Rising Evidence For Sourdough Bread And Weight Loss
“A decade ago, Professor Terry Graham and a team of six other Canadian researchers set out to see what bread might be best for overweight men to eat. They found that consuming whole-grain and sourdough bread regulates blood sugar better than commercial bread. Test subjects’ response to sourdough was better than all bread tested.
“‘With the sourdough, the subjects’ blood sugar levels were lower for a similar rise in blood insulin,’ said Graham. ‘What was even more interesting was that this positive effect remained during their second meal and lasted hours after.’ He went on to explain that he believes the fermentation process likely changes the starches in the nature of the bread, making it more slowly and evenly digested, preventing spikes in insulin.
In simple terms, their study suggests that eating toast with breakfast may make a big difference in our hunger control that day.”—CityNews, JUL 21, 2008
Hello, I’m Martha Levi. I want to tell you a very cool story today about my aunt. She wasn’t really heavy, but she had quite a bit of unwanted weight and she realized that she was gluten intolerant, so she went off of all gluten and she lost a lot of weight.
About then we started making sourdough bread and I said, give it a try and to just see if maybe, it doesn’t bother you. Just see if you can eat it. So she tried it and low and behold, she could eat it. She was so excited to have bread.
For a gift, one time we had all a whole bunch of extra sourdough whole wheat bread, and I gave it to her. She filled her freezer full of this bread and she said that it took her a month to eat it.
She said to me, “Martha, I ate a slice of sourdough for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And I thought, Oh boy, here we go. I’m going to gain all of my weight back, but I just can’t stop myself because I haven’t had bread and so long. And it was so wonderful. I just let myself do it even though I knew it might cause problems with my weight.”
Then at the end of the month, she said, “I finished my last loaf of bread and I thought, well, this is it. I’m going to get on the scale and I’m going to see what damage that’s been done.”
She said, “I not only had I not gained any weight, but I had also lost 10 more pounds,” and I thought, “Wow, that is crazy!”
I was thinking, “Why would that be?”
And you know, when you understand the nature of sourdough bread, it can kind of make sense. Because the bacteria during the long fermentation process in sourdough start consuming the starches, producing lactic and acetic acids, breaking down the gluten. It also had all the fiber in it and so by the time she was eating it, it was digesting very slowly and easily because it was already broken and it didn’t spike her blood sugar.
Normal bread from the store is all white flour. It doesn’t have much fiber so that when you eat it, it goes right into your bloodstream. It spikes your blood sugar and is very high on the glycemic index. Not so with a true sourdough and diabetics can often even eat a true sourdough.
In fact, my uncle, who is the husband of this aunt I was telling you about, is diabetic. He was eating the bread along with her and because it was easy to digest slowly, it didn’t spike his blood sugar.
It would make sense that you wouldn’t gain the weight that you might gain if you were eating that much typical bread. But because it was sourdough bread, she didn’t gain weight, she lost weight.
Now that’s not to say that sourdough bread will make you lose weight, but it is really amazing that she didn’t gain any weight eating that much bread.
So very clean carbs.
I just wanted to share that awesome story with you.
Have a happy day.
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