|| 17 July 2016

How To Eat Bread Healthfully

Bread. The French taught me to love good bread. Despite all the negativity today about eating bread — and grains in general — I still eat bread. Moderately, of course.

Almost all the bread I eat, I bake myself from whole grains. In the Chic & Slim books — and from time to time on the website — I write about my bread baking — and about my bread baking disasters. They happen.

Recently nutritionist Ellie Krieger gave tips in the Washington Post about how to eat bread healthfully.

Of special interest for Chic & Slim was a quote from Mark Furstenberg, baker and owner of Bread Furst in Washington, D.C.

“With long-fermented breads, the diner gets the taste of the grain rather than the taste of yeast. Health-wise, the fermentation process changes the starch in the bread, making it more slowly digested and, in turn, reducing its effect on blood sugar.”

It’s that effect on blood sugar that makes bread problematic for those who wish to stay slim. So it is good news that bread made by the old-world process has a texture that requires you to chew (something squishy supermarket bread lacks). When you are forced to chew, you are also forced to eat more slowly, and as the article points out “building in a measure of portion control and tempering the rise in blood sugar.”

Scale it down, Tip #3 in this article, is especially useful for staying slim. An important lesson I learned early from chic French women was that instead of eating a sandwich, two slices of bread with some meat or cheese and a few veggies layered in between, better to eat a salad made with ample vegetables accompanied by a small chunk of bread. This system increased the amount of vegetables. More filling and fewer calories. Assuming that you lightly dressed your salad with some good oil and with vinegar or lemon juice.

Ellie Krieger’s article on how to eat bread.

be chic, stay slim — Anne Barone

Image : french baguette