Butterbread

Today we are talking bread and butter.

We have a listener who wants to defend the honor of bread, at least when it comes to its nutritional content and we will scrutinize some of this listener's claims. But first butter. Questioner 1: So in our household, we recently switched to European style butter because they have higher butter fat content standards and we find that having less water and more fat in your butter makes it easier to spread the butter on toast. So I have two questions for you about this. One, why do Europeans get to have more butter fat than those of us in America and two, why does it come in this ridiculous brick? I like the sticks because they come with nice tablespoon measurements and it's easy to cut off. On the Euro brick, it has these ridiculously small measurements that you can't really cut easily or uniformly. That's it.

Thanks, man. Adam: Okay, so first sticks versus bricks. Sticks versus bricks. For most of the history of butter making, which is of course probably centuries, maybe even thousands of years long, people have probably tried to transport and store butter in the largest volume possible. It's like a big glob or a big brick, a big sphere, something big because a big, big chunk of butter reduces your surface to mass ratio. So you have less surface relative to the total mass if you store your butter in a big chunk and that's really important, especially in ye olden days when they didn't have really, really tight sealing packaging that could keep out the air and everything because butter oxidizes and that results in a color change.

The surface of the butter will start to kind of go a little bit darker and looks sort of like a plasticy sort of texture to it and gradually it develops a funky flavor. It goes rancid.

Rancidity is one of the oxidation reactions that happens in food resulting in undesirable flavors. So that's the big reason that you want to keep your butter in a big chunk whenever possible. Is that really relevant nowadays that we have refrigeration and we have really, really airtight sealing packaging? Probably still a little relevant, not as relevant as it used to be before. But that's why just historically we kept butter in big chunks and the European tradition of packaging butter, which is kind of closer and more rooted to longstanding tradition, which is going to be a big theme we're going to hit as we talk about Euro versus American butter. It's just more directly related to the tradition and so therefore they still have that tradition of storing their butter in really big chunks instead of being big globs that are just kind of piled by some dairy maid with her bare hands. They're doing instead extruding it out in big rectangles. What's a three dimensional rectangle called? I don't know. A monolith? I'm speaking from really, really, really minimal notes today.

I have done a few shows with my lovely wife Lauren, where she and I have just been kind of chatting and I have really minimal notes and people say that they like that better. They like me unscripted better. I don't. I like me scripted much better. But it's about what you want, not necessarily what I want and so I'm going to try really hard to do this with incredibly spare bullet point type notes and we'll see how it goes. Anyway, it's all made in a factory now and they are extruding out big chunks of butter and that's why it comes in that kind of perfect whatever a three dimensional rectangle is called. But it's a big, big block because historically that's just how you did it in order to minimize surface area. Come to the United States where because United States was in terms of the white part of the United States, a newer place than Europe, a little bit less moored to tradition, a country that is developing from scratch, at least the white part of it, a little bit less tied to old ways of doing things because they're building factories out of nothing and all of that.

You get a more kind of industrial approach because especially the western part of the United States entirely developed in the industrial and then post-industrial eras. So you get a different approach. They were extruding butter from an earlier stage here in the United States from modern butter factories where you can just squeeze butter out like a tube and so you can get a standard shape of any kind.

Might be a block.

Might be a stick. Might be a cylinder. Butter is sold in cylinders as well, although that's more from an older tradition where you could take kind of a still soft and malleable glob of butter that you have just churned. You put it in a piece of paper and then you kind of roll the paper with your hands and that gets you a nice, really kind of standard long stick that's easy to cut into smaller chunks when cold to throw into the pan and use for whatever you need.

If the butter is warm, in the pre-refrigeration days, it didn't matter because you would just take a spoon and go [inaudible 00:05:16], right? But in post-refrigeration days, you got to think about the butter being hard and when the butter is in a really long shape, like a long tube, it's really easy to cut off a reasonable chunk of it to use in your cooking and that's why we got the butter into small shapes or narrow shapes I should say and we were extruding butter here in the United States in the 19th century, as early as the 19th century, and I found conflicting sources on it.

At some point in the 19th century we went from a block to cutting the block into sticks. The only source on the internet that I can find on when and why that happened is an old United States public radio show called Marketplace. They did a little piece on this some years ago about why butter comes and sticks and they said that it was this one butter manufacturer in Kansas or Kansas City, which is in Missouri. I forget. One of those. They're adjacent. So just in that general area of the Western central United States.

They trace it to one particular butter manufacturer there responding to a request from a restaurant in New Orleans that was a major butter buyer and they said, "Hey, instead of sending us the big one pound block of butter, can you cut that into four individual sticks because that would be easier for us to cut off individual portions.".

That's what this report from Marketplace says. Their source is a professor in California and I can't find out what any of the primary sources are. I tried. I'm not a primary source myself, at least not in the context of these podcasts where I'm telling you about other people's research. I try to be a secondary source though. That means I read or listen to your questions and then I go and I consult primary sources. That is original scientific research or original first person accounts, that kind of thing.

What I don't want to be is a tertiary source where. I'm consulting a secondary source that consulted a primary source and I certainly don't want to be a whatever a fourth person removed is, a fourthiary source, quadrinary. Don't know what that is. The point is that it's like the more layers you have in your sourcing, the more chances you have to get things wrong just through of copying errors. The game of telephone, where things just get kind of a little bit messed up each time they transfer from one source to another. So I try really hard to be a true secondary source for you. I consult primary sources. I could not find the primary source on why American butter comes in sticks.

