Our daily bread, the staff of life, our bread and butter. We trust bread. It’s at the heart of our diet and embedded in our language, a metaphor for food, wellbeing and livelihood. In the UK, 99.8 per cent of households buy bread and we take home 11 million loaves a day. 

But just how wholesome is it? TikTok is awash with clips comparing the ingredients lists of US bread with those of UK loaves, and questioning the worrying number of additives in the former. Some of them slip into parody – “Plutonium!” one TikToker reads off the label – but the message is clear: they believe bread this side of the pond is better, and healthier, than Stateside. 

True, American bread does often contain sugar, while British loaves generally manage without. There are some additives used in the US that are prohibited over here, including one, azodicarbonamide (ADA), that, the influencers trumpet, is used as a foam expander on spongy plastics like yoga mats – not an appetising thought. 

But this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s inedible. After all, bicarbonate of soda is used in (otherwise toxic) cleaning products but it’s also a component in baking powder, and no one is pointing the finger at homemade scones. I’d be more concerned that once exposed to heat (as it is in baking bread) ADA breaks down into two potential carcinogens: semicarbazide and urethane. 

But before we Brits get too smug, it’s worth checking the labels on our regular supermarket sliced loaves. They are hardly more edifying, with the likes of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids, preservatives, tartaric acid, and environmentally questionable palm oil all featuring. 

Even apparently innocuous ingredients like rapeseed oil will have been heavily processed using hexane, sodium hydroxide and silica, which count as processing aids rather than ingredients, so aren’t included on the label. As Henry Dimbleby points out in his new book Ravenous (Profile Books, £16.99), it “might be called rapeseed oil (or canola oil in America), but chemically it is completely different from the yellow, pungent cold-pressed stuff”. 

Salt in the wound

The Real Bread Campaign (RBC), part of Sustain, an alliance that advocates for better food and farming, defines real bread as being made without chemical- raising agents, those so-called processing aids, or any other additives. 

Salt is one ingredient that RBC does allow, and is pretty much universal in all classes of bread – one exception being the unsalted Tuscan loaf. But the levels in bread were in the headlines just last month, when campaigning group Action Against Salt called out British manufacturers for lacing some breads with so much salt that just one slice can contain more than a bag of ready salted crisps (0.34g) or a small portion of McDonald’s fries (0.44g).

Salt in itself isn’t a baddie, but hidden salt in our everyday foods is a problem. On average we Brits eat 40 per cent too much salt every day, much of it in manufactured products, and we get more salt from bread than any other food. Too much salt raises blood pressure, which in turn increases the risk of heart disease and stroke – the two factors, when combined, that are the leading cause of death in this country. Not only that, they may increase the risk of developing dementia.

All about the dough

So what about the other ingredients? It is generally the cheaper, mass-produced loaves that contain the additives, while “posh” sourdough and artisan loaves crow about their short lists of ingredients. 

It’s perfectly possible to make bread with just flour and water, if you ferment the two ingredients to make a sourdough starter. A little salt, arguably, improves the flavour, and a small amount of yeast is a perfectly good alternative to a sourdough starter. 

Some additives are there by law. It’s a legal requirement, with a few exceptions, that UK milled flour be fortified with calcium, iron, vitamins B1 and B3 and folic acid. Some critics, including the RBC, argue that this is simply a cover up for flour that has been stripped of its nutrients, in particular bleached white and roller-milled flour; while others say these additions are not easily absorbed by the body. 

However, proponents point out that it’s been hugely valuable to the nation’s health, and we should go further. A study by the University of Birmingham in 2019 suggests that 10 million new cases of vitamin D deficiency could be prevented by adding vitamin D to wheat flour. Folic acid and vitamin B9 have been added since 2021.

Anything else in bread is likely to be there for the convenience (and profit) of the manufacturer and retailer, not to provide nutrition. A longer shelf life, say (there’s a reason some artisan bread goes stale within a day, though true sourdough has a good shelf life). That ADA, meanwhile, acts as a “dough improver”: it has a number of effects, such as allowing bread to rise more quickly or  making flour look whiter.

Not black and white

How we love white bread. It makes up around two-thirds of the bread we eat, despite being more expensive to produce (as so much of the grain is discarded) and far less nutritious. This is probably because for centuries white bread was the bread of the rich, made with heavily sifted stone-ground flour. 

But the white bread of the early 19th century would have looked creamy beige to modern eyes. It was only with the introduction of the roller mill at the end of the century that the ultra fine, less nutritious white flour that’s familiar to us today, became widespread. 

We continue to be wedded to our pure white bread. Bertinet Bakery (part of the Bread Holdings group, which includes Gail’s), produces some of the few supermarket sourdough loaves that are made without yeast – bucking the trend for “sourfaux”, a growing category of cheaper, yeasted bread flavoured with some sourdough powder and sold, misleadingly, as sourdough.

When Bertinet Kitchen added wholemeal, barley and spelt flours to its white sourdough loaf, to make a loaf that is closer in colour and nutrition to pre-20th-century white bread, there was a backlash from customers looking for a simple white. 

Bread health expert Vanessa Kimbell of the Sourdough School points out that another issue with our bread is the lack of diversity of ingredients. The more variety of grains and seeds that are packed in there, the better it feeds your microbiome, the community of microbes that live mostly in our gut and are increasingly being recognised as being key to good health.

