They're not 'highly processed' in a way that makes them contribute to obesity any more than the same thing made at home.

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lithocarpus 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe true as long as you make it the same way at home as the ultra processed version from the store. But you usually can't since you don't have the machinery.

Homemade wheat bread made of just wheat/water/salt is an entirely different thing from most "whole wheat bread" in the food industry.

Same for yogurt etc.

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bryanlarsen 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's the point. Homemade white bread and store bought have the same nutritional profile. They're both hyper-palatable. The super fine milling of the flour and removal of the bran makes it super tasty and enables the body to convert it into glucose super quick.

A whole-grain bread made with stone milled flour is going to be far healthier for you than steel ground white bread even if the brown bread is technically UPF and the white bread is home made.

The true "natural" alternative would be a cracked-wheat porridge. That's about as far as you can get from hyper-palatable.

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pessimizer 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> The super fine milling of the flour and removal of the bran makes it super tasty

I disagree on this. Speaking only about homemade, white bread is tasteless and wheat bran and germ adds taste.

White bread pretty much tastes exactly like the sugar you pour into it, and wheat is the sort of mix of sour and sweet that makes an addictive taste - why Kool-Aid and soda are largely citric acid(sour) + sugar(sweet) + [random other stuff]. You can drink a larger volume of sugar in a shorter time through drinking Kool-Aid than you can eat in marshmallows.

Wheat bread as some sort of health food is a scam, though. You get a few more micronutrients, but the problem is that its a ton of carbs. Brown foods being associated with health was just some weird advertising heuristic that got hammered into us our entire lives.

Wheat bread simply tastes better. All of the seeds and gritty parts that they add to some of them are honestly just more marketing to people who think that things that are more difficult to eat are intrinsically better for you. There are plenty of other places to get your fiber than your bread.

	▲	tptacek 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It tastes better to you. Good for you. White bread continues to exist as a category because it's hyperpalatable; in fact, it's one of the canonical HPFs.

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preg_match 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You don’t make home made whole wheat bread, because you don’t have a wheat mill. You use flour, which is ultra-processed.

Your homemade bread is ultra-processed. But the process of turning wheat into flour is not magically unhealthy. It doesn’t work that way.

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twoodfin 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Also not “highly processed” in ways that weren’t common 80 years ago or more, which cuts against the correlation->causation connection here.