5 reasons you should reduce bread consumption
Regular consumption of bread is harmful to the body. In Nigeria, bread is one of the most consumed foods across the country. However, scientific reasons have made us see that eating bread regularly may not be as healthy as one thinks.
Bread is unhealthy in your diet for some reasons. Here are the reasons why you should reduce your bread intake.
1. Contains dangerous chemicals
One of the reasons you should reduce your bread intake is the different ways in which bread is made. Agents, such as potassium bromate, saccharine, and iodate which are used in making the bread fluffy, and soft, and also to give it a good finish, can be dangerous to the body in the long run.
2. Blood sugar level increases
Eating processed carbohydrates will cause your blood sugar to spike, your blood sugar to crash, insulin surges, and you will feel like sleeping, so you eat more carbohydrates to bring yourself back up to consciousness.
3. Contains anti-nutrients
Grains and legumes contain lectins and phytates which are toxins that bind to certain nutrients (like iron, zinc, calcium, and others) and can slow or inhibit your body’s ability to absorb those nutrients. Since bread is made of grains, it can be bad for your stomach, causing inflammation of the stomach lining and making it difficult to absorb nutrients in the foods we eat.
4. Difficult to digest
When you refine a grain, the outermost and innermost layers of the grain are removed. The lack of starch causes the bread to turn into a sticky, gluey mass when mixed with the digestive juice in the stomach. This stays in the system for a long time and causes a toxic build-up in the body making the bread difficult to digest.
Bread also has lots of gluten, which causes bloating, damage to the wall of the intestinal tract, and tiredness.
5. Accelerates weight gain
Packaged and pre-sliced white bread contains only highly-processed, simple carbohydrates because all the refining removes all the healthy nutrients. It is also full of salt, refined sugar, and preservatives. If you eat too much bread, it can make you put on loads of weight.