Another secondary source, this show Marketplace says it was this one Kansas or Kansas City butter maker in the 19th century responding to a restaurateur to request from New Orleans. Sure, it's probably something like that. If it wasn't that, it was something like that, right? At some point somebody got the idea to chop the one pound block into sticks for ease of cutting when cold and the idea has stuck because it's a freaking brilliant idea. It makes measuring butter so unbelievably easy. Now Europeans might not care as much about that because Europeans tend to cook by weight rather than volume a lot more than we do in the United States.

I have a whole article about why

That is the case.

I will try to remember to link

It in the description or the show notes for this particular program.

It has to do with a lot of historical factors.

But regardless here in the United States, a lot of people are still cooking by volume, including me sometimes and in Europe and in really the whole kind of metric world, they're going by weight much more often and it's really, really easy to measure butter by weight regardless of what shape or form it is in.

It is very difficult to measure butter by volume really in whatever form that it's in because let's assume that the butter is warm and therefore it's kind of scoopable. Yeah, you could sort of cram warm butter into a measuring cup, but then it's going to be hard getting it back out again because it's sticky and viscous and all that kind of stuff. You're not going to get all of your butter out of the measuring cup. You're going to have some waste. That's a bad way to measure butter and then if it's cold, if the butter is cold, which it usually is these days because you're keeping it in the refrigerator, how can you measure it by volume at all? You can't cram that into any kind of volume measuring vessel. What the stick situation gets you is this nice narrow shape, highly standard, geometrically standard shape and on the packaging they can put these little markers where the tablespoons or the ounces or even the grams are, right and then you can just go by that marker on the package, cut off what you want, throw it into your recipe.

It's an incredibly fantastic, brilliant system, whether you cook by weight or by volume.

You don't even have to get out the scale because the weight can be indicated on the packaging. You just go shump and take off that chunk. If you don't want to take my word for it, take someone who is generally more respected than me, Kenji. J. Kenji López-Alt right? A guy who loves precision, cooks by weight, has advanced cooking by weight for his whole career, has probably done more than any other person in the United States to get people in the United States cooking or especially baking by weight rather than by volume, right? Kenji is all about precision.

Kenji loves stick butter, absolutely defends the honor of stick butter has written about it multiple times. It's just a really, really good system and Europeans, I think that maybe your lives would be just a little bit better if you asked the good people at Kerry Gold and other fine European butter makers Oh, does Ireland still count as Europe? Oh yes, no, because Brexit is only Northern Ireland. So boy, I don't know if Kerry Gold is in Northern Ireland or in Ireland-Ireland.

Oh, I could get in so much trouble here. This is so politically fraught. This is why I need to write script. But I don't know. Maybe people seeing me flail. So I'm going to just keep flailing. Maybe it's fun to see me flail. So anywho, butter, butter, butter, butter.

What were we saying about butter? Okay, yes, I think things would be better for you in Europe or the non-European parts of. Europe if your butter came in sticks. Stick butter is fantastic. So that's pro stick butter and then the Kerry Gold, the Kerry Gold that you dear questionnaire have is the. Kerry Gold that is packaged for the United States market and therefore it has the little hash marks on it for volume measurement. I don't know if the European packaged Kerry Gold has the same marks. Somebody, if you're watching this on YouTube, leave a comment and let us know if actually Irish for the Irish market, Kerry Gold comes with little marks for volume measurement. I'd be curious to know.

Fun fact though about Kerry Gold and the United States.

There was a whole Kerfuffle in 2015

When kerry gold got banned in the us state of wisconsin.

So Wisconsin is this historic center of the dairy industry in the United States. I love Wisconsin, absolutely beautiful state. A lot of sort of just funny things about them, funny personality, collective personality traits of the Wisconsin people. But one is that they take their cheese and their milk and their butter super, super seriously and state level regulations for butter packaging are particularly strict in Wisconsin, which you could take as maybe being kind of a protectionist thing where they're trying to favor their own native dairy industry in Wisconsin.

Make Wisconsin great again. I'm not quite sure exactly where it descends from.

But regardless, there was an old law on the books from the 1950s that essentially made Kerry Gold packaging illegal because it doesn't have a US grading standard on it and some regulator in the state noticed that in the 2010s and they sent a letter to Kerry Gold saying, "You may not market your butter in our fine state of Wisconsin anymore," and the thing is, Kerry Gold is awesome.

Kerry Gold is such good butter for reasons that we're going to get to when we stop talking about sticks and everything and start talking about butter itself, right? Kerry Gold is such good butter and the good people of Wisconsin know and appreciate their dairy products and so when Kerry Gold got banned, this underground trading network sprung up of people taking their van into Nebraska and loading it up with Kerry Gold and running butter back into.

Wisconsin. It's pretty hilarious. But anyway, the Kerry Gold people worked out a solution with the regulators for tweaking their packaging and Kerry Gold became legal again and all was well with the world. But anywho, let's talk about the actual butter itself, European style versus US style butter. Sure, there is a difference in butter fat content potentially. So butter is just, you take cream.

You skim the cream off of the milk and then you agitate the cream to break up the fat globules and get them to kind of reform in these butter crystals and the more you do this, you sort of squeeze out the water, what we call the buttermilk. That's not what buttermilk is today when you buy buttermilk at the store, at least not in the United States. In the United. States, it's a cultured yogurty product. But historically it comes from the milky water that's left over from churning butter. So anyway, you churn the butter until you get all these fat crystals forming and sticking together and squeezing out all the water and then when you get to in the United States, at least 80% butter fat, then you can legally call it butter and that product is going to be the cheapest product to make probably, right? Minimally 80% butter fat because you are (A) losing less of the cream to byproduct and (B) you're churning it for less time.