But mixing different wholegrain flours and seeds into bread takes skill, as these aren’t the heavily processed, standardised flours preferred by industrial processors. They cost more, too – all of which adds to the price of a loaf.

Dirt cheap

So is bread too cheap? Of those 11 million loaves, one million are thrown away, according to food waste campaign group Wrap, making it the most wasted food product of all – and suggesting we don’t value it enough. But with the cost of living crisis still biting, there’s a large chunk of the population struggling to feed themselves as it is, let alone to spend extra on bread. 

Not only that, bread is certainly not as cheap as it was. Food inflation is over 19 per cent and white sliced, the nation’s preferred loaf, is up nearly 23 per cent since this time last year. Sometimes more: according to Which? a Soft White Medium Sliced Bread from the Bakery at Asda leapt by 67 per cent from 56p to 94p in the last 12 months. At the other end of the scale, it’s not uncommon to pay £5 or more for a loaf of small bakery sourdough, although this may well weigh twice as much. 

Speed is a key factor in producing cheaper loaves. Until the 1960s, making bread was a process that took many hours, frequently overnight, “fermenting” the dough to get a good rise and develop the gluten. But that all changed in 1961 with the development of the Chorleywood process, which is now how around 80 per cent of our bread is made. 

By intense mixing of the dough, plus double quantities of yeast, hard fats and the addition of both oxidising agents and emulsifiers, sacks of flour can be transformed into sliced, wrapped, sale-ready loaves in just three and a half hours. 

It’s soft too, 40 per cent softer than old-style bread, which went down well in the 1960s perhaps because the nation’s teeth were still in a poor state, but remains an attribute we expect. Not only that, it means loaves could be baked using just the lower protein British flour, rather than a mix of British and high-protein imported flour, which remains the norm for slow-risen, artisan loaves.

Hard to stomach

Affordable, appetising, local – it sounds like a win, and in a sense it was, for a nation still reeling after wartime and post-war food shortages. And it’s not as though the additives used are deemed unsafe in the countries where the bread is sold. 
But fans of traditional bread-making techniques say that the fast rise means the bread is less digestible – and could be behind the hike in wheat intolerance. 

Not only that, much of bread is made of white flour described by gut expert Prof Tim Spector as “stripped of all the good stuff”, a refined carbohydrate that causes spikes in blood sugar levels, which can lead to weight gain. And with no fibre to feed gut microbes, it’s starving our microbiome. 

The reality is, not all of us have access to that perfect artisan producer – and small bakeries are not immune to the charms of industrial ingredients. So if you are buying local, get to know your baker and ask questions. 

There’s a bigger picture to remember, too: the RBC points out that it’s about more than the loaf itself, as buying from a small, independent bakery sustains more jobs per loaf, keeps money circulating in local economies and helps to keep high streets alive. Consider that when you reach for some sliced white, and always read that ingredients label. 

Where to be wary 

Not all iterations are offenders, but scrutinise the claims and contents on the labels of these types of bread in order to ensure you buy what you bargained for 

Bagels 

Sweet and whiter-than-white, standard bagels are tempting as a base for a quick lunch but, New York-style or not, they don’t pack much nutrition. Some versions contain nearly a gram of salt per bagel, and more than 5g of sugars. 

What really gets craft bakers bashing the dough is that some are sold as “sourdough” when they contain plenty of regular yeast, meaning they won’t have many of the sourdough benefits. 

Baguettes or batons

Many supermarket baguettes and batons have around 8 per cent of your daily salt quota in one 50g slice and a 1:20 fibre/carbohydraye tration, so they are bound to spike your glucose levels. That said, a high crust-to-crumb ratio may help level things out a bit, as the crust is digested more slowly as well as containing higher levels of antioxidants. 

Brioche

Brioche is bread enriched with egg, sugar and, traditionally, butter, but some high street versions are made with less delicious sounding palm fat and milk proteins instead. One blurb suggests using slices for ham and cheese sandwiches – but with 13.8g sugars and 1g salt and only 1.7g fibre per 100g, brioche is not for everyday. Treat it like cake instead.

Mass-produced sliced white

None of the standard supermarket sliced whites are very wholesome; one I found contained palm oil, calcium propionate, diacetyl tartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids, and ascorbic acid. Some deliver more salt per slice than a bag of ready-salted crisps (0.36g) and only a 1:20 fibre to carb ratio. And remember that thick-sliced “toasties” mean bigger slices, so even more salt – some up to 0.45g per slice. 

‘Light’ bread

These might sell themselves as low-calorie – and it’s true that in some cases there are only 63 calories a slice, around 75 per cent of regular bread. But they’re often so light that most people end up having a second piece, and they can be guilty of low fibre to carb levels at 1:22. Ingredients might include sugar in the form of dextrose, and a roster of emulsifiers and treatment agents. 

Bake-at-home breads

Those long-life packs of rolls can be a good store-cupboard standby – hot from the oven with fat wodges of butter, I can easily put away a couple before the soup arrives. It’s not something to make a habit of though, as some rolls deliver a startling 1.1g salt – nearly as much as three bags of crisps – and a fibre to carb ratio that’s rock bottom at 1:35. On the upside, they might contain fewer additives than some of the sliced loaves.