Half a cup (which is what the receipe I posted above) is not “miniscule” in my book. The point I was making anyway that the desire to put loads of sugar/HFCS in bread is US thing, store brought bread in the UK has far less sugar in the the US,
Except that your cite wasn’t relevant. Probably 99% of the bread eaten in the U.S. is plain old bread: yeast flour water salt and a tablespoon or so of sugar or honey. Dessert bread with dates and molasses and a half cup of sugar per 4 cups of flour aren’t really what we mean by bread.
Look at Wonder Bread. 3g of sugar per 28g of carb grams.
And then compare to Hovis bread: 1.4g sugar per 17.8 carb grams. It’s pretty much identical in sugar content.
What’s more, the UK version is a bigger slice - the small variation in sugar content is outweighed by the portion size.
I think you are operating under a misconception about US food being excessively sweet or you are underestimating the amount in your own foods.
Errr… According to your own figures the US bread has TWICE the sugar by weight as the British one, 3.5% versus 7.0% (Hovis has 3.5g per 100g, Wonder Bread 2g per 28g).
No, you’re combining two different figures.
The serving size has nothing to do with the nutritional value. Both breads sugar:carb ratio are nearly the same.
If your bread has a different number of carbs per gram of serving size, then there is some portion of your bread that is either fat (about the same in both) or indigestible fiber (Hovis has more fiber than Wonder Bread). In practice, UK bread is a tiny bit chewier and comes in thicker slices. The taste is pretty much identical. Even if you are getting an extra gram of sugar or so per 100g of bread, that is still not “loads of sugar”. Your example is like placing a lead sinker on one piece of bread and then claiming that it has less sugar per weight (which it does, but not per nutritional calorie, ehich is the important number.)
Either way, it’s not even close to your cite of 1/2 cup of sugar - that was a 4 cup bread recipe, making the sugar content 1/8th of the dry ingredients plus more from the molasses and even more from the dates.
Which is why I was comparing percentages not serving sizes. Irregardless of whether you eat a loaf or half a slice, you will be eating TWICE the sugar if you are eating the US-made bread than you would if you ate the same weight of the British-made one.
The recipes I quoted weren’t “sweet” bread they were regular white or wholemeal bread recipes. In fact I have my US bread-machine recipe book in front of me as I write this, and there isn’t a single recipe that doesn’t have 1/2 or 1/4 cup of sugar in it.
Actually looking back the Wholemeal one was. But here is a regular wheat one that does (and I didn’t have to search for it, it was the first one that came up on google).
I’ve found in the US wholemeal bread seems to have far more sugar than white bread (which already has quite a bit).
Another critique of HFCS: http://www.thatsfit.com/2010/01/18/low-fat-caused-obesity-epidemic/?ncid=webmaildl5
That’s not really a critique of HFCS - it’s a complaint against the sugar in our diet, and the only thing he says about HFCS specifically is that it’s cheap.
If this was already mentioned and I missed it, I apologize. But it’s important to understand that the “high fructose” in HFCS is as distinguished from plain corn syrup, wihch is almost entirely glucose. The HFCS used in sodas, for example, is engineered to mimic as closely as possible the profile of sucrose in sodas. I’ve researched this as extensively as the resources of the Internet permit and could find nothing showing HFCS is worse than sugar. Neither is health food and overconsumption of either carries pretty much the same health risks.