We’ve always eaten bread

One of things my students would ask me in those the early days was ‘we’ve always eaten bread, so how did we go from bread being something good that we could eat to bread that now harms us? What changed?’

Archaeologists have discovered the remnants of Neolithic grinding stones for processing grains, probably to make flatbreads. The ancient Egyptians were the ones to discover and record the use of leavening. Analyses of wall paintings, desiccated bread loaves and beer remains has proven that they knew both the brewing of beer and the process of baking leavened bread by using sourdough (Janick, 2002). How did we, as a species, transition from baking sourdough loaves using the very first wheat gathered, 10,000 years ago, to relying on genetic manipulation and cocktails of chemicals to both grow and process modern wheat? In other words, how did we go from bread that was good for us to bread that is bad for us? How did we end up with mass-produced bread that fails to nourish? What changed? I felt that in identifying those changes, I would find baking practices that I could apply to the bread we eat today that would be more synergistic with human – not industrial – evolution.

The answers to these questions are complex, because so many things changed; but this also means there is one straightforward answer – because everything changed. The wheat, the agricultural practices, the bread-making process, the way we eat bread and our own digestive systems have all changed. The loaves of bread we find in supermarkets today are created within a globalised infrastructure driven by profit at all costs. The bread is made using a system of production that is completely dependent on petrochemical-derived, synthetically fertilised and adulterated wheat that is routinely treated using carcinogenic, chemically produced herbicides, which we are beginning to understand have a negative impact on the diversity of the microbes in the gut. When you take a closer look, it is clear that much of the bread consumed today was created as part of an industrial system originally designed in the post-war period to put food security at the top of the agenda.

From the moment that I realised that eating one type of bread made me feel poorly and eating another made me feel well, I hyper-focused on understanding bread. Much of this knowledge was foundational in creating the BALM Protocol. (Hyper-focusing is a clinical phenomenon of ADHD, and I would later come to realise that this ability to focus all my attention was an unknown superpower.)

I learned that may of the ways in which we had traditionally produced and eaten bread had been abandoned. Not necessarily because of some grand evil scheme to ruin our most basic and affordable food, but because of what were at the time considered to be positive economic, political and cultural advancements. The first of these discoveries was one of the major factors that changed the structure of bread: we ceased producing bread as the combination of yeast and bacteria.

Yeast was separated from lactic acid bacteria and reduced to a single strain

At one time, almost all bread was fermented slowly using wild yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and lactic acid bacteria. The process was used daily by the general population and is even mentioned in biblical records. However, the modern process of making bread has been designed to feed the masses with affordable bread. Lactic acid bacteria, once integral to fermenting bread, became separated from the bread-making process, This marks a fundamental change in the systems used for making bread.

Wild yeast had been used for thousands of years before there was any understanding of how it worked scientifically. This came to light through the work of a brewer’s son, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, in 1680. Previously, there had been no real appreciation of the role of yeast, nor of its contribution to creating a sour flavour [Appendix x ]. Van Leeuwenhoek’s work focused on the manufacture of microscopes, and his first observation was of yeast globules [microscope image]. At this time, he did not detect lactic acid bacteria, as these microorganisms are far smaller than yeast. For this discovery, we had to wait another 200 years, until 1857, when the work of French scientist Louis Pasteur provided an understanding of the fermentation process. Pasteur believed that yeasts were responsible for fermentation, and he established that yeast was a live microorganism. In 1888, Emil Christian Hansen confirmed that yeast could be isolated and propagated in pure culture. This was the key turning point in the understanding of yeast, marking the beginning of a major shift away from the use of wild yeast or beer barm as the main source of yeast by bakers.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a close and firmly established relationship between bakers and brewers, and the main source of yeast for almost all professional bakers in the UK was beer barm.  Although this connection between bakers and brewers had existed for hundreds of years, there was a move away from beer barm during the early nineteenth century. This may have been due to a change in the hops, as the yeast was known to be bitter at times. Early yeast industrialists concentrated on narrowing down and genetically selecting single yeast species that would function optimally to raise the dough, which led directly to the development of the processes used in today’s modern mass-manufacturing of bread. However, it was not so much the identification of yeasts that changed the bread-making process but, crucially, the separation of yeast from lactic acid bacteria. This plays a key role in the digestibility and nutrition of sourdough versus mass-produced bread. Sourdough fermentation can decrease the glycaemic response to eating a slice of bread and increase bioavailability (Gobbetti et al., 2014).

By now, the drive for industrial bread made with yeast was firmly established. In 1876, brothers Charles and Max Fleischmann launched a brand-new manufactured yeast to the public at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. By the mid-1930s, commercial yeast was a household essential [Fleischmann image]. At the same time, Winge and Lausten (1938) became the first microbiologists to produce new yeast types by combining existing variations with commercial strains.

