Bread targeted as unhealthy source of salt

by Nicole Weston, Posted Mar 22nd 2006 @ 2:55PM

With news agencies now saying that a major source of salt in daily diets is bread, carb-laden loaves could once again come under fire from nutrition-fanatics. Even though the headlines blame bread, more than 75 percent of all the salt in people’s diets come from processed foods, only a small portion of which are breads. Salt is necessary in bread making, not only for flavor, but because it interacts with the yeast, retarding its growth and producing a better-textured, tastier loaf. One teaspoon of salt weighs just over 2 grams, and organizations like the British government recommend a maximum of 6 grams of salt a day. If a loaf of homemade or non-preprocessed bread has one to three tablespoons of salt in it, there is nothing to worry about unless you are eating multiple loaves of bread on a daily basis.

Some salt is necessary in the diet, serving functions like regulating fluid levels in the body. Do yourself a favor and cut back on the deli meats, don’t just cut back on bread.

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Filed Under: Trends, Light Food, Ingredients, Methods
Tags: baking, Bread, british, diet, eating, fat, food, health, health food, health risks, high blood pressure, light food, minerals, nutrients, prepared foods, processed foods, salt, sodium, spices, too much salt, unhealthy

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Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

3-22-2006 @4:17PM Myron said... In homemade bread you will find about 1.5 teaspoons of salt per loaf. (Typically a recipe will have 1 teaspoon of salt per 3 cups of flour, and big sandwich loaf might be 4.5 cups of flour)

Commercial white bread has about 200 mg sodium per slice, which is a tenth of your recommended intake. I suppose that does add up if you have toast for breakfast and a sandwich for lunch. However, I have a hard time believing bread is the problem. Many of the processed foods we eat have much higher amounts of sodium. See restaurant food, canned soup, frozen dinners, chips, pizza etc.

As opposed to a lot of foods, bread tastes bad with extra salt in it. It also tastes pretty bad if you leave the salt out, as I did once by mistake.

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3-22-2006 @4:41PM Myron said... If you want to see high sodium food, check out the pillsbury bake off recipes mentioned in the previous article.
http://www.pillsbury.com/bakeoff/recipes/showRecipe.aspx?rID=41228

Click on Nutrition Information. Yikes
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3-22-2006 @9:42PM Huffy said... One of the biggest sources of excess sodium is processed breakfast cereal. I'm not talking about a good bowl of oatmeal or Nature's Path Flax Flux flakes; the culprits here are such "kid-friendly" cereals as Cap'n Crunch and Frosted Flakes. Most of the latter contain more sodium than salty snacks like chips. Read the labels.
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