The health dangers of fresh bread?

Two recent conversations lead me to post this question. Cabbagehead reminded me lately that his grandmother warned him not to eat freshly baked bread because it would make him sick. Only day-old bread was healthy. This notion seemed so bizarre to me that I attributed it to the idiosyncrasies of his Nova Scotian grandmother, born in the last quarter of the 19th century. But then my brother reminded me of a story in our family. My grandfather, who along with the rest of his immediate family escaped Nazi Germany in 1939, took an immigrant’s job upon arriving in Chicago. He delivered Rosen’s rye bread to other German Jewish refugees. He bought fresh loaves to sell but found that his customers preferred day-old bread, which he could get free from the returning delivery truck drivers and sell for a nickel.

So the prejudice against freshly baked bread is not unique to Nova Scotia, or even to North America. I wonder how far back it goes? A little internet searching turns up a few people recollecting being told that fresh bread right out of the oven would give them a stomach ache and one case of a baker warning against consuming fresh bread. Were you ever warned against fresh bread? Have you ever heard of this belief?

Hi,

I have been told not to eat bread fresh from the oven. I have read eating bread fresh from the oven can also give a false positive for alcohol consumption related to the yeast. I have occasionally done the deed and eaten bread fresh from the oven: nothing ill was ever observed.

I do have to wonder if this notion of preferring day-old bread over fresh bread is rooted in economy. If you are a new immigrant or dirt poor and every penny counts, isn't easier to suggest fresh bread is not as good as day old in a bit of reverse snobbism?

In the Soviet Union, we had an employee who could not eat a meal without a piece of bread. If lunch was on the table and no bread was available, he left to buy bread. If the bread was not fresh, he left to buy bread. Consequently a lot of bread was wasted.

Bread was highly subsidized and quite political. A kilo loaf of dark break cost 10-15 kopeks, whereas a kilo of cookies was a rouble or more. While the government spent considerable amounts of foreign currency to guarantee fresh and cheap bread. Fresh bread was a daily purchase, though I thought the day(s) old bread was still acceptable. My using bread to the very end was not respected by my friends.

To discourage waste of bread, it was against the law to feed animals bread. Animal feed cost more than bread. A practical farmer raiding garbage for partial loaves could land in jail with considerable publicity to discourage others.

In my kitchen, there is a poster where a child is admonished not to waste bread. Behind him is a pie chart picture with the various quarters demonstrating the process of raising grain. The slogan, "Young man, bread is labor!"

Regards,

I retract my initial response vis a vis fresh bread "sickness" and the possibilities of ergot rye; Cathy2's anecdotal *labor*-responsive apprehensions seem more apropos. Received-wisdom ignorance is a fascinating thing.

I was told many times in Germany -- and by a variety of different people -- that eating very fresh bed would be bad for my stomach. After reading about the subject, I discovered that this is based on the fact that fresh bread differs in an important way from day-old bread: it is more delicious. Thus it is eaten more quickly, often in larger bites, and for that reason may lead to a stomach ache.

I have also found some evidence that wartime propaganda urged people to avoid this "unhealthful" fresh bread, harping on the potential stomach aches, in order to cut down consumption of scarce flour. If there isn't enough bread to go around anyway, you are less likely to have bread riots everyone eats less of what there is, and eats that slowly. I've heard, though I haven't been able to find direct evidence, that in some places bakers were forbidden to sell fresh bread.

Very interesting responses.

MariaTheresa wrote:I was told many times in Germany -- and by a variety of different people -- that eating very fresh bed would be bad for my stomach. After reading about the subject, I discovered that this is based on the fact that fresh bread differs in an important way from day-old bread: it is more delicious. Thus it is eaten more quickly, often in larger bites, and for that reason may lead to a stomach ache.

I have also found some evidence that wartime propaganda urged people to avoid this "unhealthful" fresh bread, harping on the potential stomach aches, in order to cut down consumption of scarce flour. If there isn't enough bread to go around anyway, you are less likely to have bread riots everyone eats less of what there is, and eats that slowly. I've heard, though I haven't been able to find direct evidence, that in some places bakers were forbidden to sell fresh bread.

From my grandfather's experience, it's clear that the belief in eating day-old bread predates the war, although I'm struck that the warning against fresh bread is still powerful in contemporary Germany.

MariaTheresa wrote:I was told many times in Germany -- and by a variety of different people -- that eating very fresh bed would be bad for my stomach. After reading about the subject, I discovered that this is based on the fact that fresh bread differs in an important way from day-old bread: it is more delicious. Thus it is eaten more quickly, often in larger bites, and for that reason may lead to a stomach ache.
.

Certain dark rye breads actually taste better a day or two after baking.

We baked a couple loaves of rye a number of years ago. Three hours out of the oven, we tried it and well, it was pretty bad. We put it away and forgot about it. Five days later, we were out of bread and well, we decided to use the bread. It was absolutely great tasting.

I'm sure that the "unhealthful hot bread" theory existed before the war, although I suspect it may have been related to the same "don't be greedy and give yourself a stomach ache" idea. Nowadays you're more likely to hear explanations about the yeast affecting your digestive system (wrong: the yeast is long dead at that point). In general, I have been given many specific instructions in Germany about what to do and what not to do with bread.

I used to go to a favorite bakery for their Wednesday bread (their own special recipe for a rustic sourdough rye, and made only once a week). You had to get there early, or it would all be gone. On the other hand, if you arrived too early, they wouldn't cut it for you, and by that I mean that the bread was made in round loaves with the circumference equal to that of a health Chicago mayor, and the baker would not cut the loaf into anything smaller than quarters when it was still warm, which in effect was at least 3 hours after it was out of the oven. You could buy what was probably a kilo of Wednesday bread or you could buy something else; no compromises.

