The rise and fall of sliced bread – and the evils of food additives

Two of John Scott’s research reports last week, although not directly related, caught my eye.

The first was an article in the Daily Mail quoting a recent Mintel report about sliced bread and its decline in popularity – well, relative decline at least. Eighty per cent of the UK population still buy sliced bread and 90% eat it so ‘real bread’ has a long way to go! None the less, sales of sliced bread did fall in 2014 by £100 million while in 2015 brown sliced bread sales were down by 7% and white sliced by 4%.

Mintel say that shoppers are put off by the amount of sugar and carbohydrates in sliced bread while 56% of those polled said they would like breads with fewer additive and preservatives. Concern over obesity and  ‘avoiding wheat/gluten (20% of respondents) as part of a healthy lifestyle’ are thought to be the main drivers.

For real bread enthusiasts, gluten-filled or gluten-free, any turning away from the dreaded Chorleywood bread processing method has to be a good thing. The process, which took over our bakeries in the 1960s and 70s, majorly increased profit margins by dramatically reducing the proving and baking time for bread. To achieve this they used intensive, high speed mixers to beat low protein flour with hard fats, ‘improvers’ (emulsifiers and enzymes) and yeast. However, in the process they deprived the bread of 90% of its nutrition (so that it had to be fortified with vitamins and minerals) and all of both its texture and its taste.

So thank goodness that the great British public might at last be waking up to the fact that those pappy, damp, scarily-long-life slices of wet cardboard, that cannot be rescued by even the very best butter and the most delicious home made jam, really are not bread! Real bread is a totally different, very nutritious and utterly delicious other thing…  Just ask Andrew Whitley and the other pioneers of artisan, craft baking! Well, actually a lot of people obviously are asking just that as, while the sales of sliced bread fell, the sales of bakeware for home baking soared by 55% this year!

The second of John’s reports was of a study led by Professor Aaron Lerner (of the Technion Faculty of Medicine and Carmel Medical Centre in Israel)  and Dr. Torsten Matthias (of the Aesku-Kipp Institute in Germany). The professors suggest the increased incidence of leaky gut syndrome (‘changes in intestinal tight junction permeability’) could be significant in the rising incidence of autoimmune conditions (coeliac disease, diabetes, MS, lupus etc). And…. That common additives widely used in the manufacture of processed food all weaken those ‘tight junctions’, leading to leaky gut syndrome…. Ergo, the excessive consumption of processed foods could be blamed for the rise in autoimmune conditions – or, to put it in the professors’ more measured terms:

‘There is a significant circumstantial connection between the increased use of processed foods and the increase in the incidence of autoimmune diseases.’

The additives that they found to be most likely to damage the functioning of those tight junctions which are meant to protect out immune systems from bacteria, toxins, allergens and carcinogens, are ‘glucose (sugars), sodium (salt), fat solvents (emulsifiers), organic acids, gluten, microbial transglutaminase (a special enzyme that serves as food protein ‘glue’) and nanometric particles’.

So all of those people who are avoiding gluten because they think it would be healthier to do so just might have a point!

If you want to read the full study, see here; if you want read a longer article on it in Newswise, see here.