Tales From The Crib

Don’t fall for the white bread scam

Jennifer Margulis

I grew up eating Apple Jacks for breakfast and Spaghetti-O’s for lunch. I liked to watch the milk turn cotton candy pink in my bowl and gulp it down without a spoon (when my parents weren’t looking) after the crunchy cereal was finished.

When I was eight years old I became a vegetarian after I watched two lobsters I had befriended in the sink being boiled alive one night for dinner. I decided that night that I didn’t believe in killing animals and I stopped eating meat for 20 years. But even so, it wasn’t until I was 29 years old and pregnant with my first child that I started questioning the grains I was eating.

Wheat? Whole wheat? I had no idea, really, what the difference was.

I found out from Ruth Yaron’s book “Super Baby Food,” which is an encyclopedia of information about food for babies and adults alike. To my dismay, Yaron revealed that all those white flour tortillas with cheese (“cheese things” my college roommate Sue called them), all that white rice, white pasta, muffins made with white flour, doughnuts, croissants, bagels — all this food I was eating — was just giving me mostly empty calories.

Why? Because when you separate the germ and the bran from the wheat’s starchy endosperm, the processing turns it into white flour and also takes out almost all of the nutrients and phytochemicals.

So why would anyone do that? Because this process gives grain products a longer shelf life.

In short, today we eat starchy white nutritionally anemic food so food manufacturers can sell it to us stale.

“But it says ‘enriched,’” you might protest.

That’s because after taking out the vitamins and minerals (including vitamin E, vitamin B6, pantothenic acid, magnesium, manganese, zinc, potassium and copper) the result is so devoid of health-giving properties that manufacturers are then forced to add back chemically some of the naturally occurring nutrients that they have taken away.

“But it doesn’t taste as good,” you’re thinking.

Once I started eating whole wheat bread, whole oats, and brown rice, I found that I actually liked the taste better — however “crunchy” it seemed at first. More importantly, I liked the way I felt. I didn’t feel hungry so soon after eating the way I did after eating white food. And I didn’t feel dizzy and tired, the way eating lots of sugar and starch often makes me feel. When my midwife told me that whole grains are metabolized more slowly in the body and can actually help regulate blood sugar levels I believed it.

Whatever our palate preferences, our children don’t have the preconceived notions and food baggage we do. My kids like the cake I make with whole wheat and garbanzo bean flour so much that when served store bought junk cake they don’t finish it. In Yaron’s book there’s a recipe for whole grain oatmeal cookies sweetened with apple juice concentrate and blended dried fruit. I use apple juice and an apple instead (and add chocolate chips) and they gobble them up. I probably wouldn’t have liked them as a kid. Good and bad habits start early.

Even if you’re trying to buy whole grains, it’s not always easy. “Wheat” on a label doesn’t mean whole wheat and food labels are often intentionally misleading. “Look on the ingredients list of the grain-based foods that you buy and make sure that the word ‘whole’ is in there,” advises Larry Lindner, the executive editor of the Tufts University Health and Nutrition Newsletter and an expert on nutrition. “You want to see that word ‘whole’ and you want to see it first.”

When I was pregnant I realized what I fed my body was being converted into tiny toes and eyelashes. The food we eat, like the gas we put in our cars, is the single most important thing that determines how well our bodies function.

Don’t fall for the white bread scam.

Jennifer Margulis is the editor of the award-winning anthology “Toddler: Real-Life Stories of Those Fickle, Irrational, Urgent, Tiny People We Love” (Seal Press). She has a new book, “Why Babies Do That” (Willow Creek Press), coming out this fall. You can meet her at a book signing at Bloomsbury Books on Oct. 20 at 7:30 p.m.