Eat the damn bread!

A follower sent me a Facebook post this week asking for my take. The post was making the rounds with a bold claim: you should not be eating sourdough bread.

I could tell it was AI-generated drivel before I even finished the first paragraph. And look, I'll be honest. It irritates me. Every second person on the internet is suddenly a writer, courtesy of ChatGPT. But I gave it a read anyway. You know what it was? The same old arguments. Carbs bad. Carbs this. Carbs that. Just noise.

My response to that follower was simple: eat the damn bread.

Now let me explain what I actually mean by that.

Context Matters. Here's What We're Not Doing.

We are not eating store-bought bread loaded with additives and preservatives. We are not eating bread made with inferior quality flour. If you have sensitivities, we are making sure our sourdough is properly fermented, that long, slow fermentation process that breaks down gluten and phytic acid and makes the bread actually digestible.

And we are not eating bread if we are diabetic, if we have coeliac disease, or if we have a true gluten intolerance. I want to be clear about that last one, because gluten intolerance is one of the most over-diagnosed and misunderstood conditions out there right now. Genuine intolerance is real but not every bout of bloating is a gluten problem, and the blanket fear of gluten has done a lot of damage to how people relate to perfectly good food.

And yes, if you have a specific goal to lose a significant amount of weight, there are caveats. What if you're doing intermittent fasting? What if your blood sugar response to carbohydrates is genuinely compromised? There are always what-ifs. I'm not dismissing them.

But those are the exceptions. Not the rule.

Humans Have Been Eating Bread for Thousands of Years

Bread has become so demonized in recent decades, and it's not without reason, but the reason is not bread itself. The reason is what we have done to wheat. Modern industrial wheat farming, the introduction of semi-dwarf high-yield varieties, glyphosate application at harvest, and the rise of highly processed flours have fundamentally changed what ends up in your loaf. Add to that the genetic modification debate, and you start to understand why our bodies are reacting differently to wheat today than they did a generation ago.

The problem is not the bread. The problem is the industrialization of the food system.

I Used to Be on That Bandwagon. I'm Glad I Got Off.

I'll own it. I was low carb. For a long while, I believed the narrative. And I was miserable. Constant IBS symptoms. Weight that would fluctuate constantly. What I didn't realize at the time was how fiber-devoid my diet had become the moment I started eliminating entire food groups.

Here's something people don't like to say out loud: humans love to overindulge in animal products and sugar. And when we go low-carb, we justify doing exactly that. We cut the bread, but we pile on the butter, the bacon, the cream. The fiber disappears from the plate and we wonder why our guts are in revolt.

There I said it.

The low-carb movement, and the Atkins era before it, was originally pointing fingers at refined carbohydrates. Your white rice, white potato, refined flours, the ultra-processed starchy stuff. Fair enough, there's an argument to be had there. The problem is that somewhere along the way, society threw whole plant foods into that same carb category and started treating a butternut and a bag of white bread as nutritional equals. That is where it went wrong.

And yes, I hear the contradiction. I just told you refined carbs are a problem, and now I'm telling you to eat the bread. But here's the thing, real sourdough, made with quality flour and properly fermented, is not a refined carbohydrate. The fermentation process breaks down the starches and dramatically changes how your body responds to it. We are not talking about the same food. A long-fermented sourdough loaf and a supermarket white loaf are not nutritional relatives. There is really solid science and research to back this up.

Fiber Is the Thing We've Forgotten.

We are so deep in ultra-processed, refined carbohydrate chaos that we have forgotten what it actually feels like to eat properly.

Let me give you two examples I use often.

Try and eat an entire butternut for lunch. Or any other whole veg if don't like butternut, just try it. See how far you get. The fiber in that food will stop you long before you finish it. The calorie density is low. The satiety is high. That is whole plant food filling you up with fiber that is going to take a while to get through your system.

Now take that glass of orange juice. Delicious. Goes down in thirty seconds. Do you know how many oranges went into that glass? Around ten. Could you sit down and eat ten oranges? You’ll stop at three. Maybe four. Because the fiber in the whole fruit would fill you up and your body would say enough. The juice stripped all of that out.

Stripping fiber from the diet is, in my view, one of the single biggest mistakes we have made as a modern society. And I don't say that only from education. I say it from living it in my own body.

You Cannot Get Fat Eating Whole Plant Foods

I'm going to say something, and I want you to hear it clearly: it is impossible to get fat eating whole plant-based foods. This is not a suggestion. This is not an opinion. This is what the evidence and lived experience consistently show.

And let's be clear about what whole plant foods actually are. They are not pastries. They are not deep-fried chips. They are not cheesecake with a vegan label on it. Whole plant foods are vegetables, legumes, fruits, wholegrains, nuts, and seeds in their minimally processed, fiber-intact form.

A Client Story (Shared with Permission)

I recently did a full assessment on a gut health client who has been dealing with severe prolapse, persistent IBS symptoms, and real difficulty keeping the colon comfortable. We looked at eating patterns, habits, food choices, and the full picture.

After a few weeks of reintroducing fiber-rich foods and moving away from the keto-style products that had dominated their diet, the change was significant. Symptoms improved. Comfort improved. And here's the part that stood out most: they noticed they simply couldn't eat as much as before.

The fiber was doing its job. They were getting more from less. Feeling full. Feeling good. The last update I received from this client? All cravings for the old lifestyle foods are gone. Eating when hungry, loving the recipe book. Satisfied by 2pm some days, and that's okay. The body is finding its own rhythm again.

So yes, eat the damn bread.

Eat the good bread. The properly fermented, quality non gm stoneground unbleached flour, real sourdough bread.

Eat it as part of a diet that is rich in fiber, varied in whole plant foods, and not built around fear of an ingredient that human beings have relied on for millennia.