Against the Grain

I met an old friend for lunch not long ago and was amazed to find at least thirty pounds less of her than there had been at our last meeting. Always eager for advice about fitting more comfortably into my own pants, I begged her to tell me what she’d done to transform herself. Had she dropped desserts or lifted weights? Had she fallen in love again—or out of it? Was she drinking an extra five glasses of water a day? Running an extra five miles? Eating all five servings of fruits and veggies we’re supposed to eat, but rarely do?

“Bread,” she said simply. “I stopped eating it.”

It was not the answer I was hoping for, though it’s the one I’ve come to expect. The enduring popularity of low-carb dieting over the past decade has made many of us look at sandwiches with suspicion, dinner rolls with disdain. Parents in the pb&j set now fret about the high-fructose corn syrup and other sweeteners found in brands labeled “healthy,” and books such as Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle are dominating dinner party conversations about what’s wrong with the way we eat. Science journalist Gary Taubes, whose 2002 New York Times Magazine article about the Atkins diet inspired many sensible people to eat nothing but bacon and blue cheese, also has a new book out: Good Calories, Bad Calories. Though I’m still chewing through the book’s 450-plus pages, its cover photograph featuring a slice of toast dripping with butter would seem to be more bad news for bakers, who’ve seen the sales of white bread drop for thirty years.

Personally, I’m on what you might call the M. F. K. Fisher diet, in perfect agreement with the gifted food essayist who once opined, “It is impossible to think of any good meal, no matter how plain or elegant, without soup or bread in it.” Even so, on the strength of several friends’ no-bread diet successes, I find myself wondering if I should just stick to the soup. It doesn’t help that the overwhelming choices in the bread aisle force me to ponder the merits of five-, nine-, and twelve-grain offerings, all of which seem to cost more than they should.

Does bread still qualify as the staff of life? I wonder. Or is it, as my newly thin friends insist, the stuff that’s making us fat?

“People are so confused about bread it makes me weep,” says Julie Miller Jones, a distinguished scholar at the College of St. Catherine, who studies the connections between whole grains and health. She thinks some of the confusion started during the last low-fat craze, which convinced some people that they could healthfully eat as much bread as they desired as long as they didn’t butter it. (Not true.) When the pendulum swung toward low-carb diets promoting cheeseburgers without the bun, some consumers came to the equally mistaken conclusion that bread is the bad guy. “When we began worrying about refined carbohydrates, it seems bread got painted with the wrong brush,” Jones says, pointing out that our daily bread should never have been lumped with Doritos as a food we should avoid.

There is a simple reason why someone who slices bread from her diet would lose weight.

“Carbohydrates make up about 50 percent of our daily calories, so when you cut them down or eliminate them entirely, you will lose weight,” says Joanne Slavin, a professor of food science and nutrition at the University of Minnesota. “It comes down to the fact that you’re eating less.” In spite of this, Slavin says, Americans cling to the idea that a single item on our plates—be it bread, sugar, trans fat, or high-fructose corn syrup—explains our nation’s troubling obesity trend.

“My theory is that everyone needs an enemy,” she explains. “Like a video game where you have a bad guy you can focus on and eliminate—people approach food the same way. They want to know what food is good and what food is bad, but those systems don’t really work with food.” Clearly, the simple carbohydrates found in cookies and cola aren’t nearly as nutritious as the complex carbs in a carrot, but, depending on what else you eat during the day, they may still be OK on your table. “In large epidemiological studies across populations, people who eat high-carbohydrate diets are thinner and keep the weight off long term,” Slavin says. “Carbohydrates are not the enemy.” And while nutritionists often emphasize the importance of eating more whole foods and fewer foods that are refined and processed, she adds, when it comes to bread, “the French eat almost nothing but white bread, and they’re still pretty healthy.”

Eliminating bread from our diet can mean cutting off an important source of fiber, vitamins, and minerals—especially those found in whole grains. A Harvard School of Public Health study that followed 160,000 women for eighteen years found that those who ate two to three servings of whole grains a day were 30 percent less likely to develop type 2 diabetes than those who ate whole grains infrequently. Another Harvard study showed that women who ate whole-grain cereal every day cut their risk of heart failure by 28 percent. A report from the Iowa Women’s Health Study linked higher whole grains consumption with a lower rate of death over the study’s seventeen-year span. These findings are why the USDA, in 2005, began recommending that half of the servings of grain we get each day come from whole grains.

