Faux Food Health Article

A loaf of white bread has been sitting on my desk for three weeks. I've been watching it, waiting for something to happen. Mold, perhaps. A touch of staleness. Bugs maybe. Its sell-by date came and went 14 days ago, but a peek through the wrapper reveals a tanned crust completely devoid of fungus, and a firm press of the package produces a springy return to a perfect rectangular shape, just as it did the day I bought it.

My Stepford loaf was spawned on the bottom floor of a five-story factory by a 2,500-pound mother dough ball that contained more than 36 ingredients, from refined flour to dough conditioners for softness and cellulose gum for "mouthfeel." A mechanized knife chopped the mound into 27-ounce balls and another machine rolled the balls into logs and deposited them into pans. The pans spiraled through an oven large enough to hold six full-size school buses and 16 minutes later the logs emerged baked. My loaf was one of 150,000 from the oven that day to be sliced, packaged and trucked to stores all over the region. Production people told me that it would take about 15 days for my loaf to begin to mold. My desktop experiment says it takes a lot longer than that.

In my refrigerator, on the other hand, sits a two-day-old lopsided trapezoid of whole-wheat bread made by a local company called Small Planet Bakery. Aaron, son of one of the bakery's owners, stirred together eight ingredients in a Hobart Upright mixer to make the loaf, adding more water and flour by sight and touch. Some days, the loaves he makes are small and dense; other days, they are so big the slices won't fit in a toaster—it all depends on the weather, the wheat and his whim. He uses whole-wheat flour, honey, canola oil and 38 percent less salt than my fluffy white loaf. His co-workers carve a 100-pound mother dough ball into 27-ounce mounds on a long maple tabletop, and after letting the logs rise solely by the heat of the Tucson summer, they set the pans in a large oven to bake. By the end of the day, the team has made a grand total of 400 loaves—each of which they estimate takes about a week to mold if left out. They pack the loaves into a truck that delivers the bread to local stores and restaurants.

Both processes produce a perfectly fine-looking loaf of bread. I can make sandwiches with either one; each seems wholesome and tasty. Both are "processed"—we're not munching on raw wheat berries here—but the paths each of these loaves followed couldn't have been more different. With growing alarms about the unhealthy state of the Western diet, packed full of overprocessed foods, I wanted to know how making food the white-bread way affects our health, and whether making it the Small Planet way is any better.

Lost in Transition

Most of the food consumed in this country passes through a factory or processing plant before ever reaching our tables, and for simple reasons: food needs to be safe, transportable and to stay sellable in the supermarket. Minnesotans want to eat canned peaches in January and working parents want to buy a loaf of bread at the store instead of spending all day baking it themselves. The result is that less and less can be called "unprocessed" anymore. Yet the transition from field to shelf happens in wildly divergent ways, from the simple baking of a few ingredients, like my Small Planet loaf, to inventing a sports drink that comes in a choice of several different neon colors, the product of food chemists and marketers hoping to create mega-demand.

A growing number of voices question whether extreme processing is just making modern food safe and convenient or if it may actually be creating a long-term threat to our society's nutritional health.

"During processing, a lot of beneficial nutrients like fiber, minerals and antioxidants are lost—especially in highly processed, refined-grain products," says Frank Hu, an epidemiologist at Harvard School of Public Health who tracks the effects of food on diseases in the American population. "Manufacturers also add a lot of sugar and trans fats back in to enhance the taste," he says. "So you get rid of the good stuff and add a lot of bad stuff and that's the reason those kinds of foods are really detrimental."

The $450 billion food industry packs superstores full of 40,000 different food items in cans, boxes, pouches and packages. "This food has become so much a part of the culture that we don't even realize it," says Loren Cordain, professor of health and exercise science at Colorado State University. "If you're an average American and you're not really too health conscious, you eat these foods every single day, and you've eaten them every single day of your life."

Whole Grains: The Protective Elements

Consider the very first ingredient in my loaf of white bread, "enriched wheat flour"—refined and reformulated wheat. At the grain mill, long rollers with hundreds of metal teeth hum noisily as they crush raw wheat berries over and over, sifting and separating them between large screens and eventually stripping the strongly flavored nutrient- and fiber-packed germ and bran from the starchy, bland endosperm. Throughout history, people considered this white flour superior to coarse whole-wheat, but it wasn't until millers began using steel rollers in the 19th century that refined flour became cheap enough for everyone to afford. Ironically, although long a staple for the privileged, white flour contains barely any fiber, vitamins or minerals, the building blocks of healthy food. One slice of white bread has 65 percent less fiber, magnesium and potassium than whole-wheat bread. The bran alone in whole-wheat bread gives it 20 times more antioxidant power.

But what is the harm in eating a few random slices of white bread? According to whole-grains researcher Joanne Slavin at the University of Minnesota, one loaf of white bread is nothing compared to the damage done by the hefty volume of refined products eaten by the average American.