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A large percentage of people eat too much wheat. If you think about the average daily diet, just three or four foods show up repeatedly. For example, an everyday breakfast of toast with butter and marmalade consists of wheat flour (bread), dairy (butter) and sugar (marmalade). A typical pasta salad for lunch would mean more wheat and dairy, whilst a dinner of pizza or chicken pie would again include wheat (in the pizza base or the pastry). And let’s not forget snacks – biscuits, doughnuts, crispbreads and bagels are all popular snacks and each one contains wheat.

Many people don’t think about the constituents of their meals and imagine they are eating lots of different foods. In fact, many meals are essentially the same but are processed, assembled or cooked differently.

Variety is the spice of life and one of the core principles of a healthy diet is exactly that – plenty of variety. If we eat a wheat-laden diet day in day out, year after year, it’s no wonder our systems become overloaded, give up the struggle and become sluggish. Our bodies need the whole spectrum of nutrients and we cannot get these if we eat the same foods repeatedly.

Wheat has a nutritious and wholesome image because it is considered to be a good source of carbohydrates and dietary fibre. However, whilst we undoubtedly need both these elements in our diet, today’s wheat flour is so over processed that the end product – the mass-produced bland bread that fills the supermarket shelves – bears little resemblance to the kind of healthy, wholemeal bread that our grandparents ate.

Since the arrival of mass production in the 1960s, wheat-filled foods have been the fastest growing items on the supermarket shelves. They are cheap and filling – which is what both the manufacturers and the majority of shoppers want – but, in order to produce the vast amounts of flour needed at the right price, wheat is sprayed with insecticides and fungicides. To then turn that wheat into bread can also involve an amazing number of processes. The wheat germ (which is high in vitamin E, has many of the B vitamins and is good for us) is often removed because it can turn rancid quickly and would therefore spoil the flour faster than the manufacturers would like. To make white flour, the bran is also removed; this is the outer part of the grain, which is a good source of niacin, iron, zinc, B vitamins and fibre. They may also irradiate the wheat in order to avoid contamination by insects. Having done all this, manufacturers then sometimes use chemicals, conditioners and preservatives to improve the texture and shelf life of the end product.

Unfortunately, all these processes result in most of the vitamins and minerals originally contained in the wheat being lost so the manufacturers often add synthetic vitamins and minerals, which the body has great difficulty absorbing.

Given this treatment, it’s little wonder that the nutritional value of your average mass-produced loaf of wheat bread, or other wheat-laden products, is often rather poor. Personally, I would rather make my own – with the help of today’s bread-making machines it’s not the arduous task it once was.