Which Bread should I choose?

Which bread should I choose? This was a question I started to ask myself the other day. I don’t know if you are like me but I LOVE bread. LOVE it. I have at minimum four pieces a day, toast for breakfast and a sandwich for lunch. And I don’t even want to tell you how much bread I used to eat. I’m really picky and so I generally eat the same thing for breakfast and lunch everyday during the week, boring I know. About 4 years ago I forced myself to make the switch from white bread to wheat bread. It was a hard transition but I found a bread I liked and was able to do it, thank you Sara Lee.

So along with my love of bread I really love to research when I have a question like that so I began doing some research because I wanted to know if the bread I was eating was truly healthy as far as bread goes. So I found what I learned to be very interesting and I thought I would share it with you. This is not a post to discourage the eating of bread, no no, rather one to help you when trying to pick out the best bread!

• The most important thing is that it is 100% whole grain
  -If it says “wheat” or contains “x” number of whole grains or multi-grain, chances are that it is white bread in disguise
  -On the front of the package you want it to say 100% whole wheat or 100% whole grain
• The world “whole” should be before any, or at least the first grain or flour, this can be seen on the ingredients listing. Something like 100% whole wheat flour or whole wheat flour should be the first and only flour listed.
• You want to have 2-3 grams of fiber per slice and pay attention to the serving sizes because often the serving size is 2 slices so then you have to halve the grams of fiber.
• You want fewer than 100 calories per slice
• You should aim for sugar to come in at ingredient 3 or 4 in the ingredients list
• Watch the sodium- try to get one with less than 200 milligrams per slice

So like in college I know to site my sources so they are below because obviously I didn’t just come up with this on my own. These resources that I gathered this information from were really helpful and also list some of the brands of bread that are healthiest so check them out! I was pleased to see that my Sara Lee bread fits a good bit of the descriptions, it’s not the best of the best but it is 100% whole wheat and does pretty good on the other requirements. I hope you all enjoyed this! Are there any other questions you’d like to see me research about and get the answer for? I’m always open to new ideas!

Fitness Magazine

Huffington Post

WebMD

Spark People