In recent times, there are more people coming to clinics and dietitians spend a considerable amount of time consoling their patients, trying to encourage them to follow a strict gluten-free diet. This development of coeliac disease is thought to be partly triggered by gluten in the environment and partly due to hereditary factors. The incidence of coeliac disease in England is thought to be 1% of the population and many people don’t have the classic symptoms of lethargy, diarrhoea or weight loss due to malabsorption. Many people who move to England from Ireland develop coeliac disease and they have to switch to eating a gluten-free bread which is made from mixtures of rice, maize and sorghum flour (6). When people from other cultures move here, they love our fresh, spongy bread to put in the toaster or have as a sandwich without realising, in some of the cases, consumption of this could increase the incidence of disease such as coeliac disease. Most of this bread is made from strong white wheat flour, water and fast-acting yeast to create quick, cheap, tasty food in around four hours. As a nation, however, we still do love our bread the average bread purchased in the UK is the equivalent of 60.3 loaves per person per year (5). This may be an indication that people in the UK are struggling with the bread that they eat. Even with more wellrounded dietary programmes, such as Weight Watchers and Slimming World, bread intake is also reduced. Initially it is avoided and then is reintroduced. Analysing these diets carefully, one of their common factors is the bread. So, inevitably, when the diet is stopped and normal eating patterns resume, the weight is regained or the digestive symptoms return (4). These help people achieve their goals in the short term but they exclude whole foods groups which are important to our long-term health. Such diets are the Atkins diet, the cabbage soup diet, the Slimfast diet, the Ketogenic diet and the Paleo diet. In the UK, America and Australia, people have always found one of these ‘diets’ to help them to speed up their weight loss or to help resolve their digestive issues, which may include bloating, constipation and diarrhoea. The avoidance of bread is a common factor in many ‘fad diets. The French therefore, are eating baguette which is low in fructans, which may reduce indigestible fibres that they consume lower in gluten, which may prevent the dormant genes for coeliac disease from being expressed or the symptoms associated with non-coeliac gluten sensitivity and low in phytates which prevent phytic acid from binding with divalent minerals such as iron, zinc and calcium (3).Ĭould this be one of the reasons that there are lower levels of these metabolic diseases in France? Popular ‘Dieting Habits’ The French bakers avoid to use the term sourdough and, as a matter of fact, some of the French products available in English supermarkets are labelled as ‘made with authentic levain’ and they are rather sweet, such as Brioche and milk bread rolls. However, the French baguette is a light fluffy bread which does not taste sour, since the bakers have developed their recipe and baking methods for hundreds of years. The result of this process is that the fructans, gluten and phytates in the flour are broken down and B vitamins (including vitamin B12), as well as lactic acid, are released in the process.ĭuring the baking process the cultured bacteria is killed and people believe that the final product is a sour-tasting bread. Sourdough bread, as you may already know, is made from dough which has been fermented by a bacterial culture, often very slowly. The translation of levain into English is sourdough. In France, most people still buy their bread from their local boulangerie where the baguette is made following the traditional slow method of production, using a starter bacterial culture dough mixture called levain. Could the humble baguette be a part of this paradox? The lower levels of obesity and metabolic diseases in France have often been referred to as The French Paradox. These diseases stem from a multifactorial problem involving many pieces of a puzzle, including food availability, working parents, education and social pressures. Childhood obesity levels in 2012, were 13.9% in France compared to 17.8% in England (2). The French population as a whole has a lower incidence of obesity, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome (1 - see references below) and as recently has been discovered, coeliac disease, than most western countries. So what can we learn from the health of the French population with regards to the components of the baguette? The French Paradox We only have epidemiological evidence, as the vast majority of the French population eat sourdough bread daily in the form of the baguette. Not enough scientific research has been carried out into the daily consumption of sourdough bread instead of yeast-risen bread.
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