World Bread Day at Zinda Foods
While bread comes in all different shapes, sizes and varieties depending on where it’s made in the world and whose hands have made it, the recipe always depends on the same two basic ingredients: flour (or cornmeal) and water. Over time, people have developed different recipes for bread, growing the list of ingredients to improve things like flavour, texture and shelf life. As science catches up with constantly changing food trends and technologies, we’re beginning to find out that not all of these additions to bread are necessarily as positive as we thought they were – for our bodies or for the planet.
Let’s start off by saying that, despite some of the nasties you might find in a modern loaf or tortilla, bread has loads of benefits and is inherently good for you. Its carb content provides you with slow-release energy and helps you keep going throughout the day. Studies have shown that eating wholegrain bread will not only make you healthier overall, it’ll also help you live longer, lose weight and feel happier. Eating bread strengthens your skin and hair and its fibre content helps regulate bathroom trips. So in its purest form, bread should not be seen as ‘bad for you’ – quite the opposite, in fact. But what happens when bread producers start to meddle with bread’s tried and tested basic formula?
To answer this question we’re going to travel to Ireland, where Subway have recently fallen into some legal trouble with their loaves. In Ireland, bread is considered a staple food so there is never any VAT charged on it. However, for a product to qualify as bread in the eyes of Ireland’s Supreme Court, added ingredients in a loaf (such as sugar and fat) should not exceed 2% of the weight of flour in the dough. Unfortunately for Subway, the sugar percentage in their loaves was found to be closer to 10%, making them closer to a confectionary than a bread product. This is just one example of how mass produced bread products aren’t always as healthy as their all-natural, wholewheat brothers and sisters. The more you cram into the dough, the further away from real bread it becomes!
When considering how some types of bread affect our health in different ways to others, it’s important to understand the difference between ‘processed’ bread and ‘ultra-processed’ bread. Technically, all bread products can be considered processed – a processed food is anything that has been altered in some way from its original form, and this includes baking. It gets a little bit more complicated when we start talking about ultra-processed foods. Ultra-processed foods usually contain ingredients that you wouldn’t add when cooking food at home. You may not recognise the names of these ingredients as many will be chemicals, colourings, sweeteners and preservatives. One of the most commonly consumed ultra-processed foods in the UK is mass produced bread, which often contains flavourings and stabilisers, like hydrogenated oils and trans fats. The problems with these ingredients is that they can be bad for your health in several ways: they impair blood sugar control, increase inflammation and can even have a negative impact on heart health.
Another ingredient which is included in almost every mass-produced bread and tortilla product in the UK is palm oil, the side effects of which have been receiving more and more attention in the media recently. David Attenborough’s recent Netflix special, ‘A Life on our Planet’, left viewers in tears as it showed how rainforests are being destroyed at an alarming rate to make room for palm oil farms, leaving the great apes of Borneo homeless. It’s therefore important that more brands, especially larger ones, pledge to source alternatives to palm oil in their products in order to help sustain what biodiversity we have left.
Throughout lockdown, a lot of people living in the UK found they had more time on their hands, and a consequence of this was an increase in home-baking, leading to flour shortages across the country. This is exciting, as it means people have begun to shy away from the mass-produced bread products which we’ve shown have a negative impact on our planet and on ourselves. People have instead begun to embrace more traditional, healthier bread options. But how will this change as people begin to return to their busy lives and find they once again rely on store-bought bread?
Here at Zinda, we believe that it’s possible to have the best of both worlds – bread can be readily accessible and affordable, without causing damage to our health and our planet. This was the core aim when we developed our AirWraps® – to produce a wrap base that went above and beyond other similar products on the market in terms of flavour and texture, whilst also never using trans fats, hydrogenated oils, or palm oils in the recipe. In fact, our AirWraps only have five basic ingredients (salt, water, sunflower oil, sugar, and whole wheat flour), making them closer to a homemade tortilla than any other product on the market!
We’re currently stocking our Chicken AirWraps in the Tesco Meal Deal, so make sure you grab one next time you’re looking for a delicious, guilt-free lunch. You can also follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to find out about all the exciting news we have coming up, including loads of new product launches in stores up and down the country!