In a little light relief from news of Labour donation scandals and blasphemous teddy bears, Tory Baroness Gardner of Parks gave an interview to Radio 5 Live this morning about sliced bread.
It’s too thick, she thinks. “In central London you can hardly buy a thin or medium-sliced loaf of bread and any sandwich that you buy in any supermarket is now made with thick bread.” And such expanding slices of bread are leading to expanding waistlines, she believes.
She felt so strongly on the issue she asked the question in the Lords:
[Should] there be more pressure from the Food Standards Agency, or one of the many departments the Minister speaks about, to take us back to normal-sized bread instead of these super-sized sandwiches[?]
Much to her credit, Labour’s Baroness Royall said that doing anything of the kind would leave the government open to charges of nanny statism.
More importantly, it’s hard to blame obesity on bread. It’s low in fat and sugar, and even thick bread only clocks in at around 100 calories a slice. If Baroness Gardner’s waist is suffering from supermarket sandwiches, it’s more likely to be the butter, mayo and bacon that are piling on the pounds rather than the innocent starchy white.
And by blaming bread, the Baroness is contributing to a modern idée fixe that somehow carbs are bad for you. Earlier in the year the Food Standards Agency reported that barely a tenth of us understand that carbohydrates should actually make up a third of all we eat. Misunderstandings of the Atkins diet – where dieters eliminate carbohydrates entirely from their food intake in the hope of bumping their bodies into a chemical imbalance called ketosis, where the liver starts converting fatty deposits into useable energy – have led to a widespread belief that somehow carbs are fattening.
The truth couldn’t be further away. All the healthy eating advice suggests that between them, fruit and veg, and starchy foods like cereal, rice, pasta and yes – bread, should account for two thirds of our food input. Wholegrain is better than bleached white bread, but even white bread has its place in our diets.
Top of the Food Standards Agency’s top tips for healthy eating is base your meals on starchy foods, since they are a good source of energy and the main source of a range of nutrients in our diet. As well as starch, these foods contain fibre, calcium, iron and B vitamins. For more information, see the “eatwell plate.”
So the Baroness can go back to butties, even those made with thick slices, safe in the knowledge that bread is good for you.
- Alex Foster is clinically obese.
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11 Comments
Who says the Tories are out of touch? School uniforms and thick slices of bread. The two most important issues facing Britain today.
The Atkins take on carbs is distressingly difficult to put down. I’ve even got a Nigella book in which she talks about being on a low-carb diet. I think it does make you bloated or something though, doesn’t it, if not actually fat? Maybe bloated is just a synonym for wind, I’ve never been sure.
I feel I should apologise for the Tory peer if this story is reported accurately. Bread is of course largely made up of sugars, albeit in the form of starch.
Although, if you can’t be slightly eccentric when you are a peer of the realm, then what’s the point 🙂
What a charming little article – good work Alex Foster.
Great article – you should see the slices of bread in our local sandwich shop – they’re ENORMOUS!!!! ;@)
Actually, bread isn’t all that healthy. White bread has relatively little nutritional value, like most foods consisting of refined carbohydrates. Eating too much of these foods is bad for you, and reducing, say, the thickness of a slice of bread is actually quite sensible.
Of course, the idea that the FSA should or could regulate this kind of thing is nonsensical. The very phrase ‘government health advice’ should be enough to send a shiver down the spine of any right-thinking individual. The current research tends to indicate that excessive carbohydrate consumption is harmful, but we have large agricultural industries which base their existence on supplying us with these foods. The government has to weigh the interests of the agricultural industry against the interests of public health, and you don’t need to be an especially strident believer in public choice theory to recognise that where those two interests do not coincide, one side has a considerable advantage in having its voice heard.
You see, that’s why I like Passing Tory. If it had been a Labour peer, we’d have had Chris Paul all over this thread telling us about how the newspapers have made it all up, and anyway the vast majority of everyone who has ever eaten bread over the past x millenia has died so that has to tell the smug doubters something, and anyway it’s all just yet another smear campaign co-ordinated by John Leech so, in summation, how dare we continue to exist as a party.
No.5 – “Eating too much of these foods is bad for you”
Which surely is the point of the expression “too much”?
Surely the solution is to stop people from using two slices of bread when one will do? What’s the difference between eating two thin slices and one thick slice?
That’s just silly. Either all the little bits of bacon will fall off or (which is far worse) you’d get a mayonnaisey hand. It’s classic tinkering with outcomes when what we need is the far more fundamental shift of redesigning the human digestive system to take account of the Loaf Volume-Tummy ratio (LVT).
Simple solution – one slice, chopped in half.
Sheesh! Clearly I have to do all the thinking around here…
Use two slices, but print the top one with “Do not eat” in some unpleasant colour. And to avoid the mayonnaisey hand, replace the mayo with some nice low-carb lard.