When did you learn White bread lacks nutrients?

Cafe Society
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These days I bake most of my own bread so yeah, I know exactly what’s in it. Most of the time it’s whole wheat flour (real 100% whole wheat) mixed 50/50 with bread flour and just a bit of salt, oil, and a bit of sugar. Specifically 3 tablespoons across two loaves which, given my average slice size, works out to 1 gram of sugar per slice or 4 calories. As I’m not diabetic at this point in time I don’t worry about that although if someone asked I could leave that out entirely. Sometimes I add egg or milk or something else, and sometimes I use rye to make rye bread or add some oats or make a multi-grain…

(Contrast the 1 gram per slice in my bread to Hawaiian Sweet which is 7 grams per slice - it’s quite the difference)

I don’t recoil from commercially made white bread as if were poison but it’s not my daily fare. If it’s part of a decadent meal (like Thanksgiving) sure, why not? But it’s an occasional thing, not something eaten daily.

I don’t know when I learned white bread was less nutritionally sound than wheat - my family had wheat bread on the table when I was a child, although I recall some white as well. Certainly, by the time I was an adult and moving out on my own I knew that as a general rule wheat was better and that’s what I’ve been eating pretty much my whole life unless I was in a situation where white was the only choice.

It depends on the white bread.

If I make a loaf of white bread in my own kitchen using white bread flour (higher protein content), milk, and eggs with maybe a sprinkling of toasted sesame seeds on top with minimal or no added sugar then yes, there’s nutrition in that loaf. As opposed to a commercial loaf with stripped-down flour and lots of HFCS no, it’s not as nutritious. The OP wasn’t talking about good French bread from a boulangerie, they were talking about Wonder Bread which is a very different product.

In the very old days, as noted, white bread was a status food reserved for the wealthy and aristocracy. Such people weren’t eating just bread, their diets tended to be meat-heavy, which would supply B-vitamins lacking in their bread and thus would not suffer from pellagra or similar diseases. It was only when the poor were able to make white bread their daily bread, people who did not have a meat-heavy diet and during the early industrial age often had a pretty terrible diet, that such diseases started to show up in wheat-bread cultures.

In the pre-contact Americas there was no wheat, the grain culture was corn-based, but pellagra was avoided by either eating a substantial amount of meat and fish or, for the empire type cultures in Central and South America, by nixtamalization. ( Nixtamalization was also used in North America, but most Native/First Nations groups had a substantial animal flesh component to their diet. Groups like the Hopi, though definitely depended on the process for their maize.).

The big pellagra problem in the US happened in the Southern poor, people where corn was the dominant grain, nixtamalization was not a practice, and diets were poor in other nutritious foods. The mandate to fortify white bread helped alleviate these problems although really the best solution was a more varied diet with nutritious foods.

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In that case, I probably agree.

Also with the average “wheat” bread in stores with a bunch of colorants, molasses-resembling sugars or whatever else added to it, including maybe a tiny amount of seeds or nut fragments added for show.

It wasn’t clear to me from the title or the OP.

But, I’ll still stand by a common-sense understanding of bread made with white flour as being just fine, as well as the white rice that 99.95% of the world eats (and many of whom would likely regard “brown rice” as something fit for a cat litter box), as well as the fact that potatoes are an important vegetable absolutely dense in valuable “nutrients” and vitamins.

As to the now clarified intent of the thread, I always knew the spongy stuff was crap, even as a kid. I still think it’s absurd hyperbole to claim it “lacks nutrients,” but it was never a question for me that it was not the good stuff.

It can make OK toast, I’ll admit, or some kind of grilled sandwich, but IMHO, it is not a bread to be consumed unless in dire straits and with no other options.

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I was raised knowing it.

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I was raised in the days of enriched flour, so I remember hearing the argument that whole wheat bread was better in terms of fibre (rather than in terms of unspecified “nutrients”).

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We bake maybe a third of the bread we eat. The other two thirds is typically bread we buy at the grocery store. It’s for convenience, so intended to fulfil the sandwich/toast role. Some of the time we get what folks are referring to as white bread, but most of the artisan whole grainy kinda loaves we eat are the ones we make at home. Up to the early 20th century, bread consumption historically represented a much higher percentage of the general public’s daily diet than today. Up until maybe a century ago bread truly was the staff of life. Nutritional deficiencies like pellagra were more prominent in environments where fewer dietary nutritional sources were available.

I’m not one of those ‘the whiter the bread the quicker you’re dead’ crowd.

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Same here. Although my mother wasn’t a fan of bread in general, so it wasn’t that we ate whole wheat bread, it was that we didn’t eat much bread overall. I never got to take a packed lunch to school; I was always signed up for the school lunch program.

But if we did have sandwiches for some reason, they were on the odious Wonder bread. My guess is that whole wheat bread probably wasn’t easy to purchase in the regular grocery store in the 1960s.

When I grew up and began cooking for myself I started baking my own bread, usually with a mix of white and wheat flours, as 100% whole wheat bread has short gluten strands and can be hard to knead, at least for an inexperienced bread baker. For a while I made a lot of Cornell Bread, which supplements a white flour dough with soy flour, milk powder, and wheat germ to replace nutrients lost in the milling process.

