Is Bread REALLY That Bad For You?

I freakin’ love bread and I hate it when people tell me it’s bad for my health.

Just let me eat my damn Vegemite in peace and save your diet preaching for the next bloated female-influencer who gives up this crunchy goodness for the sake of her own flat stomach.

Bread is not bad for you. Let me say it again so you can hear me. BREAD IS NOT BAD FOR YOU.

Homemade, store-bought, dense, grainy, good, wholesome bread free of preservatives and sugar is not bad for you “” not in the slightest.

Light and fluffy, sugar-laden, processed to last for months bread, however, is bad for you. For all the reason above, plus some pretty nasty others that you really don’t want to know about because frankly, don’t eat it and you won’t have to!

The problem with all the bread-haters out there is not what bread does to their bodies but what they think bread does to their bodies. Like coffee stains your teeth “” after about 1 million cups “” so don’t drink it. UHUH!

Bread has a stigma attached to it because some ill-informed health nut said it will make you fat, give you heart disease or diabetes, make you low in energy and prevent your morning poop. Because of this you get extra moody and your production suffers “” all because you ate toast for breakfast, c’mon!

A little article in the Huffingtonpost recently, quoted numerous nutritional experts about their take on bread and our diets.

The verdict: bread is not bad at all “” AT ALL.

“I think bread gets an unfair rap,” Lyndi Polivnick, aka The Nude Nutritionist, told The Huffington Post Australia.

“It’s much healthier than people make it out to be. It’s often demonised as being a cause of weight gain but in truth, bread does not actually make us gain weight.

“In fact, it contains many nutrients that are really good for us — including thymin, folate and fibre. When you start cutting out carbs or bread you actually miss out on some of those nutrients.”

Simone Austin, Accredited Practicing Dietitian and Spokesperson for the Dietitians Association of Australia, agrees.

“It’s not bad for you. Not bad at all. There are probably better choices among the varieties that are available, but as a whole, its [bad] reputation is unfounded,” Austin told HuffPost Australia.

In fact, grain foods, like bread, play an important role in your diet by providing many nutrients, such as dietary fiber, vitamins and minerals. The Australian Dietary Guidelines recommends you eat six servings of grain foods each day, with half being from whole grain sources.

Bread is also a great source of carbohydrates, the body’s energy fuel. But the carbohydrates in wholemeal bread are digested more slowly than those in the more refined white bread, and so keep you going for longer. Wholemeal bread usually also contains more fibre and nutrients like vitamin B, calcium and iron.

Although there are some people who avoid bread because they have an intolerance for wheat itself, or to a protein found in wheat and some other grains called gluten.

Wheat intolerance can give rise to bloating, diarrhoea and other digestive problems, and requires blood tests and internal examinations for a diagnosis. But bread can still be on the menu if you are coeliac, intolerant or allergic it just needs to be made with wheat-free or gluten-free flours, such as rice, corn, potato, or polenta.

All in all, bread is the best. So instead of avoiding bread altogether, knowing what is in each slice and watching how much of it you eat each day is usually the healthier course.

And for those diet-conscious bread haters, carbohydrates found in bread are not the calories in your food: it’s more likely to be the fat you add to the carbs that do that.

Bread is absolutely not bad- at all!