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Comment by lj3 | Hacker News Reader

I would love to if the US had the same food quality laws that European countries have. By HN standards, I'm a right wing nutcase and am in favor of as small a government as we can stand, but our food is killing us.

Bread has sugar in it. If you want bread without sugar in it, you must either pay more for the organic stuff or make it yourself. If you want bread without any additives or preservatives at all, you must buy your wheat from outside the country. Wheat in the US is fortified with iron and vitamin B by law.

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Starch is just polymerized sugar.

There's probably some room for slower digestion and absorption to matter, but calorie availability and density is likely the bigger problem then the exact nature of the calories.

You can buy unflavored white/whole grain bread from all supermarkets.

Sugar is in pretty much all bread. It's a matter of quantity.

I bake all my own bread. I use one level teaspoon of caster sugar in warm water to get the yeast going. You can add a bit more to get a harder crust on the bread. But this is so little, and it mostly gets used by the yeast, so that it has negligible effect upon the taste. Salt makes a vastly bigger difference.

I understand that much mass-produced bread in the US has greatly larger quantities of sugar in it. In the UK, this is only seen in "long-life" bread (which tastes terrible, and I don't know of anyone who buys it).

Bread has sugar in Europe too. You can choose a sugar free variety though easily.

pretty sure sugar it's basic ingredient to make bread even in Europe to help yeast in warm water by my small experience with baking bread and going through tons of recipes

also what's wrong with iron and vitamin?

"Bread with sugar in it" isn't banned in Europe.

Indeed. It's everywhere.

I believe the difference is that you can buy bread without sugar without resorting to overpriced organic bread.

So do you propose that bread with sugar be banned?

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