Bread And Your Health

What does a 'healthy diet' look like?

The healthy diet pyramid shows that bread is one of the foods you should eat most of.

The balanced diet plate shows this information in a different way. It helps you to understand the percentages for each type of food.

Using a spreadsheet, you can experiment with variations in your diet.

We can vary our diet by making sandwiches with different fillings from other parts of the pyramid or plate.

Remember that putting lots of butter or margarine on your bread makes it move 'up' the pyramid though!

Nutrition and allergies

Nutrition experts say that everyone should eat six slices of bread a day.

Remember that some people have allergies to certain types of food, if you know you have an allergy, check with your doctor or parents what you should eat. If your friends have allergies, be sympathetic if they cannot eat something.

Bread provides many of the essential nutrients our body needs:

• Energy (calories): we should cut down on fat and eat more food containing complex carbohydrates like starch.
• Protein helps us to grow.
• Calcium is essential for healthy bones and teeth.
• Fibre: bread is where we get most of our fibre from! Fibre keeps the digestive system healthy. Wholemeal and brown bread have more fibre than white. Some white bread has added fibre, look out for these if you’re not keen on wholemeal.
• Vitamins: thiamine, nicotinic acid and riboflavin help to keep our skin, eyes and nervous system healthy. These are all in bread. Folic acid is also in bread which helps keep our blood healthy.
• Iron is a mineral which we need for healthy blood.

For more information, please visit our Your Health section.