Mass food manufacturers don’t make healthy eating and supermarket shopping easy for consumers. Avoiding the cookie and chip aisles is easy enough (well, sometimes), but what some of us may not realize is that nutritional pitfalls are found all over the grocery store—even in the bread aisle, where practically every package is labeled “all natural” and “multi-grain.”
Manufacturers use these terms to give their products healthful halos that entice customers. “Seven-grain bread sounds healthy,” one person might think. “Light bread has to be better for me than the regular kind,” another might decide. But a closer look at the nutrition facts and ingredients lists reveals that many breads have deceptive names. Often, they’re not much different from the white kind: they’re similarly refined (and therefore qualify as “bad” carbs, aka the carbs that make blood sugar spike) and sometimes alarmingly high in sodium. These breads have healthy-sounding names, but they’re not as virtuous as you might think.
Rudy’s Organic Spelt Bread
This brand boasts “stuff you can pronounce and ingredients you can recognize,” which is true: ingredients include whole spelt flour, organic molasses, and the like. But take a look at the nutrition facts, and you’ll see that one serving—which is one slice of bread—has a whopping 210 milligrams (mg) of sodium. Since many people use two slices of bread to make a sandwich, that’s 18 percent of your recommended daily allowance (RDA) for sodium right there. Just imagine what it’ll jump to after you add condiments and other sandwich necessities.
Healthy Choice 7-Grain Bread
Sad that a name like Healthy Choice almost always guarantees poor-quality ingredients that are far from healthy choices. The first ingredient is whole wheat flour, which is a good sign, until you realize that the next two (after water) are bleached wheat flour and high-fructose corn syrup.
Roman Meal Honey Wheatberry Bread
Wheatberries are whole-wheat kernels that are members of the whole-grain family and fiber filled, so you’d think bread made with them would be a safe bet. Unfortunately, like its Healthy Choice peer, Roman Meal suffers from an unsettling number of iffy ingredients: HFCS and “dough conditioners” with multisyllabic names like ethoxylated mono-diglycerides and azodicarbonamide. Also, though wheatberries are great sources of dietary fiber, this honey wheatberry bread has only two grams per serving.
