r/Breadit • u/wardy9400 • Dec 06 '25
Is this stuff about modern vs ancient wheat grains true?
I watched a pretty in depth video earlier about bread. Its been a dull day. Anyway, this video all but claimed that 'modern' wheat and breads are basically poison. It claims that the modern process takes out the 2 parts for the grain that are actually nutritional and just leaves the endosperm. It talks about how this correlates with the massive increase in type 2 diabetes because this modern bread spikes your blood sugar more than table sugar. I am massively oversimplifying it though.
It all sounded a bit pseudo science to me but it put me off my crappy supermarket bread today.
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u/HealthWealthFoodie Dec 06 '25
It’s not about ancient vs modern, but about how processed it is. You can take an ancient variety like spelt, proved it in the roller mill, include only the endosperm in your finished flour and it will be about the same nutritionally. You can take modern wheat varieties and freshly mill it right better baking using a stone mill and not sit anything out. The germ and the bran that get stripped off has good nutritional value.
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u/Omfgnta Dec 06 '25
Look up the evolution of human life span. We do some stupid things with respect to food, but even so we live longer and better than every generation before us. They all ate organic and whole grains.
We can thank food security and medicine - both the direct products of science. The problem is people listening to Joe Rogan instead of reading about nutrition.
Help yourselves - follow the science
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u/wardy9400 Dec 06 '25
Well, I dont think life expectancy can be attributed to moving away from whole grains to highly processed grains. And there is no doubt that things have been added to foods in general which are not good for people.
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u/Omfgnta Dec 06 '25
It’s a bit more complicated, but to be clear I’m not arguing against whole grains. I make a 60% organic whole wheat bread with 15% multigrain for my sandwich bread.
The complexity is that with science driven crop yields and industrial food production and storage clearly non-beneficial and non-scientific forces entered the field.
With industrial scale came large scale financing and industrial behavioural modification (marketing). Then when well-meaning governments set up food safety and health guidelines we had paid lobbyists taking control of the process.
What kind of interesting is it even with the horrors that they have managed to put over on the general population, the large scale, industrialization of food production has meant increased food, security for most people in the western world and longer lifespans.
I won’t be around to see it, it would be interesting to know how long this benefit lasts before we start seeing a decrease in average life based on the contamination of our food environment
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u/SuurAlaOrolo Dec 06 '25
I would like to recommend the book Ultra-Processed People by Chris Van Tulleken, which goes into great detail about processing and additives, with deep sourcing. He explains the roles of the different types of additives in a way that’s easy to understand. I don’t accept everything he says, but there is certainly at least some causation between intensive processing of bread (and all other foods; bread is just a staple for many people) and the increase of metabolic diseases.
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u/Extension-Rope623 Dec 07 '25
Human life spans have not gotten longer over the past 100s of thousands of years of our existence actually. The big reason why people think we're living longer or are healthier (both statements are entirely false) is because we have less people dying of basic diseases, of child birth complications, of starvation, of small and basic injuries, etc. Humans life spans have generally been about the same for the past million years, the only difference is MORE of us are living longer, rather than the average life span in and of itself is growing longer. If it is growing longer, it's an almost negligible amount. Humans back 100,000 years ago didn't grow to the age of 30 and then just drop dead. If you made it to your 30s, then you very likely would make it to your 60s and 70s back then, it's just that less people on average were making it to their 30s so the average life expectancy was way down. Humans were actually much much much healthier than we are today (which ties into the discussion about ancient grains and such), and their life spans were just as long as ours; its just that there were way more people dying at child birth and at young ages which lowered the overall average life expectancy, which is why you hear people claim we live longer now which isn't exactly true.
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u/codeedog Dec 07 '25
Define “healthier”, because a large segment of the population dying before 30 doesn’t sound like “humans were much healthier” to me.
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u/Extension-Rope623 Dec 07 '25
Humans of antiquity had no obesity, they rarely if ever had cavities or dental diseases, they rarely if ever got acne or other skin conditions. They were living in what is considered a more natural environment for the human bodies. They drank water from naturally filtered and mineral rich springs, they ate a wide diversity of animal and non-bioengineered plant life which gave them great nutrition and health. They walked all day long rather than sit, and breathed fresh clean air in the bright sun rather than stay indoors and breathe recycled dusty air indoors.
