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Go for whole-meal bread
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Consuming whole-grain bread is more healthy than the light, white bread.
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HISTORY CONTINUES: Nearly 12,000 years ago, Neolithic man began baking coarsely ground grain.
A FRESH loaf of bread from the baker's is one of the simple, earthy, satisfying pleasures of life. Nearly 12,000 years ago, Neolithic man began baking coarsely ground grain, mixed with water, on heated stones, smothering the dough with hot ashes.
Unleavened bread made from whole-grain flour of wheat, corn, millets and barley — used to make chapattis, tortillas and millet-cakes, is still popular all over the world.
Research proves that bread made from whole grains, like our humble chapatti, is more healthful than the light, white bread made from finely sifted flour with the outer and inner kernel removed from the grain.
By 2600 B.C., the Egyptians had invented the modern leavened bread by baking thick, fermented barley gruel. They soon found that while barley was good for producing yeast leaven, wheat was best for baking.
The Egyptian baking kilns spread all over the Nile delta, in the shadow of the great pyramids.
The pharaohs were buried with huge loaves of bread to keep them from going hungry in the afterlife. The Roman Empire gave the world the professional baker and the baker's guilds.
The early 20th century saw the fortification of bread with vitamins and minerals, while the later half saw a movement away from white bread to whole meal bread.
Adding soy flour to dough increases its protein content. White bread, containing a high percentage of starch, may be an easily digestible food for invalids, but the ease with which it is digested also makes it fattening.
START THE DAY: Bread is a favourite breakfast world over.
Rapid digestion leads to a rapid rise in blood sugar levels. This, in turn, leads to a spike in insulin secretion by the pancreas: insulin not only reduces the blood sugar levels, it also accelerates the conversion of sugar to fat.
Whole-meal bread, on the other hand, contains more fibre, which slows down digestion.
This leads to a steadier rate of secretion of insulin and absorption of sugar, with none of the wild swings in sugar levels seen with white bread.
Chapattis cooked without oil are an excellent food for diabetics because they digest slowly, delivering glucose to the blood stream in small quantities, unhurriedly and steadily.
A white bread-potatoes-white rice diet may be a recipe for heart disease and, especially in obese women, pancreatic cancer.
The high sugar-high insulin cycle may be responsible for the latter. In the laboratory, maintaining high levels of insulin increases the ability of pancreatic cancer cells to survive and grow.
Pancreatic cancer kills 95 per cent of its victims within five years of being detected. Something to keep in mind the next time you head for the bakery for your favourite bun.
RAJIV. M
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