The Wonder About White Bread Versus Whole Wheat

Looking for the best nutritional deal on bread amidst rising prices, the scuttlebutt about Wonderbread tells a tale. Perhaps reminiscence has the nostalgia of the old-fashioned white Wonderbread that we had as kids.

Almost a toy, the creative medium of the soft and malleable texture almost made it more fun to play with than to eat. The fun shapes rolled into worms, or marbles. They were something to toss at a sibling across the table.

Unfortunately, the food value of white bread was barely more than that of a pastry with empty calories.

In a hurry shopping at Walmart, the Wonderbread package of the new age deep brown slices of bread with a rustic appearance touts "stone ground" on a yellow, streaming label. But the ingredients are just as ordinary as any of the other offerings on the shelf that state whole-wheat flour as the first ingredient.

Granted, the focus on health has brought improvement. At least the whole grain can be augmented with cracked wheat or otherwise unadulterated grains. Yet the milling process still takes away valuable nutrition due to the heat created by high-speed machines.

One of the essential vitamins that gets milled out is vitamin E, which was formerly abundant in the authentic stone ground milling process.

Statistics show that sometime after WWII, the machine milling process began and subsequently, so did the incidence of more heart attacks. Without the vitamin E, which was milled out, there was no other source of, and very little cognizance of the lost food value.

At which time, the lovely, pure white loaf of bread had a more palatable appearance. Kids loved it, and the visual compliment of being white and soft was well received.

Later, when nutrition and its relationship to health and longevity became a focus, Wonderbread became a source of ridicule amongst nutrition-oriented folks of the sixties. But how would a parent make the changeover to unattractive brown colored bread? The other difficulty was that stone milling did gradually became obsolete.

One other nutritional factor about the old fashioned stone milled bread was that it was also a great source of naturally balanced B vitamins. These matched all of the other sources of B as found in nature, which always occur in a certain proportion.

After the inception of machine milling, some of the B vitamins were added back into the recipe. Limited testing on the effects of this maneuver showed dreadful results. Separating the B vitamins and distorting the natural proportions as found in nature became suspect as far as the cause of diminished food value.

B vitamins affect the nervous system, circulation and more. The suspicion that, when separated, the higher dose of one, such as niacin for example, create deficiencies in the list of the B spectrum.

Amazingly, Wonderbread has survived and rebounded with the new trends. They don't pump up the bread with parts of B complex, but now have added modified cornstarch as one of the top ingredients, and newly discovered culprit suspected of contributing to metabolic syndrome caused by the bombardment of sugar from the various synthesized food products.

Will wonders ever cease with Wonderbread? Hmm. It's something to wonder about when looking for the best nutritional buy.

Ref
"Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit" - Adelle Davis