go back to the beginning. Are you saying home-bake bread which molds in 7 days is comparable to store-bought bread which does not mold in 7 days. OK then, in which we have nothing to argue about. I have no scientific source to cite one is better or worse than the other. By all means, buy and consume bread that does not mold for a long time. That sounds good.

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