[bjcy]

When gluten-free diets began to become popular, I had a similar question as to why a food that had been a staple of multiple civilisations for hundreds of years had suddenly become "bad for you". Dan Barber has a book on this called The Third Plate, which served as a great introduction for me on nutrition, but from a culinary perspective. He's also one of the chefs profiled in the first season of Netflix's Chef's Table.

[davebranton]

The answer to this question is that we don't make bread like we used to. There's a wonderful documentary on Netflix about this, called "Cooked" (the episode entitled "Air" is about bread). Short answer: bread used to be fermented, and consisted of three ingredients. Today's regular supermarket bread is bad for you, unless you take the time to go to your local bakery and buy their sourdough. My wife couldn't eat bread without falling asleep on the couch a couple of hours afterwards. But she can eat sourdough - which costs about the same as the gluten-free variety we used to buy. Also, it's beyond delicious.

[gruez]

>Short answer: bread used to be fermented, and consisted of three ingredients. Today's regular supermarket bread is bad for you, unless you take the time to go to your local bakery and buy their sourdough

Can you outline how the additional ingredients in "Today's regular supermarket bread" make them "bad for you"?

[chopin]

Here in Germany even local bakeries put stuff in their bread which doesn't belong there. A good chunk of population (including me) has switched to make their own bread. With a bit of routine (and patience) it's pretty easy (I am not talking about these machines which make your bread). I just finished two loaves where I even didn't add any yeast besides what's contained in the sourdough.

We have some high-end bakeries who sell real bread but you have to know them. Sourcing proper food in Germany is pretty difficult if you don't live in a big city.

[raspberry1337]

Without reading the book, did you ever reach an answer? In my understanding, wheats and carbs were never optimal for us but if you are a starving medieval peasant on a bread or rice diet, you have worse things to worry about.