We’re pretty confident when we say nothing can quite compare to the smell of home-baked bread. The delicious aroma that spawns from the kitchen is enough to make us float around the house like cartoon cats floating towards a freshly baked pie.
With lockdown still in place around the world, you only need to take a brief look on social media platforms to see many people are turning their hand to kneading and baking bread (what else is there to do, right?). But despite the gratification and sense of achievement a well-baked loaf can provide, should we really be consuming a vast amount of the stuff in a time where exercise may have come to a halt?
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Dave Asprey, the founder of the Bulletproof diet, says we shouldn’t necessarily have to stop baking bread, but simply change the ingredients we use. Specifically, we should be trying to minimise the amount of gluten we consume. In a recent Instagram post, the American entrepreneur says we should be looking out for grain-free baking alternatives when heading to the shops, as they won’t cause “inflammation the way wheat and most ‘whole grains’ do.”
He recommends alternatives such as coconut flour, tapioca, nut flours, arrowroot or white rice flour. He admits they’re not low carb (which technically goes against his Bulletproof diet ideology) but they still allow us to bake to our heart’s content.
i feel like everyone has entered the “baking banana bread” part of quarantine
— ilana kaplan (@lanikaps) March 31, 2020
He goes on to say that if we don’t want to use his alternative suggestions, then white flour is the lesser of two evils compared to whole wheat, as it contains “less gut damaging plant poisons”. It should be noted however that Dave isn’t a qualified nutritionist, but people do stand by the advice he gives. He has however made sure to avoid saying bread makes you fat, because self-proclaimed ‘fitness chef’ Graeme Tomlinson has debunked that myth in the past.
Max Lugavere, who is a qualified nutritionist, has posted his own views on wheat recently too. He agrees that wheat is nutrient-poor and makes up far too much of our daily diets (along with rice and corn). The poor nutritional content only increases the chance of becoming obese, and so he adds the bulk of our diets should come from “properly-raised meats, wild fish, eggs, fibrous vegetables, and seasonal and low sugar fruit which provide potent nutritional value.”
So by all means, continue to bake bread or make a killer loaf of banana bread, just be cautious of the amount of gluten you’re taking in because unless you’re sticking to a strict home workout routine, you can say bye-bye to that summer bod.