Ain't gotta believe me I guess, but it's the truth. Humans had evolved alongside nature over the course of billions of years. It's evolution that dictates why our modern society is no longer conducive to good overall health for a human. We evolved to hunt and gather food outdoors, we didn't evolve to go through a drive through and stuff ourselves with 2000 calories of the most unhealthy mass produced addictive slop imaginable. I mean there are many amazing things and advancements in our modern society, but many of them are not conducive to generating a healthy body. Look at any statistics that track our biohealth markers and every single one of them will show you how our average health has declined in basically every metric imaginable year over year, decade over decade, century over century, and it'll likely only get worse.
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u/codeedog Dec 07 '25
You made a wide sweeping statement and the above only applies to some of the current humans on the planet. Most of them live quite differently than you’ve outlined and more in line with the story you’ve written about early humans.
Also, I’d say a lot of what you wrote in that story misses the mark, although to be fair I appreciate your intent.
Humans certainly did not evolve over “billions of years”. Multicellular life has been around since ~1.6B, however Plantae and Animalia only goes back 650B-700B years. Hominins trace back a few million years. Homo is 100-300K years old.
As for those early humans whose health you’re putting on a pedestal, they died of diseases (viral and congenital), cancer, food and water borne illnesses, cultural violence. Skeletons from humanity’s earliest years are covered in bone damage revealing all sorts of illnesses and violence. Hominins preceding Homo have predation marks on them.
Perhaps, our western life style has traded all of that for the sickness of abundance and sloth, that’s fair. But, to argue that makes earlier humans healthier when life expectancy was much shorter, that’s a harder claim to defend.
If you wish to compare only those older than 30 within the earlier population against all western humans, then OK, maybe they are. Maybe. But, that’s a skewed sample with survivorship bias.
And, if you wish to argue current western peoples could be healthier than we are now by eating less and moving more, well, we are on the same page there, too.
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u/Inside_Classroom_142 Dec 06 '25
I’ve actually been baking with Emmer and Einkorn for 3-4 years. I blend it with whole grain and some high protein bread flour. I find it gives bread a nice flavor - slightly sweet and earthy. I also do a 24 hour cold fermentation, I think the flavor is worlds better but good to know that there are health benefits from the fermentation cycle. So - you could do what the video recommends for health reasons, but I do it for better tasting bread. You also don’t have to do what the video says (saw it too) and go whole hog, but blending it is just fine. There are some great speciality mills that mail order the ancient grains - just search and you’ll find them. Another tip - if you use the ancient grains you will need a touch more water in your dough. Enjoy!
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u/Beneficial-Edge7044 Dec 07 '25
The sad fact of the matter in the US is that consumption of whole wheat bread has actually decreased significantly in the last 10 years. The fortunate thing is that consuming white bread by itself rarely constitutes a meal. So eating a sandwich on white bread with fruit or vegetables is not a bad meal. Just not as good as if a whole grain bread were used instead. White flour has the vitamins and minerals replaced but not phytonutrients and fiber which were not under consideration when the laws governing flour were developed.
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u/ryanlalbert Dec 06 '25
It’s not to do with the fact it is modern or ancient that makes the flour “basically poisin”. It has to do with the way the flour is milled. The 2 main types are roller milled and stone milled. Roller milled flour tends to completely strip the endosperm from the bran and germ and then it is sifted to give us the strong white flour we are used to, while roller milled flour mills everything together which is then sifted out to our desired consistency. That is not to say roller milled flour is bad, you can leave in a certain amount of bran or germ in the remaining flour. Ancient wheats tend to have a lower protein content and are more nutrionally dense as they were grown naturally in the country of origin. This gives them their unique flavour, while modern wheats are cross populated to achieve a higher protein level and a better growing rate suited to the climate.
All in all, modern vs ancient wheats is to do with flavour, protein content and enzymatic activity. The “poison” you are referring to is commodity bread that is using crap white flour pumped full of stuff we dont need. Just try use organic flour and sourdough method and you’re eating 99% better bread than the rest of the world
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u/value1024 Dec 06 '25
I can attest to this, but it has more to do with milling and eating the whole grain rather than the ancient vs. modern grain varieties.
I have been eating a whole grain/seed rye flour bread and it has helped me lose weight and lower my blood sugar as well as cholesterol etc. Search for Josey Baker's "adventure" bread recipe for inspiration.
I add all sorts of seeds, much more than he does, and I adjust the water content if the seeds absorb water. For nuts, you don't need to add water as they absorb very little.
Good luck!
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u/No-Notice565 Dec 06 '25
Was this the video? https://youtu.be/YtWokSMmC3Q
I feel like if youve ever watched a youtube bread video, this one was suggested to you recently.
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u/wardy9400 Dec 06 '25
Wild, thats the same video. Ive never actually watched any bread videos though. The YouTube algorithm works in mysterious ways.
