3 Reasons to Break Up With Bread

By Tommy Leung on 01/24/2011 in Fitness

Bread has been the victim of my personal tirade as of late with gluten squarely in the cross hairs. And it has good reason to be! The more one learns about what bread does to the body, the more evil it appears! It also helps that since I’ve gone on a paleo diet/lifestyle, I’ve never been healthier or looked/felt better.

I don’t normally hammer it home when I’m giving people reasons to kick bread to the curb. I try to avoid zealotry so I don’t push the subject. People really love their bread but, the reasons to stop eating it is so compelling!

So here–in written form for all to read at their leisure–are my three best reasons to break up with bread. I’m going to play to your vanity, desire for good health, and logic.

It Makes You Fat

The most visible of all health indicators is obviously the physical. I’m not going to bother hiding my vanity or pretend we truly treat people who are pleasing to the eye like we treat those who aren’t. Better looking people get preferential treatment. Even if not eating bread didn’t make a lick of difference to my health, I’d stop eating it just for the preferential treatment.

Forget about makeup–not that I wear any–or clothes or accessories, drop the extra body fat and you’ll look banging. There is really no one who doesn’t look better leaner.

I know you want to be leaner. We all do. That’s why gyms are always more crowded in January. Regular gym goers notice when a whole slew of strangers start showing up in January only to disappear by February.

So, how does bread make you fat? To reference Gary Taubes of Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It: carbs drive insulin which drives fat. What that basically means is that carbs signal your body to secrete insulin into the blood stream to move glucose into muscles, organs, and fat cells. When your muscles and organs don’t need glucose, insulin moves it all into fat cells.

Having another helping of pasta when you’re stuffed is literally going to send it straight to your ass.

Foods with a high Glycemic Index causes the largest spikes in insulin and are therefore the worst offenders. Carbs aren’t the only foods that raise insulin levels but, they are the most responsible.  The more carb-heavy your diet–bread, pasta, cookies, and other processed foods–the more insulin is continually released until the body becomes insulin resistant. Insulin resistance leads to diabetes.

It is not completely coincidental that being overweight also increases your chances of developing diabetes and a host of other modern illnesses.

It is Killing You

This is an exhaustive list of illnesses related to insulin resistance. There is nothing good on that list. We’re talking about obesity, vertigo, insomnia, allergies, blurred vision, low sex drive, depression, night terrors, and more.

The degree of expression is going to vary by individual. Our genetics aren’t identical and some of us will have a better tolerance for grains and gluten but, the likelihood that you have improved tolerance is lower than your chances of winning the lottery.

While there is no conclusive evidence to prove that everyone has some form of gluten sensitivity, there is increasing evidence that more and more people are suffering from it. The most popular gluten disease is celiac but, that is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s now evidence that points to gluten in association with neurological diseases like epilepsy and autism.

The big question is what don’t we know? This is what we now know and only until fairly recently–1940′s–did we link wheat and gluten to celiac disease–that’s less than a century ago and we’ve been eating grains for over 10,000 years.

Gluten appears to be a fairly dangerous protein found in all grains. Foods with gluten tend to have high insulin spiking properties that lead to a host of illnesses related to insulin resistance. Knowing those things, why wouldn’t you stop eating bread?

It is tasty and addicting like a drug. And like a drug, you should stop using it. I often hear the argument that my ancestry has been eating grains since forever so how can it be bad?

There are plenty of cultures like Asians and Italians that traditionally eat a lot of grains and will find this absurd because they’ve been doing it for centuries! That might be true but, it has little to do with the health effects. Before the advent of modern medicine, people didn’t live very long. Who is to say that diet had no influence?

And if we are really going to use time as a guide, we should go back hundreds of thousands of years and see what our earliest ancestors ate. Humans didn’t domesticate plants until about 10,000 years ago. We originated in Africa 200,000 years ago. That’s 190,000 years of of not eating grains in any large quantities compared to 10,000 years of it being a staple of our diets.

If it’s about the length of time then I’ll have to go with the 190,000 years.

It is Nutritionally Sparse

My final argument against bread is how nutritionally barren it is. We all know that iceberg lettuce is only slightly better than eating cardboard. It has the lowest nutritional value of any vegetable you could possibly find.

However, even 1oz of iceberg lettuce looks like a multivitamin compared to 1oz of bread. White or whole wheat is completely irrelevant. Not to mention, 1oz of iceberg lettuce is 4 calories while 1oz of bread is 74 and 69 calories respectively. Iceberg lettuce wins by weight and on a per calorie basis.

The fear that not eating bread is going to result in a lack of nutrition is blatantly absurd. There is little else you could eat that would give you less nutritional value than bread. Bread also costs more than iceberg lettuce. It falls short on every measurable level.

For those who think we need carbs to function: there are no essential carbohydrates no matter how often health experts claim that our body prefers carbs as energy. There is no evidence that shows our body has a preference for carbs. There is only evidence that shows the body will burn calories from carbs first. That is true but, the body also burns calories from alcohol before it burns anything else.

Does that mean alcohol is even more preferred than carbs? Should athlete’s go out and get smashed the night before an event like they carb load? Obviously silly logic.

Your body will run famously on fat and fat-created ketone bodies. Any body part that can only run on glucose can also run on ketone bodies like your brain and heart. The human body is an amazing machine.

So, are you ready to break up with bread now?