Bread Matters (5 page)

However, any such positive message is undermined in several ways. The industry is still reluctant to state clearly and unambiguously what goes into standard white bread and the extent to which it is nutritionally inferior to less processed alternatives. The strategy of nutrification takes power away from the consumer: the miller, baker or additive formulator controls the quantity and mix of extra nutrients in a loaf – with the result that people whose consumption patterns deviate from the average may end up with an inappropriate intake.

But all this tinkering with added ingredients conceals a much more fundamental reason why your choice of bread matters a great deal.

The slow route to health

Industrial bread is made far too fast.

Old-time bakers knew that if you left dough to ferment for a long time in the right conditions, ‘acids’ would ‘ripen’ your mix and produce a moister crumb and better keeping quality, as well as that indefinable bread flavour. In Germany, Poland and Russia especially, the cultivation of lactic and acetic acids in traditional sourdough fermentation was valued for the flavour and digestibility of the local (mainly rye) breads.

Most of us are rather amazed that mixing flour, yeast and water produces dough that rises and can be baked into light-textured bread. But this is only half the story. While yeast turns sugars released from the flour by enzymes into carbon dioxide and alcohol, lactic acid bacteria are also at work. If yeast is the exuberant entrepreneur of dough expansion, lactic acid bacteria are the thrifty housekeepers. Not only do they not compete with yeast directly for food, relying on different sugars for their sustenance, but they coexist in a more active way. Lactic acid bacteria use amino acids and peptides generated by yeasts and in turn enable the yeasts to produce more carbon dioxide, as well as making gluten more elastic. These modest functional effects are disdained in the high-tech world of chemical additives and bread improvers. But lactic acid bacteria can do much more than make stretchier dough. They can transform this dough into healthy food by:

• Enhancing the nutritional properties of bread.
  
• Making nutrients more ‘bioavailable’.
  
• Counteracting certain ‘anti-nutrients’ in flour.
  
• Lowering its glycaemic index.
  
• Controlling potential spoilage organisms.
  
• Neutralising the parts of gluten that are harmful to people with coeliac disease and other wheat allergies.
  

Industrial breadmaking does not allow sufficient time for lactic acid bacteria to develop in the dough.

Nutritional enhancement and bioavailability

More and more research is demonstrating the remarkable power of lactic acid bacteria, not just to control potentially harmful substances but also to enhance beneficial ones. For instance, sourdough rye bread has larger quantities of the antioxidant pronyl-L-lysine than breads made with an ordinary yeast fermentation
³
.

Sourdough fermentation has also been shown to more than double levels of folate, as well as enhancing levels of several other micronutrients and antioxidants
⁴
. Baking bread using the long sourdough process may make minerals, especially magnesium, iron and zinc, more available to the body
⁵
.

Counteracting anti-nutrients

Lactic acid bacteria play a part in neutralising substances in wheat flour that can limit nutrient availability to human consumers. The bran layers on the outside of the wheat grain contain important sources of minerals such as potassium, magnesium, iron and zinc, but the bran also contains considerable amounts of phytic acid, which inhibits the absorption of these valuable minerals and trace elements. Mineral deficiencies are widely reported in developing countries and even in France a survey revealed that 72 per cent of men and 77 per cent of women had magnesium intakes below the dietary guidelines. Wholemeal bread is one of the best sources of magnesium (it has three times as much as white bread) but much of this remains inaccessible unless the phytic acid (phytate) is neutralised. A recent French study demonstrated that the action of lactic acid bacteria in sourdough fermentations improves the nutritional quality of wheat bread by reducing the amount of phytate. Simple fermentation with yeast produced less than half the quantity of soluble (available) magnesium at the end of a four-hour period compared with the sourdough
⁶
.

All this raises serious questions about the bioavailability of important nutrients in fast systems such as the Chorleywood Bread Process. The industrial bakers are showing renewed interest in wholegrain cereals for their ‘healthy eating’ ranges. It looks as though their ultra-fast doughs will be unable to deliver all the expected (and aggressively advertised) nutritional goodies.

Glycaemic response

The production of acids by lactic acid bacteria can lower the glycaemic response (the speed at which food raises blood glucose levels) to sourdough bread. This is of potentially greater significance than any glycaemic effect attributable to the difference in fibre content between wholemeal and white breads. In view of the enormous public health implications of obesity and diabetes, a natural way of reducing the glycaemic index of bread should be of great interest to responsible bakers.

Spoilage

In addition to their many other properties, lactic acid bacteria generate antimicrobial substances, or ‘bacteriocins’, that play an important role in food safety
⁷
. ‘Rope’ is the name given to the spoilage, caused by strains of
Bacillus
bacteria, that occurs in bread, usually in warm, humid weather. The word ‘ropy’ comes from this condition, and eating ropy bread can make people ill
⁸
. Rope is kept at bay in modern baking by strict hygiene, temperature control and ultimately with chemical preservatives such as calcium propionate, which may be a carcinogen. But according to recent studies, lactic acid bacteria typically found in wheat and rye sourdoughs are capable of destroying the
Bacillus
species responsible
⁹
. So, long-fermented breads are much less likely to suffer from rope. Furthermore, the lactic and acetic acids that build up as the lactic acid bacteria work act as a natural preservative (in the sense of mould inhibitor) and thus obviate the need for chemicals.

Removal of harmful agents

The most interesting recent research, with considerable implications for making our daily bread wholesome again, has shown that lactic acid bacteria are capable of de-activating the very substances that cause wheat allergy and coeliac disease.

