When I returned from my first trip to Nepal, I tried to replicate some of the foods I had eaten while I was there. My experiments with chapati failed miserably, but the tea houses in the Manang region had served buckwheat pancakes that I really liked, and to my surprise, buckwheat flour is fairly common in the US. I bought some and made pancakes with it, and they were great.
But I noticed something odd – one brand of buckwheat flour only had about 11% of daily fiber per 1/4 cup, while the other had 32%. How was that possible? Well, it appeared to come down to a small technicality in the ingredients: one consisted of “organic buckwheat flour” and the other consisted of “whole grain organic buckwheat”, respectively.
I bought a bread machine some time before the pandemic and had begun experimenting with breads. For a time, I had tried making whole wheat loaves, but they often didn’t rise very high, and lost their appeal pretty quickly after baking. At some point in time, I had noticed, though, that the fiber content between white bread and wheat bread wasn’t actually very dramatic, and white flour might have less than 1% of daily fiber per 1/4 cup, whole wheat flour had 12%. At first glance, this looks like a pretty substantial leap, so I figured it must be a lot healthier; however, with the discovery of the buckwheat, I was kind of blown away. How could 12% compare to 32%? Was wheat just that much less nutritious than buckwheat? Despite it’s name, buckwheat is not related to wheat, nonetheless how does it have so much fiber in it?
I would continue making buckwheat pancakes from time to time, but something new and mysterious popped up this past year: Bob’s Red Mill 100% Stone Ground Whole Wheat turned up in the stores. I felt like the whole “stone ground” moniker must be a gimmick (and it probably is – turns out my normal King Arthur brand uses the same moniker), but the fiber content was substantially higher than normal whole wheat flour, at 25% daily fiber per 1/4 cup vs 12%, respectively. What in the world was going on?
But again, the ingredients told the story: whole wheat flour consisted of “white whole wheat flour” [this is for white whole wheat, not to be confused with white bread. It all gets very confusing! It’s just a lighter color wheat variety] while the special flour consisted of “whole grain hard red wheat”.
The key difference, again, is “whole grain .. wheat” vs. “whole wheat”. My understanding, now, is that “whole wheat” excludes the bran, while the “whole grain wheat” includes the bran as well as everything else.
The bread is a lie.
The insanity doesn’t stop there, either. “Whole grain”, when referring to white breads, is apparently just a technicality that whole grains of various kinds must be part of the bread, but “whole grain” breads are usually still a form of white bread. It’s clearly different though when paired with “wheat”, such that “whole grain wheat” kind of means what it says, surprisingly. Nonetheless, a YouTube channel I encountered mentioned that sometimes these are all separated during processing and added back together later on. I’m going to guess this is just a matter of efficiency, but it still seems odd.
But THEN I learned that not even 100 years ago, several species of wheat were hybridized to combine properties of insect resistance with ease of separation, and while this probably saved millions from famine in the long run, this hybrid wheat is the wheat used in almost all of the flour in the world. The wheats used before this are often referred to as “ancient grains”, which seems to be yet another obnoxious moniker, but, very fortunately, they do exist, and I even bought a 2 pound package of einkorn wheat the other day to try it out. Unfortunately, it is only “whole wheat” rather than “whole grain wheat”. The serving size is 1/3 of a cup, which is very odd since almost every other flour uses a serving size of 1/4 of a cup, and each 1/3 of a cup has 13% of daily fiber. When you convert the serving size to 1/4 of a cup, to better compare with others flours, however, the daily fiber only comes out to 10.5%, which seems kind of low. In fact it is, and this makes sense if you know about the difference between designations of “whole grain wheat” and “whole wheat”. It would appear to me that the company uses a larger serving size to make the flour look like it has a higher fiber content than it really does, even though that 2-pound package cost nearly $9. Friends, we are royally hosed. This industry is full of lies and deception.
[To be fair, there seems to be a lot of speculation that much of the gluten intolerance we see is caused by the hybridization of wheats. One YouTuber who is vegan mentioned that he started experiencing issues with wheat quite randomly, so he stopped eating wheat altogether for a time, then went back to wheat using only “ancient grains”, and hasn’t had any problems since, so that’s very interesting. I don’t begrudge the fact that these species of grain are more difficult to grow and thus cost more, but at least be honest about the raw nutritional content! Or do people a favor and don’t remove the bran – if they’re paying a premium for an “ancient” grain, they probably want the full benefit, not some half-assed, well-processed imitation]
I don’t know how much of this truly matters. To some extent, people are inherently to blame for what the market produces because we choose to consume it, and the human preference for white bread is largely responsible for why our shelves are full of white flour. And hey, I like it, too. It’s just that nobody ever told me about all of this, and when you are born into it, it’s all you know. I can’t believe I never knew that our modern wheat varieties are hybrids created from an effort to reduce famine. Trade offs, huh? But I find it disingenuous how confusing these labels are, and maybe that is a matter of history, but I feel like food companies are trying to lie around every corner, and I never could have written about any of this if the internet didn’t exist to help me look it all up. Again, if you pay close attention to most forms of “whole wheat” sold in stores, you’ll see they almost always use molasses as a sweetener rather than normal cane sugar, and I’m certain this is to help the final product look darker, since people looking for “wheat” products are usually trying to be healthier, and they very easily associate a darker color with a higher nutritional content, even when the fiber content is only marginally higher. I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist. This is literally how the food industry works, and it’s disgusting.
