Homemade sourdough rye is a healthier option than store-bought bread. Photo / 123rf
Why Tim Spector won’t stop eating sandwiches.
I eat a slice of bread a day, either for breakfast or lunch. That may surprise you, as bread doesn’t have the best reputation when it comes to our health – but it’s misunderstood.
It’s one of the first things humans made – there are records of flatbreads going back some 14,000 years. So it’s part of our culture; let’s not demonise it but enjoy it.
But, in some forms, it should be a rare treat (for me, that’s when it’s topped with marmalade). If you’re having it on a regular basis like me, make sure that it’s both tasty and good for you.
Most days, I eat sourdough rye bread that I make myself with wholemeal flour, rye flour, malted flakes, water, salt, a sourdough starter and some mixed nuts and seeds (I’ve shared the exact recipe below). It’s got a really rich taste, a nutty feel to it, lots of structure and you know it’s doing you good. It’s heavy, dense and fills me up.
It’s free from additives and preservatives, full of high-quality grains, is high in fibre and fills you up – meaning you eat much less of it than you would a shop-bought equivalent.
I often make more than I need and freeze it – slicing it thinly, so it’s simple to take a couple of slices and toast as you need it.
But if I don’t have any, I’ll buy something like a rye and barley sourdough. Sometimes I’ll pick up a pre-packaged long-life German rye bread. These don’t look very appetising but are nutritious and do the job until I can next make my own.
I certainly wouldn’t now buy the heavily processed supermarket bread that I used to, like white or even wholemeal sliced; but I’ll eat it if I’m at someone’s house or travelling and it’s really the only option available. They’re full of sugar, packed with artificial ingredients and won’t fill you up. Once you get used to healthier breads, these options no longer taste nice, either – they’re very light, dissolve in your mouth and feel very sugary.
But I don’t always just stick to my healthy rye sourdoughs. My guilty pleasure is warm bread in restaurants, which is often quite sugary but delicious – options like homemade ciabatta and focaccia that I cover in extra-virgin olive oil. I’ve found that I’m not very good at saying no to it but as I don’t go to restaurants every day, I see it as a treat.
I’m now completely turned off the classic sandwich and popular fillings. In my 25 years working as a hospital doctor, I’d buy a daily meal deal (in health terms, probably the worst possible invention in the name of convenience). Tuna and sweetcorn or cucumber with mayo on brown bread was my go-to, with a packet of crisps and orange juice. At the time, I thought this was a healthy option but it definitely wasn’t – the bread was dyed and full of sugar and additives and I don’t think it had a single wholegrain in it. And all that tuna is probably why I’ve got high mercury levels now.
Instead, I now make much healthier high-fibre open sandwiches at home with whatever I have in the fridge.
If I’m in a hurry, I would opt for cream cheese topped with sauerkraut or kimchi. I’ve just done a new study for my book Ferment, which is out in September, and we tested Philadelphia cheese that counts as a fermented food as, surprisingly, it contains live microbes. We could be snobby and say it’s mass-produced but, ultimately, fermented food improves your digestion and gut health and we don’t eat enough of it – though I prefer to buy a cream cheese from my local delicatessen that tastes better (but I’m not too proud to buy Philadelphia).
If I have more time, I would drizzle my toasted bread with olive oil, spread over some hummus (either regular or beetroot) and top with jarred artichoke hearts, as well as some sauerkraut or kimchi.
As a treat, I love dipping bread into olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Not only does it taste fantastic, the dips are full of healthy fats, which counteract some of the sugar in the bread. It feels like a luxurious thing to do but may have some benefits.
Ultimately, many of us choose the easy route and have the same single-ingredient sandwich most days. As well as being unhealthy, it reduces the diversity of plants you are eating, depriving your gut microbes of a treat. So it’s important to look for new ways to enjoy our sandwich.
The UK’s more popular fillings – like ham and cheese, BLT, prawn mayo – are all pretty rubbish for our health. Instead of always having our bread with meat, try to think of veggie options you could make. Most people like hummus and have it in their fridge but most don’t think to put it on a sandwich. Try to be more adventurous.
It’s pretty hard to find good healthy bread in most supermarkets. The top-selling breads all tend to have a nice healthy label promoting vitamins or fibre, some seeds scattered on top and they tend to look brown and may even mention the word sourdough on the front of the packaging.
But you’re never going to be able to tell from the appearance or the front of the packet whether you’re buying healthy bread because there’s no agreed legal definition for the words wholegrain, or freshly baked, and dyes are often added to bread to make them appear healthier than they are. Sourdough is sadly often added as a “fake” ingredient to sell the product.
If it’s “baked on the premises”, supermarkets don’t have to share the ingredients in it and this category includes breads that have been made in a factory, kept frozen for up to two years in warehouses and then thawed out and baked in-store. It creates a lovely smell in the shop but will do little for your health.
Instead, you need to look at the ingredients list on the back of the label. There, you’re looking for a high percentage of fibre in your bread (ideally over 6-10%) and as little sugar as possible. It’s also important to try to avoid too many ingredients, especially red-flag ingredients like emulsifiers and palm oils.
If vitamins have been added to the loaf, it’s often a sign that the bread isn’t healthy. A lot of the vitamins out there come from big factories overseas, often made using modified microbes, and there are real concerns about whether they actually contain what the labels say.
The combination of ingredients like salt, sugar and fats in unhealthy loaves are designed to make them very easy to overeat, which is known as hyper-palatability.
If you go for a healthier option with lots of fibre it will actually fill you up – you’ll eat less and feel fuller. Loaves made with rye flour, spelt flour or wholegrains are best. Another good sign is that it has a short ingredient list.
I know this is a really difficult food for people to work their way around and I don’t think people should stop eating bread, but I do think everyone should be trying to select a bread that is healthier than the one they’re eating at the moment.
If you’re just a bit fussier about the bread you eat, you can actually improve your health a lot.
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Experts suggest calling in sick is often the best approach.