War

The critical point in the story of yeast came during the 1940s, as the US entered the Second World War. Fleischmann Laboratories were continuing to lead the way in developing yeast by beginning to manufacture Active Dry Yeast®, created specifically so that that troops could eat home-baked bread [add war photography images]. Up until this point, all commercial yeast had been fresh. Unlike the fresh yeast, this new dry yeast did not require refrigeration and was activated quickly in warm water. It was a complete revolution in baking. Laboratories continued furthering the enhancement of yeast strains, and new highly active dried yeasts were being developed, which were now capable of raising the dough up to 50% faster than the initial dried yeasts. By 1961, this approach had led to what is now considered a low point in the history of bread-baking: the high-volume, fast-speed Chorleywood bread-making process, using just yeast (Cauvain & Young, 2006). The whole process takes roughly 1.5 hours, and the fast fermentation means that the proteins in the wheat are not broken down in the process, leading to unprecedented numbers of people reporting that they are intolerant to wheat, frequently blaming gluten as the cause of their digestive malaise (Kucek et al., 2015).

Yeast is now big business, and has an annual worldwide consumption exceeding 1 million tons. The applications for yeast have gone far beyond brewing and bread-making, and yeast is being used in the pharmaceutical industry and beyond.

Bread become less nutritious as roller-milling took over from stoneground flour – Insert about the industrial revolution and flour and corn laws

Milling  – a combination of both agricultural practices and milling processes stripped fibre, vitamins and minerals from our flour.

By the end of the nineteenth century, there was a major change in the way that grains were ground and made into flour. Sophisticated roller mills had been developed (Tann & Jones, 1996) that allowed the production of much larger volumes of flour than was achievable using traditional milling techniques. This new flour was also whiter. Until this point, all flour had been stoneground, a process based on grinding between stones and then sieving. The benefits of this process were that the fresh, unoxidised flour retained the wheatgerm and its oils, meaning it was full of nutrients and fibre. However, freshly milled flour had to be consumed quickly, before the rich wheatgerm oils turned rancid (Boukid et al., 2018).

The new roller mills used steel cylinders, instead of stone, to grind the wheat. This process eliminated the germ, removing the richest part of the grain, which contains proteins, vitamins, lipids and minerals. The roller mill removed the most nutritious part of the grain, but it was able to produce white flour at a high speed, offering huge advantages for the manufacturing of bread (Gage, 2006) Moreover, the flour could be transported and stored for many months without spoiling. Seen as a revolution in the nineteenth century, we still use this process today, despite the reduced nutritional value of the refined white flour it produces (Sharpe et al., 2008)

Monoculture – removing fibre and reducing diversity

The process of removing the fibre takes away the phenolic compounds that protect against heart disease (Khurana et al., 2013) and cancer (Guo et al., 2009), while using commercial yeast increases glucose response. Plus, those delicious, nutty flavours disappear – together with vital vitamins and minerals.

Through the process of roller-milling, the wheat is stripped of its nutritional properties, before being rapidly manufactured into bread at factory scale using a single monoculture yeast strain and a single species of wheat, along with preservatives, emulsifiers and enzymes (Barling et al., 2009)

White bread contains flour that has been stripped of fibre and nutrients, and consequently fortified using pharmaceutically produced nutrients, and the loaves are quickly fermented with commercial yeast (Barling et al., 2009). Essentially, the bread we eat shifted from being a diverse, slow-fermented, chemical-free loaf made with stoneground whole wheat, to a modern white loaf devoid of nutrients. These dramatic changes in the way we grow, mill and ferment bread give some explanation as to why the modern diet is extremely fibre-poor by historical standards, containing only around 15–19 g of fibre per day (Gibson et al., 2019; Gressier & Frost, 2008; O’Keefe, 2019). Evidence points towards humans having evolved to eat up to 10 times that amount (Leach, 2007). This lack of fibre became more relevant later on as my understanding of the gut microbiome showed we need fibre and diversity. This historical context underpinned the development of the second principle of the BALM Protocol, which is to increase fibre.

The origin of the conflict between healthcare bread production systems: Our most basic food originated in war

What becomes incredibly clear is that war that was one of the biggest influences leading to this change to a system of bread production that ruined our health. There were three key events that contributed to these changes, all based in war.

• First, as discussed above, the Fleischmann brothers (LINK) were commissioned by the US government to produce a fast-acting yeast that produced food quickly for their soldiers.

• Secondly, after the war, it was discovered that the nitrogen from the bomb-making factories that fell in the surrounding fields led to an increase in the yield of crops in those fields, so bomb-making ingredients were then used as fertiliser. The nitrogen not only increased yields, but also changed the balance of the gluten and the gliadin, most notably the gliadin. The gliadin increases relative to how much nitrogen is thrown on the field. [find the research on this.}

• The Chorleywood process itself was part of a post-war political drive for the UK to have food sovereignty. The presence of German U-boats off the coast [reference] and the bombing of grain had shown a need for food sovereignty, so the Chorleywood process was part of a kickback after the war: an effort to prevent an enemy ever being able to control our food again.