Bread has been one of the most important sources of calories and nutrients across cultures for millennia. Today, it's a $200 billion industry around the world.

Here in America, ultra-processed white bread is the norm, but this is what bread used to look like.

It was typically made with just three ingredients: flour, water, and yeast. But nowadays, your average loaf of white bread can easily contain up to 20 ingredients, including salt, sugar, fats, and oils, a cocktail of chemicals like dough conditioners, ascorbic acid, bleach, and more.

And somehow this bread is a lot less nutritious than this. So how does a food that has been such a staple change so much?

And what kind of impact does that have on our bodies? I'm Mia de Graaf.

I'm a health editor at Business Insider. The first traces that archaeologists have ever found of bread is these crumbs that are 14,000 years old that they found from a Neolithic site in Jordan.

These crumbs seem to have been made from a rudimentary flatbread that were sort of a combination of water and ground-up grains, kind of the ancestors of modern-day cereals.

Egyptians discovered yeast, likely by accident.

But the way Egyptians were making bread was what we would describe today as a sourdough. And that was the kind of bread that we were making then for centuries.

So we could see from the Egyptians that bread making could proliferate an entire society and sustain an entire community.

Pyramid builders were paid with bread. People in higher-status positions were people who were overseeing the production of bread. That only develops further.

By the time you get to 150 BC in the Roman Empire, bread-making, by then, was a really prestigious career.

So how did bread come to the US? Rumor has it that when Christopher Columbus journeyed to the New World, he brought a Crock-Pot of sourdough starter with him.

And once we started mass producing wheat across the US, bread as a business and as a culture really kicked off.

In the 1880s, we saw the industrialization of bread, and that kicked off with mechanically milled flour.

These mills would remove the germ of the flour. It contains so many nutrients.

It's got proteins, oils, omega-3s, all of that good stuff. But it makes it quite unruly in a bake.

They remove the bran, remove the germ of the flour, and completely pulverize the flour so that it is as fine as it can possibly be.

Suddenly, you don't have that volatile element that could be a margin for error in your business. You can just scale this right up and make bread that seems to be very consistent every time.

So that's what we've seen with all these mills, adding different kinds of chemicals and adding different kinds of ingredients.

How could we make something that is shelf-stable, continuously fluffy, and just delicious at all times?

In the late 1800s, we invented commercial yeast. This is a kind of dried yeast that can last way longer than fresh yeast.

Fresh yeast, like a sourdough starter or a balm, you've got to treat it, you've got to feed it.

It's not the kind of thing that you could use for mass production so easily. But a commercial yeast, it's dehydrated in such a way that it could last for weeks and weeks and weeks.

The mass-produced white bread or the fluffy kind of Wonder Bread that we have today was invented in the early 1900s.

But it wasn't sliced. It was just this big block of fluffy, white dough. In the early 1900s, an engineer called Otto Rohwedder had an idea that you could make one single machine that slices and packages bread all at the same time.

It took him about a decade to finally finish his prototype.

We get to 1928, when he debuted his invention at a fair in Missouri. And it was a huge hit.

People's minds were blown. And within two years, the Continental Baking Company, which is the maker of Wonder Bread, was using it.

I know mine eat their lunch now. I pack their favorite sandwiches on their favorite bread, Wonder. Kids eat it up.

This Wonder Bread, it's already got a ton of things in it that make it shelf-stable. Add the packaging, it's going to last you for a week or more or, you know, maybe even longer.

It was a huge game changer in American culture.

The war was starting. The economy is really hard up. You have this thing that's going to last you for a very long time.

It actually created a supermarket culture. And really decades later, we can see it created this huge shift in how we shop and eat and live in this country.

By 1930, mass-produced loaves made up 30% of the average American's diet, which was a higher proportion than any other food.

But scientists started to see the results of eating this bread that had all of the nutrients removed from it. Around the start of the Second World War, we started to see people developing diseases with quite worrying symptoms.

There are diseases like pellagra, which has symptoms of dementia, or beriberi, which has symptoms of paralysis or losing the feeling in your hands and feet.

People also had rickets, which is the weakening of bones, iron deficiency, birth defects.

In response, the US government collaborated with manufacturing companies, including the Wonder Bread manufacturer, Continental Baking Company, to produce and promote these more fortified versions of Wonder Bread.

Commercial: That's why you can help yourself grow bigger and stronger eight ways with Wonder Bread. I mean, grow bigger and stronger eight ways.

While this didn't make ultra-processed white bread as healthy as a whole grain, it did prevent people from developing diseases, which is capitalism at its finest.

Commercial: Each delicious slice of Wonder Bread supplies protein for muscle, minerals for strong bones and teeth, carbohydrates for energy, vitamins for nerves, all vital elements for growing minds and bodies.

The point of ultra-processed bread is really a business opportunity.

It's something that was scalable. It's developed for convenience. So what are the ingredients in a typical loaf of ultra-processed bread?

So first we have tartaric acid, also known as DATEM. This is an emulsifier which is used to make bread smoother or fluffier and to stop ingredients from separating.

Emulsifiers are generally believed to be safe in small quantities. But gut-health experts worry that the combination of water and oil that's used to make this may wear down the gut lining in a way that can make you susceptible to digestive issues and digestive diseases.

Next, we have corn syrup. This is a really common ingredient in ultra-processed foods, including bread.

It's super sweet. It can be used to mask the more chemical flavors of an ultra-processed food after it's been broken down and had so many things added to it to keep it shelf-stable.

One of the health effects of corn syrup is that it's a high-fructose type of sweetener, and it means that your liver has to work harder to break it down than, say, glucose.

That can put you at risk of fatty liver disease as well as the risks of just consuming a lot of sugar.

