Bread is a staple of the western diet.
Most restaurants always keep it stocked on the dinning table while many households serve it with every meal.
And while there’s nothing wrong with eating homemade bread every once in a while, processed bread really shouldn’t be eaten everyday.
If you find yourself eating that kind of bread during most of your meals, try giving up entirely for a month: You’ll feel more energized and less bloated! There are many health benefits of not eating bread.
Health benefits of not eating bread
1. Weight Loss
As you probably know, one of the first foods cut out by most people trying to lose weight is bread .
This is because its high in refined carbohydrates, which makes your body accumulate water weight. It’s estimated that each gram of carbohydrates you eat binds up to 3-4 grams of water. This can leave you feeling bloated and large.
Eating refined grains also makes you more likely to gain visceral fat around your belly area .
2. Energy Boost
Wheat is known to cause quick rises in blood sugar levels, which is never a good thing. The glyphosate residue in the wheat also increases intestinal permeability, making it more likely for you to develop leaky gut syndrome.
According to Alessio Fasano, the Medical Director for The University of Maryland’s Center for Celiac Research, no one can properly digest gluten. And some people are more sensitive to it than others.
“We do not have the enzymes to break it down,” reports Discovery News. “It all depends upon how well our intestinal walls close after we ingest it and how our immune system reacts to it.”.
The compounds that make gluten, gliadin and glutenin, are immunogenic anti-nutrients that attack your body as you eat it. This can leave you feeling tired, weak and uncomfortable, even after a balanced meal.
The grain is also known to cause energy-draining chronic inflammation and joint pain.
3. Improved Digestion
Despite present in an overwhelming amount of food products, wheat is notoriously hard to digest.
In fact, many people don’t even know that the everyday digestive symptoms they’re experiencing are caused by a gluten-heavy meal.
“Probably one-third of patients in my allergy clinic complain of digestive symptoms such as bloating, diarrhoea, vomiting and stomach pain after eating bread,” explains Isabel Skypala PhD, specialist allergy dietitian at the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust. “Some people find certain foods are simply hard to digest and wheat appears to be one of those,” .
Perhaps the most well know conditions that cause gluten-based digestive distress are wheat allergy, wheat sensitivity and Coeliac disease, but many other digestive conditions can cause heightened sensitivity to the grain.
Actually, cutting out wheat and other fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols can also improve the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome.
4. Controlled Appetite
Refine carbohydrates found in white bread don’t actually contain the nutrient-rich wheat bran and germ, making it easy for your body to digest. Instead, it contains the starchy endosperm that quickly gets converted into glucose, causing a rise in your blood sugar levels .
And since quick rises in blood sugar lead to quick declines, eating bread makes you more likely to get hungry after a meal and crave more simple carbs.
Its lack of fiber and nutritional value also leaves you feeling physically less full and more prone to snack throughout the day.
Start by going off bread for a week. If you start feeling better, try extending your no-bread diet to a month or get creative and skip bread as much as possible.