The main way that you increase the butter fat content is to keep churning for longer and longer and longer. Time is money in an industrial context and so cheap butter in the United States is going to be just 80% butter fat, enough butter fat that they can legally sell it as butter and no more.

You might think that the EU standards would be higher. But they are, for unsalted butter. It's 82% minimum fat content for unsalted butter. For salted butter, it's 80% because the salt takes up volume. It's the same as the US standard for salted butter. But for unsalted butter, yeah, 82%. How much of a difference does 2% make? Well, kind of a difference and also you have a lot of artisanal butter makers in Europe and now in the United States who are going for more than the bare minimum. They're selling butters that are 85% butter fat for more money.

But boy do they taste good, right? Taste really good. Why does such a tiny difference in butter fat percentage make an appreciable difference in how the product tastes? Looking at the scientific literature on this, it's not entirely understood. The enhanced creaminess sensation or perception may indeed be due to there's just more fat, right? There's just a little bit more fat and so you taste the slightly greater concentration of fat.

But my instinct looking at the scientific

Literature is that probably the bigger factor is how the salt crystals actually form over the course of the churning process.

There's lots of different crystal states that

Can be achieved depending on the length of the churning, the temperature at which the churning happens, the temperature at which the butter is then chilled down to solid form.

Is it rapidly chilled or is it slowly chilled? You get different kinds of crystals and different kinds of crystal to crystal interactions that is arrays of crystals. It all kind of depends a lot and science has shown that those different crystals and crystal configurations absolutely affect the properties of the butter, particularly, I guess they would call it rheology in food science. Basically I think we'd probably call it texture, just how it spreads, how it feels, all that kind of stuff and the questioner notes that Kerry Gold seems to spread better than.

American style butters and that may be due to the lower water content. But it may also be due to the different crystal configuration that results from how exactly they make Kerry Gold as opposed to US style butter, which is generally just made faster because we're more about in industrial efficiency here in the United States historically at least, right? Because we're the birthplace of that kind of efficiency.

The United States and England, the birthplaces of that kind of cutthroat industrial efficiency and if the rest of the world hates it so much, then riddle me this. Why are you all copying us? Everybody's mode of production is going in this direction for a reason because it results in more food for people at a lower price and yes, higher corporate profits too, but also cheaper product. Okay? Anywho butter, butter, butter fat. So the amount of water itself might also affect how butter fat crystals form. Actually I was looking at a study. It was a Danish study from 2012 looking at the water content of butter and how it seems to affect crystallization.

They were also looking at the temperature of the cooling, how rapidly you cool the butter down and how that affects how it crystallizes and they found that higher water content and faster chilling do indeed result in less spreadable butter, at least when the butter is fresh. What they found was that after 21 days of storage, all of their samples ended up having the same basic spreadability. All the differences kind of even doubt because the crystal structure continues to evolve inside the solid block of butter as it sits around and even if it's well sealed and packaged, it still loses some water over the course of storage. So the differences even out the less fresh the butter is. But when the butter is super fresh, they found absolutely more water and faster chilling resulted in less spreadable butter and remember that spreadability is different from meltability. Those are totally different things. Ideally, what you generally want in butter is butter that is highly spreadable when cold or relatively spreadable when cold but still doesn't melt rapidly. You want a high melting point.

High spreadability is generally what you want in high quality butter. So anyway, that's probably why your Kerry Gold spreads differently, its crystal structure than its water content. The water content can apparently influence crystal structure. So that might be kind of a distinction without a difference. Another reason that European style butter tastes so different is that it is very often fermented to a degree greater than the kind of incidental fermentation that probably occurs during the production of. US style sweet cream butter that kind of prides itself on not being fermented at all. Why would you pride yourself on not being fermented at all because we all know that fermentation is awesome. Fermentation is life, right? Results in all kinds of wonderful complex flavors.

Well, this is something that really sticks in my mind from Anthony Bourdain's first book, Kitchen Confidential, which I read that shortly after it came out and it was just obviously extremely influential for me and my way of looking up the world and my way of looking at food. But one of the things that Bourdain writes about is his summers in France as a little boy. Anthony. Bourdain came from a pretty well to do family in the New York area in the United States. His mother was an editor at the New York Times, which is why he knows so much about writing and why he was able to get a newspaper article published that ultimately changed his career from being sort of a middling chef to being the world's biggest food celebrity arguably. It was because he got an article published in The Times and he probably knew how to do that because of his connection with his mom. But anywho, mom was an NYT editor.

Dad was an executive at Columbia Records,

Though interestingly his dad worked his way up to that from working in a record store.

 

He was a manager at a record store when Bourdain was very little and he sort of worked his way up to be an executive at Columbia Records, which is pretty awesome I think. But anyway, Bourdain's dad was not born in France. So Bourdain's paternal grandparents were born in France and so the family went to France frequently for extended summer holidays and Bourdain writes in his book about being a little boy, going into these fancy French restaurants and trying to find anything to eat because little kids are picky eaters and they don't want to eat liver pate or whatever fancy stuff that the parents were eating.

So Bourdain and his brother, they'd go hard on the bread and butter. They'd just try to fill up on bread. That was the thing that was familiar to them at the. French restaurants and ironically though or sort of tragically in the life of a very little boy, he was always stymied by the fact that the butter was cheesy. He described the butter as being cheesy, that cheesy French butter.

Why was it cheesy? Because fermentation, because fermentation, because traditional ways of making butter in France in particular involve letting the cream ferment for a few days before you churn it into butter and you get a product that is arguably as much yogurt or cheese as it is butter, right? That's not true.