If you consume a lot of sugar, you're at a higher risk of diabetes, inflammation, heart disease, obesity, and all of the classic things that are associated with a high-sugar diet.

Another common ingredient used is acetic acid. This is an antimicrobial that's used to prevent mold from growing or to prevent the bread from going off or going stale quicker.

It's a vinegar that can be used in other types of food production. Acetic acid is not dangerous to human health in the amounts that are used in store-bought bread.

But it is part of this perfect storm of chemicals that are used to make bread last way longer than it naturally would.

Then we have calcium carbonate. This is a dough conditioner which is used to improve texture and shelf life of ultra-processed bread.

So on its own, calcium carbonate is not that bad for you. And in fact, it can be good for you.

The issue with calcium carbonate in ultra-processed bread is that it's making something inherently unhealthy quite enticing. Another common sweetener in ultra-processed bread is molasses.

This is something which is quite popular with home bakers, too. It's a sweetener that has a low glycemic index.

So in theory, it would be healthier for you than a refined sugar. It can still spike your blood sugar, especially if it's used in an ultra-processed bread that you're naturally going to eat a lot of.

Ultra-processed food drives people to eat more of it. Another ingredient that you will see on basically every label of store-bought bread is ascorbic acid.

This is a type of vitamin C, which sounds great.

The issue with ascorbic acid is that it's used in the manufacturing process as a flour treatment to fortify the dough against a rather aggressive manufacturing process.

So it means that we can toss this dough around and slam it against machines and pulverize it in a way that's quite unnatural unless you have all of these ingredients inserted into it.

A common preservative used in store-bought bread is L-cysteine hydrochloride, which is derived from duck feathers or human hair.

It's an amino acid which is used to prolong shelf life and also enhance the flavor of processed foods.

The FDA says that this is actually safe for human health, but it is widely regarded as just gross.

You also have bleach, which is added to the bread to make it look whiter. So this can be done by adding chlorine dioxide gas to the flour before it reaches the manufacturing plant.

We also have azodicarbonamide, which is used as a bleach and as a foam expander to give bread a fluffier feel.

This is an ingredient that's also used in vinyl flooring and yoga mats to give it a squishy feel.

The FDA says that it's safe to use in small amounts, but the EU and Australia and other countries disagree.

Azodicarbonamide has been banned as a food additive for years due to concerns that a byproduct can be cancerous.

Of course, you have preservatives to prolong shelf life, so that could be calcium propionate. Fats are used in a store-bought loaf for volume and fluffiness and shelf stability.

Look on your label for something like mono- or diglycerides.

That's made from soybeans and other oils to give it that kind of fluffiness and also to help it last a little longer.

Let's take a look at these breads. First, we have Wonder Bread. Iconic packaging. So this, even holding it, it is so extremely fluffy.

I can't ignore that fact. And this ingredient list is huge. The main ingredient in this is unbleached enriched flour.

The second highest proportion ingredient is water. Then we have sugar, yeast. So we then have a very long list of micro-ingredients, let's say.

Calcium carbonate, wheat gluten, soybean oil, salt, dough conditioners, sodium, stearoyl lactylate.

I don't know if I got that. Calcium stearoyl monoglycerides, mono and diglycerides, calcium peroxide, calcium iodate, vinegar, citric acid, chol... what?

Cholecalciferol. That sounds like a name in "Game of Thrones." Soy lecithin, calcium propionate, and that's it.

Wow, that was a journey. Okay, now we have Nature's Own 100% whole wheat, and this has 13 grams of whole grain per slice.

Heart-healthy. Whole wheat. This is great. This is something that I would look for in a store. You want to see whole wheat or whole grain.

But let's see what's on the label. So we have whole wheat flour. That's the first ingredient, and that's great.

We have distilled monoglycerides. So that's a fat that's used in the process to create volume and bounciness and fluffiness to your bread.

It's not necessarily bad for you in small amounts, and this is less than 2%.

You know, it's a fat that can impact your cholesterol levels or inflammation in your body. Pepperidge Farm's Farmhouse Multigrain Bread.

So first off the bat, multigrain. This is something that I try to avoid, I would say. If you're buying store-bought bread, none of it's going to be that good for you.

But multigrain is not in the same league as whole grain or whole wheat.

Whole grain and whole wheat, they have the entire kernel of the original wheat intact. Multigrain, this just tells you that it is made from loads of different kinds of flour.

It's not telling you that it's necessarily a very healthy type of bread.

So that's a bit of a red flag for me. No high-fructose corn syrup, that's nice. So in theory, it's signaling that this is a healthy bread.

Let's look at the label. Okay, immediate red flag. This has, per slice, 5 grams of sugar.

That is really high. That's double the amount of sugar in a slice of Wonder Bread. The ingredients here, we have enriched wheat flour.

It's nice that it has oats in it, though in very small proportion. And this is extremely high in sugar for one slice of bread.

According to the USDA, your daily intake of total sugars, including from fruit or coffee or tea in very minuscule amounts, shouldn't exceed 50 grams, which is 12 teaspoons.

So let's look at how many teaspoons are in this loaf of bread.

One. Oh my god, we're halfway through. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. So that's the total daily intake that anyone should have from anything.

Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Wow, that is how much sugar is in this.

These have little pieces of oats on them. They look very grainy and healthy. But I can feel from the squishiness and even just see from the bounciness of the dough, this is definitely an ultra-processed slice of bread.

And I can see from the ingredients list that there is stuff in there that is not what I would be going for for a nutritious lunch.

How Ultra-Processed Bread Took Over America | Ultra-Processed Life | Business Insider

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How Ultra-Processed Bread Took Over America | Ultra-Processed Life | Business Insider

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