Bread is a staple for nearly all of us and one of humanities oldest foods with the evidence of the first breads dating back over 12,000 years. At its most basic, bread can be and is often still made using just 2 ingredients – flour and water. Yeast is often added to bread along with salt, but you really don’t need much more than that for a delicious loaf. For example, did you know that the French Bread Law of 1993 regulates the ingredients of baguette specifying that no more than four ingredients can be used – wheat flour, yeast, salt and water?

The problem with bread, though, is that it can go stale quickly.

Whereas once, not so long ago, people would bake their own bread, modern food habits now increasingly rely on buying bread. And when you buy bread, it often takes a much longer time to get from oven to kitchen. For example, a loaf from the supermarket is baked, cooled, packaged, transported to a warehouse, transported to a distribution centre, transported to another warehouse, and finally put on the supermarket shelf. It’s then expected to still stay ‘fresh’ for another week or so. A baguette bought in the morning will be stale by the evening, wheras a loaf of bread bought in plastic from the supermarket might be ‘fresh’ for a couple of weeks.

Stopping bread going stale too quickly is a problem that manufacturers have ‘solved’ by adding chemicals. In this example of supermarket-bought bread there are 10 ingredients. The 6 ingredients following the initial 4 – wheat flour, water, yeast and salt – have not been added to make the bread more nutritious though. They’ve simply been added to make the bread cheaper and increase shelf life. After spending the past few years researching many of these ingredients, I don’t even consider three of those extra 6 ingredients as foods! You can read more about 2 of them here – the emulsifiers E472e and E481            

But people, quite rightly, still want local baker making fresh bread!

You would be forgiven for thinking a local baker would use better ingredients, make fresher bread, and sell tastier sandwiches. For us, here in Sheffield, we have a local baker – Roses the Bakers – who proudly state on their homepage:

“Our bread is baked fresh every morning, we never compromise on quality”

I have bad news though – I’m not sure that statement is entirely true. I think that they have compromised on quality to improve shelf life at the expense of our health. You’d hope that a loaf of ‘fresh bread’ from a local bakery that costs 3 times as much as one from Morrisons would be made from better ingredients – after all that’s what’s implied in the statement.

This is why I will never buy or eat bread from Roses the Bakers again

Picking a loaf of Roses the Bakers bread at random – the first one that came up for me in a Google search – I read the ingredients in horror!

Large Wholemeal Loaf

Ingredients: Wholemeal Bread [Wholemeal Wheat Flour [Wholemeal Flour (Wheat)], Water, Yeast [Processing Aids: Crodamol; Struktol, Potato Starch, Yeast], Dried sour dough improver [Flour Treatment Agent: Ascorbic Acid (E300), Anti-Caking Agent: Calcium Sulphate (E516), Emulsifier: Emulsifier Mono- and diacetyltartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E472e), Fermented Rye Flour, Rapeseed Oil, Wheat Flour], Demerera Sugar [Demerara Sugar, Sweetener: Glycerol (E422)], Shortening, Salt, Improver [Emulsifiers: Emulsifier Mono- and diacetyltartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E472e); Emulsifier Mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E471), Water]]

The ingredients I’ve highlighted in red have been linked by research such as the French NutriNet-Sante cohort study to health problems as horrifying as atrial fibrillation, breast cancer, prostate cancer, coronary heart disease, cerebrovascular disease. Many of the other certainly have no place in a loaf of bread, in my opinion!

But surely it can’t be all the bread from Roses the Bakers can it?

Well here’s a second one

White loaf

Ingredients: White Bread [Wheat Flour [Alpha Amylase (E1100), Flour Treatment Agent: Ascorbic Acid (E300), Wheat Flour (Calcium Carbonate, Iron, Thiamin, Niacin)], Water, Yeast [Processing Aids: Crodamol; Struktol, Potato Starch, Yeast], Salt, Shortening, Dried sour dough improver [Flour Treatment Agent: Ascorbic Acid (E300), Anti-Caking Agent: Calcium Sulphate (E516), Emulsifier: Emulsifier Mono- and diacetyltartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E472e), Fermented Rye Flour, Rapeseed Oil, Wheat Flour], Dried Sourdough [Flour Treatment Agent: Ascorbic Acid (E300), Dried Wheat Sour Dough, Processing Aid: Enzyme(s), Yeast], Improver [Emulsifiers: Emulsifier Mono- and diacetyltartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E472e); Emulsifier Mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E471), Water]]

And it goes on…

Flour cob

Ingredients: White Bread [Wheat Flour [Alpha Amylase (E1100), Flour Treatment Agent: Ascorbic Acid (E300), Wheat Flour (Calcium Carbonate, Iron, Thiamin, Niacin)], Water, Yeast [Processing Aids: Crodamol; Struktol, Potato Starch, Yeast], Salt, Shortening, Dried sour dough improver [Flour Treatment Agent: Ascorbic Acid (E300), Anti-Caking Agent: Calcium Sulphate (E516), Emulsifier: Emulsifier Mono- and diacetyltartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E472e), Fermented Rye Flour, Rapeseed Oil, Wheat Flour], Dried Sourdough [Flour Treatment Agent: Ascorbic Acid (E300), Dried Wheat Sour Dough, Processing Aid: Enzyme(s), Yeast], Improver [Emulsifiers: Emulsifier Mono- and diacetyltartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E472e); Emulsifier Mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E471), Water]]

And a fourth

Granary loaf

Ingredients: Granary Bread [Kibbled Wheat Flour [Flour Treatment Agent: Ascorbic Acid (E300), Kibbled Malted Wheat, Malt Flour, Wheat Flour, Wheat Gluten], Water, Yeast [Processing Aids: Crodamol; Struktol, Potato Starch, Yeast], Shortening, Salt, Dried sour dough improver [Flour Treatment Agent: Ascorbic Acid (E300), Anti-Caking Agent: Calcium Sulphate (E516), Emulsifier: Emulsifier Mono- and diacetyltartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E472e), Fermented Rye Flour, Rapeseed Oil, Wheat Flour], Improver [Emulsifiers: Emulsifier Mono- and diacetyltartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E472e); Emulsifier Mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E471), Water]]

in fact there apears to be very little produced by Roses the Bakers that I would feed to my children, or dog for that matter

So, what should I do instead?

Baking bread at home, for those who haven’t tried it, might sound daunting to begin with but it gets easier with time. For example, a bread maker means you can throw in the ingredients and a loaf of bread is ready in under 4 hours. And that’s bread that isn’t full of chemicals and poisons. You’ll also save money.

Home cooking was once the only option for most but and it’s becoming that way again – certainly if you want to be healthy. Having watched in horror over the past 40 years as food has changed from something healthy and nutritious to what is now often not much more than a load of chemicals in the form of food, it’s time to tell food manufacturers that it’s not acceptable.

Basically, the only way that food manufacturers change their behaviour is when the consumer votes with their feet. In other words, let’s just stop buying poisonous bread!

If you want to find out more I can recommend several books

Firstly, Ultra Processed People by Prof. Chris van Tulleken (of University College London) is a great place to start. You will never look at the ingredients of food ever again.

Secondly, Eat, Drink and be Healthy by Prof Walter C Willet (of the Harvard School of Public Health). This gives a much more in-depth look at food and what we should and shouldn’t be putting into our bodies.

Thirdly, Why We Eat (Too Much) by Dr Andrew Jenkinson is an accessible guide to understanding how the human body uses food and why it does.