Bread and Fiber

After I started this blog, my father has gained interest in my endeavor in creating great food that is healthy. One of the things my father loves to make is bread. It has become a hobby for him, creating great breads that contain whole grains and quality fiber. Since he is the expert on bread, I asked him to write about his thoughts on bread and fiber and share his recipe for Rolled Oat bread and Steel Cut Oat bread.

Bread and Fiber

Bread is known as the staff of life, and most people have a vague idea that whole wheat bread is better than white bread, but why? And what constitutes whole wheat or whole grain bread? And how does fat content fit into that?

I served a Mormon mission in the Netherlands and Belgium, so I have eaten lots of bread from European bakeries. The stuff is amazingly good, but it is amazingly high in fat. Bakers put fat in bread for texture and taste. Unfortunately, it adds dense calories and harms heart health.

But that gets away from the fiber. Pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig has demonstrated that due to insulin response, sugar is responsible for the explosion in diabetes incidence. The reason is pretty simple---sugar spikes insulin and insulin tells the body’s tissues to store the glucose. Hence body fat and obesity. Even worse, continually high sugar levels blunt the body’s response to insulin, meaning that increasing amounts are required to obtain the effect. Once insulin resistance is high enough, a person crosses the threshold to Type II diabetes.

How does fiber play into that story? Fiber reduces the ability of the body to access the starch in the food, so insulin does not spike, fat is not stored, and the incidence of Type II diabetes is less. But, the story is not quite that simple because there are two types of fiber---soluble and insoluble. Soluble fiber lowers cholesterol and is found in, among other foods, rolled oats. Insoluble fiber keeps food moving through the digestive tract. Keeping strictly to the topic of bread, any whole grain such as whole wheat, wheat bran, and steel cut oats are good sources of insoluble fiber. Rolled oats and rolled barley provide soluble fiber, which slows digestion of sugars. The processing associated with rolling the oats breaks down the chains of the insoluble fiber, rendering them soluble. In terms of bread, the best option is to get bread with chunk of whole grains in them. As a side note---this is why smoothies are a bad idea. All of that great insoluble fiber gets torn to shreds. In many ways, a smoothie is no better for you than a Coke.

All that having been written, most inexpensive supermarket whole wheat bread is really just white bread with caramel covering---read the label. Unless the bread is dense or has objects, it really does not have a lot of fiber. The recipe below is designed for a bread machine baking a 1.5 pound loaf.

Soluble Fiber Bread

Rolled grain bread

1 cup rolled oats

12 ounces water

3 cups white flour

3 TBSP extra virgin olive oil

2 TBSP skim milk powder

2 TBSP honey or sugar (I use turbinado (raw sugar))

1.5 Tsp salt

1.75 tsp yeast

Cooking the oats gives you the maximum rise from the mix, so I cook the oats in the water for 3 minutes. The 12 ounces of water is my winter recipe when the atmosphere is dry. During the humid summer, the flour absorbs water and I have to back the water off to 10 ounces.

The temperature of the boiling will kill yeast, so if the machine is to cook the bread immediately, you need to chill it. I put it in the freezer for 15 minutes. Once chilled, add all ingredient to the bread machine pan and put on the White bread setting and start. The loaf will take about 3 hours, but this depends on your bread machine.

If you do not have a bread machine, you can still make this bread recipe!!!! Prepare the oats as described above and wait until they are about 100-110 degrees F. Then add all the ingredients to a mixer and knead until completely mixed. Take the dough out of the mixer and place in a greased  9x5 bread pan and place in an warm oven (about 150 degrees F). Place a moist towel over the top of the bread pan and let rise until double (about and hour). Punch the dough back down and let the bread rise until double (about another hour). Remove the towel and turn the oven to 350 degree F. Cook for about 25 minutes. When the bread crust is light brown, take the bread out of the oven. Let rest until cool then enjoy!

The recipe will make a 1.5 pound bread machine loaf. I will occasionally substitute rolled barley for the rolled oats. That produces a creamier mouth feel and keeps the bread moist longer, but at a cost of about 40 additional calories per serving. My bread machine loafs are 7.25 inches long and the nutrition information below assumes rather fat slices---8 servings/loaf, which is how I eat it for breakfast. Here are the nutritional facts for each slice of bread. Note than the fat is considerably below the 30% fat from calories threshold with the recipe coming in at 20% calories from fat per serving.

If you want to add insoluble fiber, I sometimes add ½ cup of steel cut oats to the rolled oat recipe. According to Lustig, having both soluble and insoluble fiber is the best of both worlds.

While being the best option nutritionally, my wife does not like this recipe as well because a few steel cut grains will fall out when slicing the bread. The steel cut grains also tend to dry out the bread a bit, so best to eat within three days. That is generally not a problem in our house.