And then there was the day that I took my great haunch of rye and started to put it into a plastic shopping bag with my other purchases. I was instantly told that I could not do that; it would ruin the bread. Fresh bread does not get put into plastic!

Some of the health issues seem to apply to the consumers of the bread, and some seem to apply to the well-being of the bread itself, a carefully cultivated and delicate creature!

Hi,

Fresh bread when cut has a tendancy to compress. Once it has cooled and stabilized after some hours, you can cut it without affecting the structure.

German sourdough rye is one of our family's favorite breads. It isn't found all over Germany. When my Dad visited paternal relatives in the north, he never saw it and missed it. When he
visited maternal relatives in the south, it was plentiful.

Sometime this year, I will have a speaker on German food. There is no universal German food, though there are plenty of regional preferences. We knew there was something to this simply from observing my Grandparent's preferences. Unbelievable to me, Opa disliked spatzle because he grew up on potatoes. Spatzle was served at his home when he was not around.

Now if you really want to rattle a European, ask for ice in your drink in winter.

Regards,

Hi,

I forwarded a link to the lady who will speak sometime on German food. I have permission to repeat her response:

Regarding the bread: I think that this is a myth! In Germany we adore fresh bread and we have all these wonderful sorts of bread, literally hundreds of different sorts and flavors. And especially the younger Germans love their fresh bread. On the opposite: I think that now bread that is a few days old gets thrown away much more readily than some decades ago.
And we also have to talk about WHAT bread the Germans eat. They first and foremost love the "Koernerbrot"-- the bread that is made out of whole wheat and has seeds in it. Or I, for example, am a big fan of spelt bread and rye bread and all these breads that naturally have a higher density that white bread.

maybe these people that decades ago were afraid to get sick from eating fresh bread had a gluten intolerance without knowing it?....

But I promise you that nowadays Germans love their fresh bread and their Broetchen.
I can't wait to get back to Berlin (I will go in May) and eat myself silly!

Reading Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), I came across a relevant passage. Ned Silverton complains about the dyspeptic George Dorset, husband of Bertha, a woman he is in love with: “Gad! what a study might be made of the tyranny of the stomach— the way a sluggish liver or insufficient gastric juices might affect the whole course of the universe, overshadow everything in reach— chronic dyspepsia ought to be among the ‘statutory causes’ [for divorce]; a woman’s life might be ruined by a man’s inability to digest fresh bread.”

So it would appear that those with poor digestions should avoid fresh bread (in 1905). And although the words come from a quite unsympathetic character, LTHers might have some sympathy for the sentiment that a spouse's "chronic dyspepsia" could ruin the other spouse's life.

I once had a problem after eating several slices of fresh warm soft bread before and during a meal. I think it all compressed into a big blockage in my stomach/intestine and I was in agony for an hour or so. So I can see how this warning originated.

Here's a "scientific" explanation why eating fresh bread is undesirable, from Report on Vienna Bread, a book published by the US Government Printing Office in 1875.

Eben Norton Horsford wrote:It is well known that thin slices of toast may be digested in a sensitive stomach without producing the distress occasioned by flatulency, and which, when fresh warm yeast-bread is eaten, is due to fermentation. The process of toasting has not only destroyed the yeast-germs, but it has converted the starch into dextrine, which is incapable of fermentation, and so of course incapable of producing flatulency.

Though I don't know for certain the logic behind it, I do know that the Lovely Dining Companion--relying on a popular (and, at least in her case as well, highly effective) program for avoiding "triggers"--suffers from migraines and that fresh-baked bread is apparently a very common trigger. She has been assiduously following the depressingly long list of things to avoid since she doesn't know what her food triggers are and, to her great relief (and mine), she has only had migraines once in the past seven months. Whether it's the fresh-baked bread or something else (citrus?!), we'll discover as she is very slowly allowed to start adding things back, but neither of us would ever have thought to eliminate this.

adamjetkon wrote:So why do we eat them? The answer, from an evolutionary perspective, is that humans don’t eat grains—or didn’t, as the case is.

Untrue. Take a look at the skeleton of "Lucy". A very chimp-like torso, with a ribcage that spreads wide toward the gut. This is because Australopithecus, like the other living great apes, survived on plants and meat that is not cooked, and required a long ferment in the gut: you needed room to digest all that.

Fire changed things. About a million years later, Turkana boy, an example of Homo erectus, has a more human frame: narrower ribs in particular. There's evidence of fire use, and the breaking down of meat and plant matter through heat provides more usable calories, enabling more ability to travel, build, etc.

We're quite evolved to eat cooked food.

JoelF wrote:We're quite evolved to eat cooked food.

If you are interested in this topic, I'd like to highly recommend Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham. The story of what happened to us when we figured out how to use fire is pretty fascinating!

A classic Alton Brown Good Eats episode (no idea which one) on bread comes to mind. He talks about the importance of letting bread properly cool before digging in. I forget the why, I remember him saying you must let it cool 30 to 40 before serving and then intensely watching it eyes fixed. You just know for the next 30 or 40 minutes he sat there transfixed on that bread.

One other thing that comes to mind when you mention the Soviet Union would be the use of sawdust in bread after WWII. Government directive to address the constant shortage of wheat according to our high school history teacher.

For those of you who decide to let freshly baked bread cool, let me mention two words to you: biscuits & pizza. So I'll just keep burning the roof of my mouth.

mamagotcha wrote:

JoelF wrote:We're quite evolved to eat cooked food.

If you are interested in this topic, I'd like to highly recommend Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham. The story of what happened to us when we figured out how to use fire is pretty fascinating!

Yes, an awesome read.

=R=