It's more butter than it is yogurt or cheese. But it has aspects of yogurt and cheese in it from both sort of a definitional standpoint, but also just kind of how it tastes to you. It sort of tastes like yogurty butter and so this poor little American boy, little Anthony Bourdain, that was very frustrating because he found that cheesy butter rather disgusting. There are other ways to get that cheesy effect in butter other than letting the cream ferment for a while before you churn it. That's not the only way that it is done and in fact, it's usually not the way that it is done in modern production because that's highly inefficient, just letting the cream sit around. So they will often kickstart the process by culturing the butter and it will generally be sold as cultured butter that way where you're introducing bacterial cultures into the cream to get a rapid and reliable fermentation before you move on and finish the process. So that's one thing that happens in European style butter production.

Also, there are sort of cheaper and faster ways of doing that that they do in European style butter production where you can actually kind of spray the finished churned butter with bacterial cultures after you've already made the butter and then you package it up and then the fermentation happens inside the packaging and that results in a faster and a faster fermentation and a cheaper product.

The really cheap thing to do is to simply mimic the flavor of European style butter or cheesy butter by introducing flavoring agents, just mixing in flavorings and this is the case, I think, I should not say this with total confidence. But if you look at Plugra, which is kind of the first. European style brand of butter that I recall making a big impact here in the United States. When I was a kid, Plugra showed up on mainstream grocery store shelves in the US and that was the first time I saw something marketed as European style butter and my mom loves Plugra to this day and if you look on the ingredients of Plugra, it says milk and natural flavors, milk, natural flavors, at least on some of Plugra's products.

I shouldn't speak universally for all of them. But on some of them you will see that on the label. What are those natural flavors? Well, under US food labeling laws, they can be lots of different things that's like really? You want to call that natural, right? It's a lot of leeway.

But this is just a guess based upon how Plugra tastes is that it's just lactic acid. They have lactic acid that they probably source through industrial fermentation and they just mix the lactic acid into the butter and there you go. You get a tangy butter and is that worse than butter that is cultured? I think that's highly debatable. Why do you culture the butter? To create lactic acid, right? I guess I suppose maybe the fermentation process also results in other fermentation metabolites other than lactic acid. So maybe you get a slightly more complex flavor.

I just assumed that it was based upon how it tastes.

But now.

I know that actually I was right

All along kind of because if you look on the label, there's natural flavors in plugra and based on how it tastes, i'm guessing that it is lactic acid added into that butter to make it taste cheesy as little boy anthony bourdain would have said.

So there you go. That's the difference between American and European style butter. Why do they have better butter in Europe? Historically, it's because you have a more settled, rooted population that is closer to its traditions, both closer chronologically and also kind of closer physically. You had production infrastructure extent in Europe for making all kinds of products and therefore industrial production was huge closer to those traditional methods because they already had the tools, whereas in the United States, especially in the western United States, the entire country was developed into an industrial society in the industrial era, really quite late into the industrial era and so they were kind of starting from scratch and they went with industrial style productivity and values and all of that kind of stuff and I think people liked the taste of unfermented sweet cream butter because it didn't have that kind of cheesy note that to some people maybe tasted a little bit off or rotten because I suppose it technically is, right? It's butter that's gone off a little, but just in a good way and now there's all kinds of amazing butter in the United States.

I mean just go to the store.

Go to a good mainstream grocery store in the US and you've got really, really high quality expensive butters made in the United States. There's this one. I think it's Vermont Creamery is the brand and that's probably my favorite mass market butter in the United States right now. Really, really good. Very high butter fat content. The cultured one is super cheesy, super tangy. Good stuff is everywhere now as long as you know how to look for it. So there you go.

Good people are everywhere too as long as you know how to look for them. Say you are an employer who is trying to make some end of year employment goal, trying to land some good people in your company before the end of the calendar year and you're figuring, "Oh my gosh, how do I do that?

Terms and conditions apply.

Need to hire? You need indeed. Ben: Hi Adam, my name is Ben and I have a question about bread's place in a healthy diet.

Like many other people, I developed a bread baking hobby during the pandemic. But mine has persisted and I still bake a lot of bread. I make a really, really good sourdough bread with a lot of whole grain in it. It's just flour, water, salt and sourdough starter. Sometimes I'll toss in some sesame seeds, sometimes I'll lather it in olive oil and sprinkle on a little more salt and bake it into a focaccia. It's really good. I thought for visual aid I would share a couple pictures. This is one of my recent sourdough breads.

This one over here is the same bread in focaccia form and in my house we eat a lot of this. It's a thing we really enjoy. You mentioned that the starch and bread is nutritionally similar to sugar, refined sugar. But it seems to me that bread and especially whole grain bread is a lot more than just the starch inside of it. Whole grain bread has some fiber, which I think slows digestion of the starches and if you Google the nutritional information for even all purpose flour, you'll see that as a percent of daily recommended minimum values, it has more protein than it has calories for starch, not to mention sourdough enthusiasts will often claim that the cultures in sourdough starter enhance the nutritional value of the flour and further slow digestion.

So for those reasons, I'd like to think that the whole grain, slowly fermented bread that I eat is pretty healthy. But I would love to hear how you evaluate those claims.