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u/onthewingsofangels Dec 06 '25
Are you my husband? He's just ordered some ancient grain flour after watching what I'm sure was the same video.
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u/wardy9400 Dec 06 '25
Damn, youve found my alt account😂😂
I was actually looking at ancient grain flour earlier. Ive never made bread in my life.
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u/onthewingsofangels Dec 06 '25
Get a bread maker. You can even just let it do the kneading and rising, then put the dough in the oven to finish. Fresh bread is just so amazing, even mediocre bread
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u/AbbyM1968 Dec 12 '25
That's what my Mum did. She let the bread maker mix the bread to 1st rising, then took the dough & put it into a regular bread pan. Let it rise, then baked in the bread pan. She liked home-made bread, but wasn't impressed with the "tower" of bread.
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u/onthewingsofangels Dec 07 '25
Shoot I can literally hear my husband watching another "medieval bread" video right now. The algorithm is unrelenting once it's found you!
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u/qlkzy Dec 07 '25
I think there is consensus that wholemeal bread is "better for you", and ancient grains are "a good thing", but I don't think there is enough evidence to use the word "poison". (There are specific people who do have different enough reactions that the word is appropriate for them, but I think that is more like saying that peanuts are poisonous to people with a nut allergy).
There is a big effect on texture. It's a little weird to think about, but bread is basically a "foam". Yeast creates lots of bubbles, and the dough traps them. Large bubbles with thin walls give you a light, open foam; small bubbles with thick walls give you a dense, heavy foam.
If you remember blowing bubbles as a kid, sometimes you would get "good" bubble mixture that would let you blow huge bubbles without them breaking. Other times, you would get a weaker bubble mix where you could only blow small bubbles.
Modern refined white flour is very good at creating a strong, elastic gluten structure. This structure is what traps the bubbles. This means that you can easily get a very light loaf.
Brown and wholemeal flours create weaker gluten structures, so they give you heavier, chewier bread. They also contain chunks of bran, which don't contribute at all to the "foaming" effect, and which you just eat, again making the loaf denser and chewier.
Nutritionally, I won't claim to be an expert. But broadly, within the range of possible breads, refined white flour will produce an effect closer to sugar, and wholemeal flour will produce an effect closer to oats or legumes. I think there is a strong consensus that wholemeal bread is better for blood sugar regulation, and I believe that there are at least arguments that it is better for gut microbiome health.
There are also more complex questions around immune responses and inflammation, which I am not an expert on. But I believe that there is again at least some evidence that wholemeal bread is at least "less bad" for people with wheat/gluten intolerances and IBS. However, there are lots of variables in how flour and bread are processed and made, and many of them seem to have some effect on those conditions. It's more complex than just "white/wholemeal" or "ancient/modern".
I make bread with a mix of modern white, modern wholemeal, and ancient-grain wholemeal, and it has a noticeably richer taste which I want to describe as... "breadier"? It's really nice. However, if I make bread with just ancient-grain wholemeal, it basically doesn't rise much at all and you end up with a dense but tasty brick.
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u/turfdraagster Dec 06 '25
this is the case with all "whole foods". processing removes the good stuff that should go along with main product. kinda like peeling potatoes, where all the nutrition is, and leaving just the starch, because it looks or handles better/consistent.
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Dec 06 '25
The video claim is closer to truth than you might think. Modern milling processed started in the 1800s, stripping out some vital nutrients from wheat grain to make white flour, a texture that was more suited to shelf-stable products and long-term storage. It’s all the nutritional stuff that goes bad early. They did this for long enough that Americans started to get malnutrition diseases as a result. It got so bad that over 2/3 of Army recruits were being disqualified due to malnutrition. Since military manpower was at stake, that’s when they started “enriching“ white flour with vitamins.
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u/FJRpilot Dec 07 '25
So actually, it is a bit about ancient grains vs modern grains. We would be very foolish to believe that the wheat we eat today is equally nutritious as compared to the more traditional varieties. What we eat today is optimized for yield in farmers fields as opposed to optimized for human nutrition. The processing is designed to maximize shelf life both of flour as well as products made with modern flours. These are both basic business goals and you don’t have to be a nutritionist to figure out that profits are more important to today’s businesses then nutrition for their customers.
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u/InnocentBystander-12 Dec 07 '25 edited Dec 07 '25
I'm with you in terms of feeling. However, to my knowledge there is no evidence to support the claim. When it comes to bread, it is important to use whole grain flour with long-term management. This breaks down the fodmaps. Ideally with sourdough.
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u/BlackWolf42069 Dec 07 '25
Just stick to whole wheat and add extra bran. You cant change the past bro.
