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Comment by Kirby64 | Hacker News Reader

You’d be wrong about that, though.

Wonder bread white has 140 calories, 1.5g of fat, 5g of protein, and 29g of carbs for two slices. 5g of claimed added sugar.

In comparison, a recipe I’ve used to make very good white bread (the zojirushi recipe for their bread maker, for reference) has, for an equivalent weight of bread: 137 calories, 2.2g of fat, 3.9g of protein, and 24.8g of carbs. The recipe has roughly 2.5g of “added sugar” per that bread weight.

I wouldn’t consider 4g more of carbs per equivalent weight, or 2.5g more sugar, to be a “lot” more sugar.

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You can't really tell how much sugar there is in baked bread simply based on the amount added in a recipe.

Yeast ferment sugar, so depending on how much yeast you have, how active they are and the fermentation time, a small amount of sugar can easily be long gone by the time the bread comes out of the oven.

That goes for both store bought and homemade.

I mean, that’s double the added sugar. The US recommends only 50g of added sugar per day. And you’re generally not eating only two slices of bread; in the US breakfast mainstay that is peanut butter and jelly, both the peanut butter and jelly also usually have sugar.

> And you’re generally not eating only two slices of bread;

Aren't you? What meal typically has more than 2 slices of bread? A sandwich is two. Breakfast meals where toast is used is typically 2 slices.

And, if we limit ourselves to the 50g of added sugar a day, I'd say 10% of that for a component of one meal is pretty reasonable.

I was regularly eating around 8 to 10 thick slices per day of bread at one point

* 4 for breakfast as toast

* 4 for lunch to make 2 sandwiches (1 sandwich would be too small and I would be hungry all afternoon)

* sometimes another 2 with soup or an evening snack.

I think that speaks more to your diet than anything else. Regardless of the amount of added sugar, that’s an absurd amount of carbs to be getting just from bread and cannot be particularly healthy, no matter the type of bread.

That is a surprising assertion, given that eating the majority of one's calories in the form of bread was the normal human experience for thousands of years - practically since the beginning of agriculture - throughout Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa!

"Give us this day our daily bread", the old prayer goes: because bread was food, and everything else was accompaniment.

What is your point? That doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Thousands of years is literally nothing on an evolutionary scale. Modern humans have existed for at least 100,000 years.

Bread became ubiquitous because it didn’t require hunting or gathering, i.e. it supported ever growing communities of stationary humans. Not because some ancient nutritionist decided it was good for you.

My point? If you think a staple food vast numbers of human beings have relied on for literally all of recorded history (not to mention thousands of years prior) is "not particularly healthy", then perhaps your definition of "healthy" is a little too exalted for everyday use.

Again, “literally all of recorded history” is literally meaningless. I also find it bizarre that you would find something as simple as a well balanced diet (i.e. one humans enjoyed for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the agricultural revolution) as an “exalted” definition of healthy.

Let’s not use thousand year old traditions based on poorly understood nutritional science to guide today’s practices.

If you get the majority of calories from bread then you are, at best, eating far from the optimal amount of protein and lacking some useful nutrition. At worst, you’re eating a poorly balanced diet that will lead to overeating or malnourishment (or both).

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