Adam: First of all, Ben, that bread sounds absolutely fantastic, really delicious and really healthy as long as it's eaten in the appropriate moderation, which you appear to do. I can see you on the camera and you cut a trim figure. It doesn't seem like you're getting way too many calories and that's fundamentally what it's all about. Anything that puts you over budget on calories is going to eventually result in you being overweight and potentially obese. So it looks like you're doing it right, my man. I have no notes, no notes for you, Ben. Adam's carb phobia. Let's interrogate this a little bit because I think it's a fair critique that I worry too much about carbs relative to other macronutrients and that I also don't work hard enough to distinguish simple carbs from complex carbs and different sources of carbs, simple or complex.

What they're wrapped in matters. What other things you eat those carbs with really matters and we'll get to some details on that. But at first I want to explain where I'm coming from because I think there's a fundamental generational component to the attitude toward carbohydrates that I have and that maybe you have, Ben. You look younger than me. I'm going to assume you that you're considerably younger than me, Ben. I'm 40 and when I was a kid in my formative years, the consensus view of nutritional science is that dietary fat was the big problem with US diets or the diets of developed countries where people are eating way too many calories and getting fat and its subsequent scholarship and public reckoning with that scholarship has revealed that it's a lot more complicated than that.

Too much dietary fat is absolutely bad.

But it depends on the kind of

Fat and carbohydrates are at least as responsible for the obesity epidemic as highly refined fats are is what sort of most experts that you would talk to right now would say something like that.

 

It's the obesity epidemic is a combination

Of several factors and if we were looking at major nutrients responsible, then yes, absolutely.

Highly refined dietary fats are responsible, also highly refined, concentrated carbohydrates are also responsible and if any one thing is really the bad thing, it's probably sugar or highly refined and concentrated starch as well potentially. But most experts wouldn't even say anything like that. They'd say it's not one thing. It's many things. I grew up in the era when they were blaming fat and so we then had to go through this kind of corrective period where we said, no, no, no, no, no. You can't eat all of the pasta that you want as long as you don't put any butter on it, which is what they were telling us in the '90s. The experts were promoting very, very high, high carbohydrate diets in the '90s.

Pasta was the healthiest food imaginable. Stay away from the beef. Eat tons of pasta without any fatty sauce on it and that's not really good advice and we were sort of reacting to that bad advice, trying to get it into our own heads and then me as a science and food communicator, trying to get it into your head that you got to worry about your carbs too, not just your fats.

Now we're in a position where everybody has gotten that message and I suppose you could sort of argue that there's been a bit of an over correction, that now carb phobia has become a bit of a problem and someone like me is a contributor to that problem and I'll take that on board. I think that that's probably legit. This is not a perfect comparison. But I'm going to make it just because I think it's kind of an instructive comparison.

So when I was growing up watching TV in the United States, let's restrict it to news, news presenters because that's what. I was is a radio person for a long time. All of the newsmen were all newsmen. They were all dudes and they were all white, not all. So there was the very notable exception of, say, Connie Chung, right? An Asian woman. But she was notable because she was rare. Most news presenters were white dudes and that served to embody and perpetuate this kind of a damaging stereotype that says that if you want reliable, solid information, you go to a white man. It sounds ridiculous to even say out loud right now because we've done a pretty good job of correcting that and now a young person who's watching TV or whatever and seeing lots of different colored faces on news or in movies and that kind of stuff, they might think people are worried about representation in media? There was an audience member of mine wrote a very critical email to me one time saying, "What's wrong with having white guys in media? I'm a white guy.

I'm a young white guy and I never see myself in the media," which I think was probably a significant hyperbolic statement, an overstatement on this email writer's part. But I take the broader point, which is that it's like if you're young and you have grown up in the era when we have been working really hard to correct the representation and media problem, you might not see a problem because I don't know, maybe arguably you could say there is no problem anymore. But it has only happened due to great effort to try to correct the representation bias in media and I'm sure every person of color and woman in the audience right now is probably screaming that the problem isn't fixed, right? Because you can get a person of color to host your news program. But if the executive producer and all of the other kind of people with power behind the scenes are still old white dudes, then you could say that the diversification there is only skin deep. So, I don't want make it sound like the problem is fixed. But I understand why people much younger than me right now might struggle with the idea that there is a problem that requires active correction and I think this is kind of comparable to what you see with the carb thing. If you're a young person, you've grown up in an era when everyone was warning you about carbs and so you don't understand why there needs to be so much emphasis on carbs when carbs as a broad class are probably not that much worse or better for you than fats as a broad class. They're both essential nutrients that we need and that are both really bad for you if you eat way too much of them.

I think that's a basically true, very general statement that I can make. So yes, I will cop to my car phobia. Maybe we have gotten the word out there that you need to watch your carbs and so I need to stop harping on that point so much.

Maybe it's more that I harp on

It for myself just because my favorite foods are all super, super carby and i struggle with my carb content much more so than the fat content of my diet, partially because especially as i get older, i have so much trouble digesting high fat foods.

They just absolutely wreck my system and so I don't binge on fatty stuff. I don't binge on fried food. I binge on bread, right? Bread is a problem for me, it's not a problem for you, Ben. Obviously you're doing everything.

But bread is kind of a problem for me and that's why I worry about it. Now let's talk about your bread, Ben. Is your whole grain sourdough better for you than a loaf of. Wonder Bread, some highly refined white flour, very little fermentation at all going on in it, kind of standard American style sandwich bread and the answer is almost certainly yes. In every conceivable way, your bread is healthier, healthier from the standpoint of trying to avoid obesity, but also probably in its nutrient content, although not necessarily because you might not be using fortified flour and the fortificants, the nutrients that they add to even garbage white bread in the United States, you can talk crap about us food all you want.

