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.