Another beef I have with the industry is how there really is no such thing as “wheat” bread, as the brands trying to seem “healthy” love to combine a great variety of grains together in one, which makes it damn near impossible to figure out whether any one of them is giving you an issue. It’s an attempt to add flavor, but it ends up confusing the nutritional content quite significantly. I don’t begrudge the adding of gluten to help the loaves rise more (I even bought some wheat gluten for my homemade bread so I could try whole loaves that aren’t super dense), but throwing all these grains in for no great reason, adding lots of molasses to cater to expectations of color, and often adding other odd chemicals I don’t think accomplishes what they claim to be aiming for – health.
I’m honestly tempted to buy a home mill, because at least that way you could get all of the nutrients directly from the source (you can buy most “berries” raw). The absolute whole grain. No separation and re-mixing later. Everything, all in one. Fresh from grinding. One reason I would consider a hand-crank mill over an electric one is that, even though we spend time running and lifting weights at the gym, most people think that any form of manual work is “too hard”, even though you could probably eliminate the need to go to a gym if you stopped trying to make life so damn easy in the first place. [Says the guy with a bread machine]. I don’t know. I guess the real issue is, I don’t actually eat all that much bread, and Bob’s Red Mill also sells an organic whole grain wheat flour, which is about as close as you can get to what bread truly used to be, unless maybe that einkorn or other variant of “ancient” grain is sold in whole grain wheat variety, but expect to pay a lot for those. I found a way to make hamburger buns with my flour without using egg, which I used to do, but it also occurs to me that two well-toasted slices of bread could do the trick as well, so it doesn’t have to be as difficult as we often make it. From this perspective, I don’t know how crazy I want to go on bread if I’m otherwise just paying $12 every month or two for a 5 pound bag of the good stuff. It depends on how artisanal I want to get, or if I really prefer white wheat berries over red wheat berries.
This is a subject I definitely want to continue learning. It makes it all the more disturbing, though, seeing just how much fiber is processed out of our diet, when before, these rich whole grains were a major part of civilization for thousands of years. And to be fair, I don’t think they should be a majority of your diet, what with dental carries exploding in incidence after the agricultural revolution, but I’m curious how much good a load of organic whole grain, “original” grain could do for a person, or whether, hey, maybe even just whole wheat might do, and I don’t want to beat up on fake wheat too much since it’s still an improvement over a diet rich in white bread.
Final note: there seems to be some evidence that heartburn and gerd are caused by the modern diet, which is high in sugar and refined grains. A high fiber diet seems to be negatively correlated with the incidence of heartburn. That being said, I really miss pizza, and I discovered that there is such a thing as whole wheat pastry flour, which I believe is just whole wheat flour finely ground, and is probably well designed for something like pizza crust. For whatever odd reason, you can find cauliflower crust, almond flour crust, all sorts of odd pizza crusts, but I have yet to see in stores anybody who sells a whole wheat crust. Maybe I’m not checking the right places, or my eyes are missing the obvious, but that’s crazy to me. So, I dunno, the tomato sauce and cheese aren’t particularly healthy, I don’t think, but if the bread was whole wheat, I feel like that adds a tremendous amount of nutrition and would be far more filling. I’d love to try it sometime.
Final final note: Since I portion my homemade bread in parts of white and wheat flour, I had to ask myself whether the fiber content really counts that much. If 2/3 of a loaf is white, doesn’t that significantly dilute the fiber content? There is some truth to this; however, I want to start experimenting with 100% wheat again, and even if I settle on 1/3 or 2/3 wheat, what whole grain wheat does is increase the nutrient profile. As I understand it, there is the endosperm (white flour, when isolated), germ (wheat flour, when isolated along with the endosperm), and bran (whole grain wheat flour, when combined with endosperm and germ). If all you use is white flour, you don’t get any of the nutrition or fiber from the germ or the bran. If all you eat is wheat flour, you don’t get any of the nutrition or fiber from the bran. (EDIT: This isn’t correct. Whole wheat apparently consists of all 3 parts of the grain, but “whole grain” does have some odd caveats. For the life of me, though, I haven’t been able to discover how Bob’s Red Mill has so much more fiber than other brands. It might have something to do with the fineness of the grind, but so far I haven’t been able to figure it out). You can actually buy bran separately, but it’s not crushed uniformly to match the rest of your flour, which might change how it bakes. The fact that I do include some white flour does make me question whether going crazy on grains has any true benefit. Right now, I have three kind of flour: organic white, organic white whole wheat, and organic whole grain wheat. Because the white whole wheat does not include the bran, I’m going to eat through what I have of it but probably not buy any more, preferring to use the whole grain wheat instead, simply from the perspective of increasing the nutritional profile of the bread I eat. Sigh.