On ‘Bread 2’ and the rise of alt-carbs

The launch, this month, of the Superloaf by Oxford-based company, Modern Baker, turned the thoughts of this blogger to the topic of the role of bread in the politics of health. It's pretty important – most of us eat it everyday – and, in some ways, it defines countries and their cultural attitudes to health and food – the French stick, sold and consumed each day, versus the British long shelf-life polywrapped sliced loaf.

 

Well a new player has just entered the crowded bread ‘space’ on these shores. The Superloaf, now available in branches of M&S and through Ocado has been billed by its creators, with a degree of marketing hyperbole, as ‘smart bread’, an ‘alt carb’, and ‘Bread 2’. So what is it?

 

First, it’s sliced bread in a poly wrapper, like we’re us used to. It’s made with standard white flour on high-speed machinery using the Chorley Wood bread process (invented in 1961 and used for 80% of British bread). It is co-manufactured by Hovis. However, the Modern Baker company uses what it describes at ‘targeted fermentation’. It omits refined sugars and adds fibres and bioactive plant compounds, to create a product that, the makers maintain, is better for blood sugar levels, more nutritious and has fewer carbohydrate than standard, mass-produced bread.

 

Its ingredients include psyllium husks, pumpkin seeds, brown flax seeds, apple cider vinegar and kelp – which would all be at home on the shelves of a health food shop. It does contain salt, which is bad for blood pressure, but far less than conventional bread.

 

Backed by funding of nearly £1m from Innovate UK, Modern Baker has grown to a 15-strong workforce and can make up to 20,000 loaves a week. The makers say that their product has the fluffy deliciousness of mass-produced bread – that claim has yet to be put to the test by this blogger.

 

Is this baking innovation a good thing? Hell, yes. As I may have mentioned before, ultra-processed food, especially in carbohydrate-rich forms, such as the nation’s favourite, sliced white bread, is a major contributor to the obesity-linked conditions which are clogging up the NHS. But the Superloaf is not cheap. Its recommended retail price for a 400g loaf, £2.30, compares unfavourably to Ocado’s M&S soft white medium sliced loaf, which costs 85p and weighs in at 800g.

 

In other words, it is four times more expensive – placing the gut microbiome-friendly Superloaf at the costly, niche end of the bread market, rather than in the school lunch box. In a more sensible and healthier world, the UK government would intervene in the bread market with taxation. A loaf of medium-sliced white bread would cost more than twenty cigarettes and the Superloaf would be less than a quid.

 

Don’t expect such a fiscal intervention to happen any time soon. No government in history has been elected on a manifesto promise of making bread more expensive.

 

Revolting bugs

 

Before trading standards services took on the job, environmental health practitioners and their predecessors used to tackle the mis-selling of food. It was a serious business – bread could lose most of its nutritional value by being adulterated with chalk dust or alum, milk was routinely watered down.

 

In some cases, adulterated food was highly toxic. In 1858, the nation was shocked when 21 people died in Bradford after eating the products of ‘Humbug Billy’ – sweets to which arsenic had been mistakenly added, instead of a popular sugar substitute, powdered gypsum, called ‘daff.

 

The case brought to light the need for specific, food-related legislation and a spur for this was provided by the work of chemist and pioneer microscopist, Arthur Hill Hassall, who carried out the UK’ first comprehensive food sampling programme, in the 1850s.

 

Hassall had previously appalled the public by discovering, through his lens, a new universe of weird-looking bacteria and other micro-organisms in water from the Thames. His equally alarming discoveries concerning food were published in The Lancet and led to the Food Adulteration Act of 1860.

 

The pioneering act of 1860 was strengthened in 1872, by the addition of sampling officers and public analysts, and, in 1875, the Sale of Food and Drugs Act introduced meaningful sanctions for those adding injurious substances to food or drugs.

 

The war against food adulteration and mis-selling is far from over – as the ‘horsegate’ scandal of 2013 made clear and this year’s discovery of rotten pork being sold for human consumption. A country disrupts relations with its main trading partner and abandons food controls imports to avoid bureaucracy – what could possibly go wrong?

 

What it says on the box

 

Adding extra ingredients to a staple of life to make it healthier, has a more recent history. The fluoridation of water to reduce tooth decay is a classic example. It was speculated in the nineteenth century that diets supplemented with fluoride would protect populations against tooth decay. Experiments in the US in the 1940s, confirmed the hypothesis and the fluoridation of water was born.

 

By 2008, more than 70 percent of the US population was served by fluoridated public water supplies. In England, as of 2023, only 10 percent of the population benefits from this scientifically-validated public health measure. Its opponents, who were the anti-vaxxers of their day, have been spreading a trail of disinformation since the 1960s.

 

Food fortification, or enrichment, has been less controversial, although it is opposed by some on civil liberties grounds. UK regulations of 1998 require that all flour, except wholemeal and some self-raising flours, is fortified with calcium, iron, thiamine (vitamin B1) and niacin (vitamin B3). It’s not uncommon to see niacin, riboflavin, thiamine, vitamin B6 and folate among the lists of ingredients of ultra-processed and extremely sugary cereals. In 2011, Kellogg’s made a commitment to add vitamin D to all of its children’s cereals.

 

Adding folic acid, which produces vitamin B9 in the human body, to bread has been adopted in more than 80 countries in the last two decades. It is proven to reduce birth defects, such as spina bifida, and anaemia. The US was the first country to mandate folic acid in bread, in 1998. Australia, New Zealand and Canada, followed suit. The UK government is currently consulting on a proposal to add 250 micrograms of folic acid per 100 grams of non-wholemeal flour.

 

You could say, as some food campaigners do, that much of this chemical fortification is merely adding nutrients back to ultra-processed foods from which they have been stripped, in a less bioavailable form. This blogger could not possibly comment.

 

The latest, and controversial to some, gene-editing technology known as CRISPR now enters the picture. CRISPR, is already being used to biofortify cereal crops such as rice, wheat, barley and maize, for example, adding carotenoids to rice, which convert to vitamin A and can prevent blindness. Tomatoes engineered to contain high amounts of gamma aminobutyric acid (GABA) are designed to reduce blood pressure.

 

The Superloaf, which is the product of five years’ research into the relationship between producing and baking dough and the gut biome, is a good example of ‘food as medicine’ – a trend which will certainly continue. EHPs and their colleagues, trading standards officers, will be tasked, as they have been since the nineteenth-century, to protect the public and to test marketing statements against reality.

 

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986. He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.