Healthy Bread: Evaluating Your Loaf’s Nutritional Value
Don’t Be Fooled: Discover If Your Bread is Really Healthy
Don’t be fooled by appearances – not all bread is as healthy as it claims to be. Whether you’re picking up a loaf from the supermarket or your local artisan bakery, it’s crucial to know if it’s genuinely good for you. Our simple tool cuts through the marketing fluff and gives you an honest assessment of your bread’s healthiness. We’ll help you dig deeper, looking at fibre content, fermentation, flour quality, and potential agrochemical residues. In just a few clicks, you’ll know if your bread supports your well-being – no more falling for clever packaging or buzzwords. Make sure your bread is truly nourishing!
How to use the calculator
- Pick up your loaf and examine the ingredients list and nutrition label.
- Check for key factors: whole grain content, % fibre content, and see if there are any detail on milling process,
- If it does not say regenerative agriculture or organic, then the grains will have been grown conventionally and subject to agrochemical exposure
- The list of additives is not all additives I have just listed some but there may be more.
- If yeast is mentioned then choose unspecified fermentation
- If it says Sourdough and yeast choose unspecified Fermentation
- If it says sourdough but not “retarded” or Cold fermented then choose ambient fermentation not specified
- If it doesn’t say stoneground flour then assume roller milled flour.
- Enter details into the form and click “Calculate Score” for your bread’s health evaluation.
- Talk to the baker, look up details on website and dig deeper.
Let me know how you get on. I would be so delighted if you can share the brand and your score with me on comments below on on social media.
Best
Dr Vanessa Kimbell
What is Personalised Bread?
Really useful and interesting tool to empower people to have a better understanding on what “real” nutritious bread should contain and that so-called “Sourdough” / “Gut-Healthy bread” is typically marketing.
It is beholden though on the manufacturers that make good quality, nutritious bread, to be more open and transparent of the ingredients used; the percentages, and the method used.
I am aware that The Berliner bakery White Sourdough loaf, which is sold through Waitrose, is a fairly good nutritious bread using a mix of flours (some organic) and made using a long cold fermentation process. It also has no additives. However there is a difference in the information published on their website (https://bertinetbakery.com/products/sliced-white-sourdough-500g/) to what is published on waitrose’s (https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/products/bertinet-bakery-white-sourdough/575100-595150-595151)
If I score using the data on their website the bread is scored 10 (Group 4 / UPF) where as using the data on Waitrose’s website the score is 55 (Group 3 – Processed but at the higher end)
As a baker that uses a mix of white roller milled and freshly milled wholegrain, and a diverse blend as well, I would be interested to be able to input a mix of flours to have a more accurate scoring perhaps.
Lastly, it was interesting to see that some commercial brands who state they use a range of flours and seeds still only have a low fibre content which may suggest that the inclusion of diverse flours and grains might make up a very small percentage of the overall flour mix.