Bad Food of the Week: Sara Lee Soft and Smooth Whole Grain White Breads
Posted by: Brad in Nutrition
Sara Lee’s Soft and Smooth Whole Grain White breads (wait a sec, isn’t “whole grain white bread” an oxymoron?) are billed as “whole-wheat with the flavor of white.” One little problem: the breads contain only 30% whole wheat! A look at the ingredients tells you all you need to know. The first item listed is enriched bleached flour. This is another way of saying that all the nutrients have been stripped from the flour and some were then added back through processing. The fact that it only contains one gram of fiber per slice speaks volumes about its lack of whole grain. Wait, there’s more. A further inspection of the nutrient label shows that it contains high fructose corn syrup–a sugar alternative that has no place in any product, nevertheless a bread marketed as a healthful whole wheat alternative. And that’s really the biggest issue here: Sara Lee is blatantly trying to trick consumers into believing this is a “healthy” product when in fact it is little better than plain old Wonder bread–the standard definition of an insulin-spiking high-glycemic food. The best advice when choosing a bread is to perform the “dough ball test”: if the bread can be easily molded into a dough ball, feed it to the birds. This product flunks the test. ‘Nuff said.
Stay Fit!
Brad
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November 11th, 2012 at 10:17 pm
I have purchased this bread for many years. I just wanted to tell you that I’m very disappointed in the quality. It used to be soft and smooth but now is very course and dry It falls apart so what ever you did to cut corners it didn’t work. I kept buying it hoping that it would improve but it hasn’t so I’ll probably not buy it anymore.