By The Financial District
Oct 24, 20201 min
Many nutrition experts will tell you it's better to eat wholemeal bread than white bread, and not without reason. But white bread also has its merits, they say - you just shouldn't eat too much of it, Bernadette Winter reported for Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa).
One of the pluses of wholemeal bread is that it makes you feel full faster thanks to its higher dietary fiber content. "It fills the stomach without delivering a lot of calories," points out nutritionist Maike Groeneveld. In the opinion of experts, wholemeal spelt, also known as dinkel wheat or hulled wheat, is the healthiest bread and has a taste that children also like. The more finely ground the flour, the more easily digestible it is. On the negative side of the slate, fresh, still-warm bread often isn't tolerated well, says Restemeyer. Krueger adds that coarse, water-insoluble dietary fiber can lead to abdominal pain and intestinal gas.
Dietary fiber can help lower your risk for type 2 diabetes, lipid metabolism disorders, colon cancer and cardiovascular diseases, according to Silke Restemeyer, a nutritionist at the German Nutrition Society (DGE).
In dark-bread-loving Germany, commercial use of the term "wholemeal" is even regulated by law: The German Food Code stipulates that to designate bread as such, at least 90 per cent of it must consist of whole grain. Although the whole grain - including the bran and germ - is used to make wholemeal bread, this doesn't mean that the loaf is grainy inside or that you can see individual grains, as the flour may be very finely ground.