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I totally agree! I was raised on white bread, either from the grocery store or the breads my mom and grandma made. To this day I prefer white bread. The other breads always seem too dry, especially for sandwiches. A thick piece of bakery Italian bread toasted is heavenly…and white.

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I don’t think I ever ‘learned’ it, but did hear it a lot.

I have a memory of Consumer Reports (possibly early 1980s) testing bread nutrition by feeding it to rats. The surprise result was the critters did better on white than whole wheat. They theorized that something in the whole wheat blocked absorption of a specific nutrient. But… I can’t find on-line reference to the CU test.

Beyond that, when I look at nutrition labels of commercial breads, there usually isn’t much difference between white and non-white. Maybe a percentage point or two on some items. It seems that unless 80% of my diet was bread, the type of bread doesn’t matter much. That might not be the case for someone with glycemic issues.

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I like a good white bread too. Oroweat Country Style buttermilk bread makes excellent deli sandwiches. I believe it’s more nutritious than Wonder bread.

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I was raised on wonder bread. It’s weird and spongy and i haven’t eaten it in years.

But surely after we were married, my husband named all the bread we ate for a couple of years. And it was all whole wheat. And i grew to understand why white bread is popular.

Yes, i prefer a nice chewy baguette to white sandwich bread. And i often buy sandwich bread that has something other than just white flour in it. And i like a nice earthy brown bread from time to time. But … There’s something lovely and luxurious about white bread that brown bread lacks.

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I agree - bread made with white flour can be “part of a nutritious diet”. The problem was always when it comprised the vast majority of a person’s diet, in which case no, it’s not a great food. Plain potatoes are arguably a better choice for a monodiet although it’s far from ideal as well.

Someone eating a varied and nutrient-rich diet full of all sorts of foods doesn’t have to worry about their bread. Any deficiencies in the bread will be made up by other stuff they’re eating such as legumes or various vegetables even if they’re not getting a lot of meat and/or fish. In fact, bread can cover some of the “deficiencies” of legumes to make the whole better than the sum of the parts, even if the bread component is less than wonderful.

As I said, the problem has always been when bread is the main thing people are eating. Hence the old saw “One can not live by bread alone”. The purpose in mandating that white bread be “enriched” by putting back in some of the vitamins and minerals lost in the milling process is to help reduce problems among the poor and others who aren’t getting a varied diet. And by and large it has had a positive effect. Just as mandating fortifying some foods with iron has reduced anemia and mandating adding folic acid to some other foods (including bread) has reduced neural tube defects.

The effects of these additions are not so apparent these days because in the US today even the poor mostly eat a variety of foods and have access to variety even if imperfectly. The effects were much more apparent back in the beginning of the 20th Century.

So, yes, if you eat a good diet it really doesn’t matter if you eat just white bread. Have at it. I happen to like a wide variety of breads and for daily consumption prefer a half wheat/half white mix I make myself but I’ll make white loaves for a change of pace just as I’ll make other varieties, and if I’m having a really crazy week I have been known to buy commercial bread. It’s not a big deal either way given the rest of my diet. Probably not a big deal for most Americans, although some people could probably benefit from dietary improvements.

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Commercial whole wheat bread contains sugar; it can have even more than white bread.

Pellagra is rare in developed nations today. People do just fine with enriched white bread in their diets.

[brief soapbox appearance] A common claim is that modern fruit and vegetable hybrids don’t have as many essential nutrients as old-time varieties; therefore you need to take dietary supplements to make up the difference.
For one thing, this claim is based on limited data. Also, any differences in nutrient value can readily be made up by eating a bit more of the vegetable or fruit in question, rather than having to depend on vitamin pills which lack beneficial bioactive compounds found in fresh foods. [/bsa]

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It doesn’t even need to be kneaded! My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method by Jim Lahey, Hardcover | Barnes & Noble®

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True. That is one reason I prefer to make my own.

My main reason for opting for 100% whole wheat when shopping for commercial bread is that it’s one way to avoid barley in the bread, either flour or malt, which I am allergic to. Fortunately, it’s not a severe allergy but it is a concern of mine. Not relevant for nearly everyone else in the population.

If you’re living in “The West” then buy whatever bread makes you happy.

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White flour has had the outer bran layer and the inner germ removed. All that’s left is the starchy middle.

Imagining that it’s good for you because it’s delicious and French is magical thinking.

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The el-cheapo sandwich breads must be made with floor sweepings these days. Trying to make a peanut butter sandwich, or even spread butter, would just destroy it. The final straw for me was when a slice broke in half under its own weight.

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Some people just seem to like it. When our kids were young we bought only whole grain brown bread (with ingredients carefully screened for sugar & saturated fats etc) , but as soon as they were old enough to start buying food for themselves, it was WonderBread all the way.

Sigh. We tried…

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As someone who regularly makes baguettes, 100% agree with this. Unless it’s been enriched in some way, it’s just really crunchy/tasty white bread.

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It may actually be less healthy than the enriched wonder bread. But a good baguette is delicious.

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How is this relevant to the thread, though? Twix bars are also delicious.