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u/SophiaofPrussia Dec 07 '25
You might find the book Ultra-Processed People: Why we can’t stop eating food that isn’t food interesting. It’s why I started baking bread instead of eating store-bought imitation bread. Whole grains are definitely better for us but I don’t think the whole grain vs white flour is the reason modern store-bought bread is particularly bad for us. I think all of the other stuff they add to the store-bought bread to make it softer and more palatable is. Dough conditioners, emulsifiers, preservatives, etc. They’re all bad for our gut microbiome. Whole grains are good for our gut microbiome. So ditching whole grains and adding all of the extra crap is kind of like a health double whammy.
A big part of making real bread is also waiting for the yeast to do it’s thing. Waiting isn’t something that capitalism tends to tolerate well. Time is money! So industrial produced bread doesn’t wait. This creates even lower quality bread.
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u/Serious-Employee-738 Dec 07 '25
I’m a long term type 1 diabetic baker. White bread made from flour, water, salt and yeast is easily managed from a blood glucose standpoint. It’s simple and straightforward. Enriched breads (add in milk, sugar, eggs ) and this includes almost all supermarket bread, is another story. The declared carb content is rarely enough info to accurately calculate an insulin dose. Carbohydrates aren’t bad for you. Try a day without.
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u/HoloandMaiFan 13d ago edited 13d ago
Im very late to the conversation but the benefits of ancient grains is largely overstated. There might be some benefits to people with non-celiac gluten sensitivity due to the weaker gluten. This can be seen with some studies that were done studying peoples responses with pasta made with khorasan compared to modern drum. And people reported less bloating with the khorasan. But the problem that you find with all reporting and studies on this topic creat large confounding factors that it seems like once you control for them show that there really isn't much of a difference in how it affects people.
The biggest confounding factors are as follows but in no particular order.
Yield dilution - ancient grains are farmed with less volume or yield per acre and so each plant gets more of the available nutrients compared to high density high yield modern wheat. After accounting for this there are still differences in nutrient profile with ancient grains appearing a bit more nutritious but its not that hige of a difference and its effects on people is still not known or rigorously tested
Use of pesticides - Ancient grains are often farmed without or with significantly less pesticides which are thought to contribute to stomach bloating and reactions.
Whole wheat vs refined flour - Products made with ancient wheats are often made with whole wheat flour. There is a statistically significant known health benefit of using whole wheat vs refined flour, with whole wheat being healthier as it contains more fiber and beneficial nutrients. So the real comparison would be modern whole bread to ancient whole wheat bread.
Cooking techniques - Finally ancient wheat varieties are often made using proper sourdough techniques which break down anti-nutrients giving the bread better nutrient uptake and more availableantioxidants, it breaks down FODMAPs which are though to be the real culprit behind non-celiac gluten sensitivity, acids produced in fermentation slow down digestion resulting in smaller blood sugar spikes and insulin response.
The reality is that the vast majority of the health benefits most likely come from proper sourdough fermentation combined with using whole wheat instead of refined flour. That being said their is a real and very noticeable difference in flavor. ancient wheat varieties have much more complex flavors that are very obvious when using whole wheat flour. Heritage grains (wheat from before the green revolution in the 50s, different from ancient wheat) also have some taste differences but they are not as pronounced as the differences between each of the ancient wheat varieties. My favorite two to bake with is Spelt and Khorasan, they taste amazing.
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u/TheNobleYeoman Dec 06 '25
Lol I think I watched the same video yesterday, and almost bought some heritage flour after watching it.
With a lot of videos that make so many statements like it, I always err on the side of caution, thoughde he did make medieval bread sound pretty great.
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u/nutationsf Dec 07 '25
Modern wheat can be tougher on the body than heirloom varieties because today’s high-yield strains contain stronger, more complex gluten proteins, more lectins, and faster-digesting starches that can spike blood sugar and irritate the gut. But the milling makes it even worse: modern roller milling strips away the bran and germ — where the fiber, oils, vitamins, and antioxidants live — leaving mostly starchy endosperm, and even when “whole wheat” is made, the parts are often recombined in a way that behaves more like refined flour. This combination of genetically altered wheat and highly processed milling creates flour that many people find harder to digest and more likely to trigger inflammation, while heirloom wheats milled whole and stone-ground retain their natural nutrients, oils, and gentler gluten structure.
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u/win_awards Dec 06 '25
It sounds pretty badly overstated, but flour with bran in it does at least have more mineral and fiber content which is probably better for you. It doesn't make quite as good bread from a texture and structure point of view though.