In 2002 Italian scientists demonstrated for the first time that selected sourdough lactic acid bacteria could neutralise some of the wheat gliadin that attacks the intestinal mucosa of coeliacs
¹⁰
. In 2004 a Japanese study showed how the lactic fermentation of soy sauce completely removes any allergens from wheat, which is one of its two main ingredients
¹¹
. This is no mean feat, since other studies have proved that the particular parts of the wheat gliadin that harm humans are hardly affected at all by stomach enzymes and very acidic gastric and duodenal fluids
¹²
. It seems to be the unique property of certain lactic acid bacteria that, given time, they can knock out some otherwise impervious elements that make wheat unpalatable for so many people.

But these are test-tube studies. What do they mean for the bread we eat – or can’t eat?

Most remarkably, the Italians made a bread with 30 per cent wheat flour (plus oats, millet and buckwheat) and fermented the dough with selected sourdough lactobacilli. It took 24 hours to hydrolyse almost completely the wheat gliadins and the ‘33-mer peptide, the most potent inducer of gut-derived human T-cell lines’ (the things that do the damage) in coeliac patients. They made a similar bread raised with baker’s yeast, and fed samples of both to coeliacs in a double-blind acute challenge. Thirteen out of 17 patients showed a marked alteration of intestinal permeability (popularly known as ‘leaky gut’) after eating the yeast-raised bread. But the same 13 patients, when fed the sourdough bread, showed no significant reaction: remarkably, coeliacs had eaten bread with wheat in it with no ill effects. (The remaining four did not respond to gluten in either of the breads.) The authors of the experiment conclude, rather modestly, that bread made using selected lactobacilli and a long fermentation time ‘is a novel tool for decreasing the level of gluten intolerance in humans’
¹³
.

Currently, the only treatment for coeliac disease is a lifetime abstention from gluten. This experiment is a ray of hope for coeliacs. It suggests that everyone should be able to eat wheat and rye bread
if we get the breadmaking right.
What’s more, it may point to how cereal intolerance is not so much a matter of genetic chance as a consequence of the reckless application of scientific knowledge in the service of private gain rather than public health.

Slow is beautiful

There was a time when almost all breadmaking involved lactic acid bacteria and a long fermentation time. Before modern yeasts were isolated, most bread was fermented with what we would now call a sourdough and it would have taken many hours to rise. It is an intriguing possibility that, even if the wheats our forefathers cultivated contained the same potentially harmful gliadins as modern varieties, they were largely neutralised by the lactic acid bacteria that bakers couldn’t help developing in their doughs.

Coeliac disease was identified only in the 1950s. In its severest form, it is a seriously debilitating condition unless treated by total avoidance of gluten. If such a disease had existed from our earliest wheat-eating days, is it not likely that sufferers, not knowing the cause or not having enough other food to eat, would have fared rather badly in the evolutionary stakes? Yet it seems that a good many of their genes have survived. A more plausible explanation might be that it was a combination of changes in wheat itself and a move to fast fermentation using commercial yeast and little or no natural lactic acid bacteria that rendered bread indigestible to certain individuals who may, granted, have had some genetic predisposition against gluten.

Could there be a connection between the Irish tradition of making bread without any fermentation at all (it is aerated with bicarbonate of soda) and the high incidence of coeliac disease in that country?

Whatever the outcome of detailed research into the exact mechanisms of cereal intolerance, it is abundantly clear that we have evolved an industrial breadmaking system that, in a variety of ways we can no longer ignore, produces bread that more and more people cannot and should not eat.

Quality, wholeness, health

When we choose a loaf of bread, we are not simply choosing a shape, a flavour or even the method that was used to make it. We can also choose how its basic ingredient is grown. We can opt for bread made with organic flour, milled from wheat grown in soil kept fertile by compost, crop rotation and green manures in a system that minimises the use of synthetic chemical biocides. Or we can choose flour from conventional wheat production, which uses energy-intensive chemical fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides to maximise grain yield and milling quality.

I grew up in a village with a ‘glebe’ – a piece of land adjacent to the church, which was originally part of the vicar’s benefice. The word comes from the Latin
gleba
or
glceba,
meaning earth or soil. From this comes the old English
hlaf
, or loaf. The Russian for bread is
khlyeb.
Old German was
laib.
And so on – because bread comes from the soil, is of the soil. The fertility of the glebe gives rise to grain, the staging post between soil and bread. Bread’s roots are in the soil.

In bread we gain access to the vitality of the seed, a vitality that surely extends beyond mere bodily function to include what George Stapledon called ‘its ability to enliven’
¹⁴
. For this and other reasons, it seems to me that the quality of our food, and therefore of our life, is inextricably linked with the condition of the few inches of ‘the delicate organism known as soil’, beneath which ‘is a planet as lifeless as the moon’ (as Jacks and Whyte put it in their 1939 book,
The Rape of the Earth: A World Survey of Soil Erosion).
In the words of Robert McCarrison, whose comparative research into the diets of the Hunzas in Northwest India and the urban poor of Bombay in the 1920s and 1930s helped establish the link between food, soil and health: ‘[Natural foods], when properly combined in the diet, supply all the food essentials, known and unknown, discovered and undiscovered, needed for normal nutrition, provided they are produced on soil which is not impoverished, for if they be proceeds of impoverished soil, their quality will be poor and the health of those who eat them, man and his domestic animals, will suffer accordingly.’
¹⁵

Thanks to advances in molecular biology and genetics, we know that the expression of genes in wheat differs markedly depending on whether the grain has been grown organically or with synthetic nitrogen fertiliser
¹⁶
. Further research may tell us whether organic flour is more or less palatable than non-organic, particularly in relation to the gliadin proteins that are responsible for wheat allergy and intolerance.