But it's the government policies of adding fortificants, extra nutrients into products like white flour, just virtually eradicated nutritional deficiency diseases in the United States and then really across the entire developed world. It's got a pretty good track record, that kind of food, at least in terms of avoiding nutritional deficiency diseases. It has a miserable track record when it comes to avoiding obesity and metabolic syndrome, which are bad for you and we'll talk more another day because lots of people are trying to argue now that being fat is not bad for you and there's a lot of legitimacy to that argument up to a point, looking at the literature and talking to experts.

But fundamentally being very over fat, having much too much adipose plus tissue on your body is almost certainly really, really bad for you. To the extent that scientists know anything, they know that. So let's proceed from that assumption and talk about the way that you make your bread, Ben, and how it may potentially is helping you to avoid getting over fat and over fat, that's a really creepy term. It's got a bad sound to it. But the thing is it's good because it's more scientifically precise than saying overweight because you can for example, be overweight, have a BMI that is too high because you are solid freaking muscle, which actually might also be bad for you by the way. To a certain extent, body tissue, body mass makes things harder for your heart, whether it is muscle or fat. But that's another topic for another day. So anyways, we'll talk about how your bread is helping you to avoid becoming over fat, Ben.

So first of all, fermentation, you're doing sourdough. So you're talking about a much more fermented product. Fermentation absolutely is going to reduce the glycemic index of the bread. So what is glycemic index? Glycemic index is a way of measuring how rapidly your food is going to convert into blood glucose, how rapidly your food is going to raise your blood sugar and generally speaking, in the developed world where we're all overfed, high glycemic index foods are bad. That's the really, really bad thing. Spikes in blood sugar are what really gets you because assuming you don't burn off that sugar through physical work, that situation's going to result in storage of adipose tissue and then arguably more seriously insulin resistance over time and that's how you get type two diabetes. So high glycemic index is bad, although it's not the only thing that you look at for a couple of reasons. One, glycemic index is an estimate and not everybody's body processes food in the same way.

Secondly, glycemic index is different from quantity glycemic load, right? Because if I have one single grain of sugar, yes, it's glycemic index is 100. No, not sugar. Glycemic index of 100 would be straight glucose. That's the benchmark. Straight glucose is glycemic index of 100.

So I take a little fingertip dip

Of glucose syrup and i eat that.

The glycemic index is 100.

It's just 100.

Okay? A score of 100, as rapidly digestible and convertible into elevated blood sugar as a food could possibly be. But I'm only eating a nanogram of it and therefore it doesn't really matter that much. So quantity also matters and what you eat it with also matters. Anywho, it has been shown in several studies that extra fermentation of bread dough results is results in lower glycemic index bread and from the literature that I consulted, it's not entirely understood why that is the case. To some extent it's just that fermentation results in less sugar, right? Because that's what the little buggies do is they convert glucose into other stuff. They eat the glucose before you can and they convert it into metabolites. Some of those metabolites are healthy, all kinds of organic acids that have been found to be potentially beneficial to people's bodies and then they also convert the glucose into some less healthy things like ethanol. All fermented products have some alcohol in them, some booze and that's not good for you, probably in any quantity and has calories.

A gram of ethanol has more calories than a gram of sugar. But regardless, what we've found is that extra fermentation does lower the glycemic index of bread. Oh, it might also be due to pH. There is research that shows acidity slows the conversion of starch into glucose in your body, the enzymes in your body that break starch down into its individual glucose monomers. That process is slowed in an acidic environment. So if you're having your starch with acid as you are doing in sourdough, right? By definition, then that is going to slow the breakdown of the starch into glucose and therefore lower the glycemic index of the food. Another thing that's potentially going on there is what they call dextrinization. Dextrinization happens in a few contexts.

But one is when starch gets heated, really, really hot in the presence of acid in a low pH environment and that is what one of the things that results in a nice brown crust on a loaf. That brown crust is comprised significantly of dextrin that is created through that process, that hydrolysis that happens at high temperatures in the presence of acid and some dextrins are not super digestible. Some dextrins are incredibly digestible and a dextrin, it's really complex. It's a few glucose bonded together in such a way that in the case of some dextrins, you can't digest them or you might even not be able to digest them at all. There's kinds of dextrin that are considered soluble fiber because you cannot digest them at all, at least not in your upper intestine. They go down to your lower intestine where they're fermented into short chain fatty acids, which you do digest potentially in your lower intestine. But, boy, that's a whole thing. Anyway, so I don't know.

So that could be a case where the extra crustiness that you get on a sourdough loaf, which you do get, right? Everybody knows that. You will generally get a thicker, browner crust on sourdough and that could potentially be resulting in elevated levels of dextrins that are indigestible. But I also found one paper that examined that hypothesis and found it to not be relevant to the glycemic index of the bread. Anywho, sourdough also tends to have more resistant starch in it and nobody knows why. Resistant starch is starch that cannot be broken down into its constituent glucose monomers and then be digested by your body. It just passes to your lower intestine, where again, it very often gets eaten by bugs and fermented in your lower intestine and that's probably good for you in lots of ways. One way in which sourdough is not good for you, I hear people say, "Oh, it's so good for your gut microbiome," and their claim there seems to be based on their assumption that they are eating live bacteria, live beneficial bacteria in the form of the sourdough and that is absolutely not true, obviously, right? Because you're baking it.

You're baking it to generally a minimum internal temperature of at least 190 Fahrenheit.

Sorry, I don't know what that is in Celsius.

This is the problem with me talking

Off the cuff.

