What’s In Your Bread? Part 1

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life. I am that bread of life.” (John 6:47–48)

Bread has been synonymous with food ever since Adam left the Garden. Ever since God said Adam (mankind) would eat his bread by the sweat of his brow (Gen. 3:19), bread has also been synonymous with life. Bread has remained the symbol of life for millennia.

Bread is universally eaten. Every culture of the world has a version of bread. How many kinds of bread can you name? There are bagels, brioche, baguettes, biscuits, chapati, challah, lavash, naan, pitas, pizza, pretzels, puris, tortillas, roti, paratha, and many others. All represent culture.

What about American bread? What is actually in our average grocery store bread? It certainly has changed over the years. It’s truly a shame what we have done to our basic loaf of bread in this era of “enriched” grains. Americans wanted their bread softer, so we changed the formula. While we genetically altered our grains so the bread is softer and fluffier, we also lost much of its nutritional value. To make it seem healthier, many of our American wheat farmers spray their wheat with folate or folic acid and call it “enriched” to compensate for the lack of nutrition and fiber. The vitamins they fortify their bread with are most often synthetic and do not absorb well. The sugar content may be high as well.

When I was a kid, Wonder Bread was a big deal, and that was all most kids liked to eat. It was this white, soft, almost gooey bread that stuck to the roof of your mouth when you chewed it. My mom was a whole wheat bread kind of lady. When I ate Wonder Bread, it tasted so different I wondered what it really was. It didn’t take long for me to know that Wonder Bread was not for me.

More and more people are physically reacting to modern versions of bread. Six percent of Americans are now “gluten sensitive,” and one percent are “celiac”; they have developed an autoimmune disease. If you are in this category, eating bread with gluten can have a number of different effects on your health with moderate to severe symptoms.

Many of my family members had to stop eating any kind of gluten. This required huge lifestyle changes. You would be surprised to learn how many things contain gluten. This made us all start asking about what is in our food instead of just eating it.

Three years ago, Kimberly had a functional doctor tell her to go gluten free because of inflammation in her body. So I decided to go gluten free as well. We avoided all kinds of gluten and started trying to find gluten-free alternatives we actually liked. Most crackers tasted like cardboard. All the alternative breads were super expensive and didn’t taste very good. We ate them in small amounts. We learned to live without traditional bread.

We did feel better and accepted that this was probably our lifestyle going forward. Then we saw our family again and they started talking about eating bread—real bread. My sister made me a piece of toast and said, “We can eat this bread, and it doesn’t bother any of us. Do you want some?” I tried it. “Wow, this tastes so good! What is it?”

She asked if I had ever heard of einkorn wheat. I had not. Then she told me the story of how a climber in the Italian Alps found a man frozen in the ice. It turns out he was a 5,300-year-old mummy now known as Otzi. (Link at the bottom if you want to read about it.) Otzi had einkorn grain on his person when he was killed by an arrow.

From that frozen man, we found the original grain ancient man ate. It only has fourteen chromosomes rather than the forty-two chromosomes found in modern wheat. Einkorn grain can heal your gut! So bread is not the problem; it’s what man has added to the flour that is the problem. This changes the whole idea of bread.

Bread is mentioned 336 times in the Bible. The first Adam needed bread to live, but Jesus —the last Adam—is the Bread! If Jesus said He was Bread, it is important to understand what He meant. It is all too easy to think about modern bad-for-you bread when you read this text, but if Jesus says He is the Bread of Life, then it has to be good! When I discovered einkorn wheat, it all made sense. Einkorn means “single grain.” Jesus is the original grain! There is nothing added or modified in Him. He is life itself.

Now comes the real question: What kind of Jesus “bread” are you eating? I know what I want. I want the original. 

https://www.einkorn.com/otzi-the-icemans-last-meal-included-einkorn-wheat-bread