Our Expensive Clients, 

It’s solely six weeks till Christmas, which I’m enthusiastic about.  Lovely and scrumptious Christmas merchandise and presents have landed on our cabinets at Planet Natural.  That is making me really feel festive, so I’ve pulled out my menu and baking lists to think about what I really feel like creating this 12 months.  

For Christmas baking, I take advantage of natural wholegrain spelt flour.  There’s an previous saying I like: ‘The whiter the bread, the faster you’re useless.’  If you happen to don’t already know this, it may be stunning and annoying to study that white flour is unhealthy to your well being.  It’s the mainstay of many individuals’s diets – and it’s not including to well being and wellbeing. 

White flour is the opposite sugar. 

Many individuals know that consuming an excessive amount of sugar can result in blood sugar issues.  Most individuals don’t know that white flour causes the identical issues.  So far as your blood sugar is worried, your physique can’t inform the distinction between a spoonful of white flour and a spoonful of sugar.   The truth is, the Glycaemic Index of white flour is worse than granulated sugar.

Whenever you eat refined grains – white flour cereals, bread, biscuits, snacks – your blood sugar ranges shoot up.  It is because the physique assimilates it in a short time and it quickly passes into the bloodstream as a easy sugar.  This fast rise in blood sugar ranges triggers a equally fast launch of the physique’s sugar-regulating hormone, insulin. This offers you the ‘elevate’ adopted by the ‘crash’, which makes you’re feeling drained and down. To take care of extended excessive blood sugar, the physique is pressured to retailer the surplus sugars as fats, inflicting weight achieve. 

You in all probability know this about sugar, but it surely’s the identical with white flour.  Think about that if you attain for a croissant or give your children a bowl of white pasta. 

If this occurs over an extended time frame, it might result in thrombosis, hypertension, coronary heart illness, hypoglycemia, kind II diabetes, decreased immune operate and/or adrenal stress. 

What’s white flour? 

White flour is the white powder that’s left after stripping all of the vitamins and fiber out of a grain.  Milling removes the very best bits of the grain – the germ and the outer bran layer – so out go the nutritional vitamins, minerals and many of the dietary fiber.  White flour comprises 60 per cent of the entire grain – excluding the very best half.  You might be left with poor high quality proteins and diet empty starch.  

However it’s ‘enriched’, which sounds good! 

Yeah, don’t be fooled by that.  Due to well being issues created by consuming white flour, in 1941, a legislation required the addition of a small quantity of nutritional vitamins B1, B2, B3 and iron.  ‘Enriched’ shouldn’t be an correct description.  The artificial nutritional vitamins and minerals which can be added again in don’t substitute the thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, pyridoxine, pantothenic acid, folic acid, vitamin E, calcium, phosphorus, zinc, copper, manganese, potassium, iron, magnesium and fiber that had been misplaced or destroyed. 

No white flour product gives something close to 100% of the unique goodness within the grain. 

When it comes to its dietary advantages, consuming mass-produced bread is like consuming cardboard. 

So why on earth do producers use it/prefer it? 

White flour is so stripped of goodness that there’s nearly no dwelling meals substance in it to go rancid – which is nice for producers.  I realized a very long time in the past that a lot of what occurs within the meals trade isn’t to your well being, however for the comfort of the trade.   

Different issues related to white flour. 

Consuming too many merchandise made with white flour may contribute to constipation, since you aren’t getting plenty of good fiber.  This could set off Crohn’s, Irritable Bowel Syndrome and most cancers of the colon.  White flour additionally slows down the physique’s metabolism, which may create digestive issues and larger fats storage, so additionally it is related to being chubby. 

Why do individuals like it? 

I ask myself this.  I believe there are a few causes.  One, I believe it’s as a result of, like sugar, white flour is addictive.  Secondly, it may very well be conditioning.  Lots of people grew up with the style and the feel of white bread, so it’s what they’re used to.  Additionally, wholegrain breads was once heavy and stodgy however at the moment, there are beautiful wholegrain loaves obtainable.  (I make wholegrain spelt bread that individuals beg for.)   As an American, I grew up on Wonderbread (argh), which now I couldn’t deliver myself to eat, however I do sometimes love a white croissant. 

Eat entire grains 

The answer is easy – eat entire grains – more often than not.  Nature, in its intelligence, has given us all of the goodness and fibre we’d like in a grain if we eat the entire thing.   If you happen to’re not already, you’ll be able to bake with higher flour.

Eat properly; dwell higher, 

Renée x