I can't convert the numbers for you. But regardless, you're heating the bread to a point where it's a biological desert in there. No bacteria survives. But it could be the case that bacterial metabolites of the fermentation process are present in the bread and those may indeed be very good for your gut microbiome as would be the fiber and all of that that you're getting from the bread and you are cooking bread, Ben, you say, with whole grain, which means not just the endosperm, which has the starch and some protein, but also the germ and the bran coat part of the grain and that's all filled with stuff that's not starch, right? Filled with fiber, mostly insoluble fiber, which is the kind that just kind of bulks up your stools, which is good for staying regular and it dilutes the calories in your food.

If you're eating something that's 10% insoluble fiber, well, that 10%, it's taking up the space of 10% of digestible carbs that you're not eating instead and that's good. So it kind of lowers the calories there.

But insoluble fiber doesn't do a ton to slow down digestion, to slow down the absorption of glucose into your bloodstream. What really does that is soluble fiber and bread tends to not be super high in soluble fiber. Vegetables are generally a better bet for you in terms of trying to get lots of soluble fiber, beans too, oats, gosh. So maybe you're putting oats in your bread, Ben. I don't know. The reason that oats are gooey is because they have lots of soluble fiber in them and that's awesome. That's great for slowing the absorption of sugar into your bloodstream and that's helping your bread to be better for you, Ben, and as you say, Ben, bread contains more than just the starch. If we were to just look at the starch specifically at the amylopectin starch, which is the branched form of starch, scientists generally think that the glycemic index, the effect on your blood sugar of amylopectin is basically the same as just straight glucose because your body is very able to rapidly break down amylopectin into its constituent glucose monomers and then it's just straight glucose.

I would go back and refer you to that one if you have not seen that one. Bread is mostly amylopectin, which is the easier to digest kind. I think a wheat flour is generally about 70% amylopectin and 30% amylose in terms of its starch content and then in the case of highly refined white flour, you're talking about a 90% starch product on in terms of its dry weight and of that, say that 70% is amylopectin, that quantity, which that's the majority of the dry weight of the product is same as glucose to you, to your body in terms of your glycemic index.

That's really bad because it's easy for us to eat a lot of highly refined carbs. If you're hungry, you can just mow through an entire bag of Wonder Bread. It's harder to eat straight sugar.

I just don't think you would just eat an equivalent mass of hard candy or something like that and that, I think, what makes starchy carbs so kind of dangerous to our diet is that they're stealthy, right? You can eat a whole lot of sugar without even realizing it because you don't taste it as being sweet.

It gets broken down into sugar rapidly once you swallow it. But as you say, Ben, your bread just has a lot more other stuff in it that's not straight up amylopectin and some of those other things might actually slow digestion. So there's research showing that, assuming if there's some fat in your bread, right, Ben, if you're using the bran and the germ especially, there's fat in there. So yeah, there's fat in your bread. Fat slows the digestion of sugars. Fat lowers glycemic index, which doesn't mean it's great to just eat a ton of fat. It just means that the presence of fat with the sugars helps to slow the digestion of those sugars a little bit and then there's the soluble fiber.

There's some soluble fiber in your bread, probably, Ben, a lot maybe if you're using oats and it's an oat bread, right? That's pretty sweet. Yeah. So all I'm saying is that yes, your bread sounds fantastic.

Your bread sounds great.

I don't challenge you on your bread at all.

You seem to be eating enough of it. That said, you can make yourself fat eating way too much of almost anything, but especially bread. You're still talking about a really easily digested, highly concentrated form of calories and there's likely to be very little resistant starch in any bread proportionally because bread is so thoroughly cooked.

One of the main ways that starch is resistant is just that it's physically inaccessible because the starch granule never gelatinizes in the food. Think about an undercooked potato. But bread, between the milling and the whetting and the baking, you're gelatinizing all of that starch. That starch is going to be highly available to your body. So there's going to be a lot of it and you still need to be aware of that if you're getting too many calories in your diet. It looks like you aren't, Ben. So, you're cool. You're good with me.

I condone what you are doing. The one thing I do not condone is the argument that you made that bread is good because if you look at the nutritional data as collected and tabulated and displayed by United. States health authorities, bread has a higher percentage of your recommended daily intake of protein relative to the carbs or the total calories, which I'm not sure if that's true. But I'm going to take your word for it, Ben. Sounds like it could be true. I don't think that that's a super good argument for a few reasons. One, the recommended daily allowances are gross generalities that the health authorities are trying to make on a population level and they often do not work at all on the individual level.

The governmental processes that result in those recommended daily serving sizes or values or everything are highly political, especially when it comes to macronutrients. Micronutrients, that's not a highly political thing. Big vitamin isn't lobbying to get more niacin in your food or whatever. But the grain industry absolutely does have a lot of political pull and the meat industry and all of that and there's well documented cases of incredible industry interference in the political process that results in these recommended daily allowances and portion sizes and all of that and so I wouldn't look at them with too much seriousness and then also the protein thing.

So your recommended protein allowance is really low, which is probably appropriate because what they're thinking is a person going to get enough of their essential amino acids in order to not die, in order to not get a nutritional deficiency disease because they're not getting enough of a certain amino acid.

That's a pretty low bar and in a case of me, a man who lifts weights and I think a lot of people listening right now are of that general description or they are slight deviations from that description, such as a woman who lifts weights. I know that you're out there too and it basically goes for you as well. We want to have a lot more protein than what is minimally recommended by the government in order to not get an amino acid deficiency disease.

So by that score, bread is not a good source of protein. Really by any score, bread is not a super good source of protein because the protein in wheat is not particularly digestible and for some people it's completely indigestible, people with gluten intolerance and all that kind of stuff. So it's not particularly digestible for science reasons that we could talk about another day. It's also the amino acid profile of wheat, what specific amino acids it has and in what proportion is not ideal for human, animal feeding needs. You're not going to be at your healthiest getting your protein from bread, though it's possible. You can. You can live on just bread.