“Hypertension, metabolic syndrome, heart disease, inflammatory diseases, overall mortality—you name the problem and those people who consume the most whole grains lower their risk,” says Jones. She adds that whole (and some enriched) grains are also an important source of folic acid, which is recommended for women of child-bearing age to help reduce the risk of neural tube defects. “This is why, over the long term, I really have concerns about people who aren’t eating these products,” she says.

Forgoing good grains may also mean missing out on a potential weapon in weight control. Since whole grains are digested more slowly than refined grains, they may keep blood sugar at steadier levels and thus prevent hunger pangs from derailing a healthy diet. Studies also show that the more extreme the restrictions of a particular weight-loss plan (say no bread for as long as you live), the less likely participants are to stick with it in the long run. “It’s very difficult for most people to stick on a diet that eliminates an entire food group for the rest of their lives,” Jones says.

The healthier approach, says Slavin, is to “make peace with your food. When people look back on their lives, many of the most important and meaningful memories are of the things they ate—the birthday cakes and the wonderful meals they shared with loved ones. Food is a hugely important part of life. Fighting it all the time just isn’t worth it.”

I’m all for making peace with my food. I’m just not sure which bread to bring to the table—and neither, it seems, are most Americans. A Natural Marketing Institute survey found that while 71 percent of consumers say they’re getting all the whole grains they need every day, when asked to recall what they’d eaten the day before, 40 percent hadn’t eaten any whole grains at all. This is why I asked Slavin to come to my neighborhood grocery store and help me sort out the options. She was nice enough to do the same thing for the Canadian government a few years ago, when officials were devising a system for determining which products deserved a whole grain designation and which did not.

“First, look at the label,” she says, grabbing one of at least seventy varieties of golden-brown loaves on the shelves and examining its long list of ingredients. While I often pick the first brown loaf I see, color—which can be created with molasses and other coloring—is no indication of ingredients. Words such as stone-ground, durum, and multigrain would seem to be a good sign, but Slavin says the only way to make sure the product is mostly whole grain is to look for the word whole at the very top of the ingredient list—as in whole wheat flour or whole oats. “If it appears in the first ingredient, then you can be reasonably sure you’re on the right track,” she says.

Because whole grains are whole—the bran, germ, and endosperm all together—one might conclude the lack of processing would result in cost savings for consumers. Not so. “Unfortunately, our system is set up for refining,” says Slavin, who adds that the sticker shock people felt at the first $5 loaf of bread has been leavened by the number of companies now producing whole-grain breads and pastas. We found several good options in the $3 and $4 range.

With consumers concerned about high-fructose corn syrup turning up in so much of our food, some bread companies tout that they’ve taken it out of their recipes. But Slavin advises reading the entire list of ingredients to make sure the recipe hasn’t merely substituted another sugar—say, brown sugar syrup, dextrose, or maltodextrose. “If they have, it’s not really a big improvement,” she says.

Slavin and her U of M colleagues are studying how the fiber found in whole grains might reduce the risk of certain kinds of cancers, which is one reason she favors brands that deliver at least two grams of fiber per slice and rejects weight-conscious brands that she complains “feel like air.” “I’m a big believer in particle size,” she says. “It gives you that nutty and chewy taste that makes you more satisfied.” Though whole-grain white-flour products are a new favorite of parents and school nutritionists trying to give kids a taste of what’s good for them, Slavin says we should also bring home the undisguised variety to help teach them what good food looks like.

Which kinds of whole grains should you buy? Wheat is the highest in fiber. Rye is full of the phytoestrogens believed to reduce the risk of breast cancer and is said to give dieters a satisfying feeling of fullness. Barley and oats taste a little sweeter and are high in soluble fiber, which has been shown to reduce cholesterol. “Mix it up,” is Slavin’s advice, “depending on the taste and texture you’re after.”

As for what to serve with it, “soup is always good,” she says, apparently another fan of M. F. K. Fisher. “Soup and some really good bread. You just can’t go wrong.”

Reach columnist Laura Billings at edit@mspmag.com.