As long as you're getting a few

Other micronutrients from a little bit of fresh fruit and vegetables, you won't get a sailor disease.

 

You can live on bread. It's possible. But it's not great. There's a reason that bodybuilders drink whey protein and not wheat gluten because you can go to the store and buy a solid thing of vital wheat gluten and chug it and there's a reason they don't do that. It's not a super good protein source. You're not even digesting a lot of it probably, though that certainly is going to depend on the person. So yeah, I wouldn't think of bread as being a high protein food. It's a high calorie food.

 

Most of them are just kind of the B vitamins and the minerals like zinc that your body needs for hormone synthesis and if you are low on those vitamins, then you're going to have low testosterone and potentially low lots of other hormones as well. So if you supplement those vitamins, then yes, assuming you're a little bit deficient, you're going to see your T go up a little bit. So that's what I said and a member of the audience wrote in to say, "Hey, I think you kind of dropped the ball a little bit there because there's new things on the market now." Not vitamins, but natural plant ingredients, for example, fenugreek, which is a delicious spice that have been shown in scientific literature to raise testosterone and this is true.

This audience member sent me a study. Well it's not a study. It was a literature review out of Russia from 2021, so a recent thing where they were looking at all testosterone boosting supplements on the market. But they went into particular depth on these new kind of herbal ones, if you want to call them that. Fenugreek, tongkat ali, I'm not sure if I'm saying that right and I'm really not sure if I'm going to say this right, but ashwagandha root.

Okay? So those are three natural plant ingredients that have been found, it's true, in very, very small studies to increase your testosterone to a statistically significant level and here's a really, really important distinction that I want to make here. I'm not saying you person who wrote me, because you're clearly a scientifically literate person, but lots of people out there aren't super scientifically literate and they might look at a study or somebody else's writeup of a study where they find the claims that an ingredient increased testosterone significantly and they might think, wow, significantly, that's great.

No, no, no. In the context of scientific literature, significance is a very specific thing which is statistical significance. Is the difference observed by the experiment bigger than the estimated margin of error? If it is, then you say it's statistically significant finding.

That doesn't mean it actually is significant,

Significant in the way that you and i actually use those words.

To be meaningful, to make a noticeable difference, to make it worth your time and money, that's a totally different thing from statistical significance. Do we see actually significant increases in tests when people supplement with say fenugreek and so looking at the studies, I went back to look at the primary sources that this Russian literature review looked at on fenugreek and so I feel bad.

It's true. Fenugreek kind of surprisingly has shown in one study some surprisingly strong effects in terms of boosting testosterone. It was a small study. But it was a difference of an average or an average testosterone in the study group of 630 among the group that got the placebo and 725 among the group that got the fenugreek and it was a small study with a giant margin of error. But I don't know. That's a pretty big difference of 100. I, for example, have recently seen my testosterone plummet by about 100, right? A couple years ago, the reference range is between 300 and 1,000, right? That's sort of the normal range of nanograms of testosterone per deciliter of blood. Couple years ago it was 650, my testosterone, which is dead center and then it kind of went down into the 5s and I was tracking it and tracking it, tracking it and then really rapidly earlier this year, it just plummeted from the upper 400s to the lower 300s and oh my God, did I feel that, right? So at the risk of giving you too much information, my sex drive plummeted.

It just plummeted. It sucks. I hate it. That's not who I want to be yet and so that's why, I mean, I'm going to go see a urologist. I'm going to see an endocrinologist. I'm exploring treatment options and so all I'm saying is that 100 point difference in serum testosterone is potentially quite big. Now did I feel it because it was 100 points or did I feel it because it was 100 points in that specific lower end of the range, right? I don't know. That's a really scientifically sophisticated question that I am not in any way qualified to answer and maybe nobody is qualified to answer.

Regardless, 100 points could make a difference is all I'm trying to say and this one study on fenugreek taken in combination with ashwagandha route resulted in this on average 100 point boost for this little tiny study group and that's cool. That's neat. What is the mechanism? Nobody knows. One is that there are specific compounds in both fenugreek and ashwagandha root that have been shown to inhibit aromatase. I combined those two words. It might inhibit aromatase. Aromatase is an enzyme that you make in your body that converts testosterone into estrogen or estradiol specifically and that's a thing that you need. Your body needs both testosterone and estrogen, regardless of where you are on the gender spectrum.

Your body needs both of those hormones and so your body has mechanisms in it for kind of maintaining a certain ideal balance of those hormones and one of those is your body makes this aromatase enzyme that converts testosterone into estrogen and there's stuff in fenugreek and ashwagandha root that had been found to inhibit aromatase activity and that's just one example of one potential mechanism at play there.

Now I want to emphasize that there's still very, very little research on this and the results are not super dramatic or convincing. So even these Russian scientists who wrote this literature review that this listener sent to me, their conclusion at the end was, "We cannot recommend natural T boosters for athletes." They said the research is not strong enough. These studies are tiny. The findings are highly questionable, mostly because the studies are tiny and we don't know about side effects or anything like that yet. So they were just, "No, no, no, no." You cannot recommend T boosters was their conclusion and you should believe their opinion way before you should believe my opinion. I defer to their opinion, which is that I defer to the opinion of most scientists who have looked at "natural testosterone boosters," which is that the effect is either too subtle or too ill understood to really make the products recommendable and that sounds like good enough advice to me.