What's in your bread?

Most people will be horrified by reports that when you eat three slices of some brands of apparently healthy wholemeal breads, you will be clocking up more fat than a Mars Bar.

Confused, too. Fat, after all, is not a traditional ingredient in bread. So why are so many loaves on our supermarket shelves loaded with the stuff?

Fat is added to bread for the worst of motives. Its inclusion means that the bread can have a higher water and air content, which gives it greater bulk.

In other words, you think you are buying a sustaining, health-promoting food when, in fact, you are paying over the odds for added air and water. The inclusion of fat also extends a product's shelf-life.

Clearly this is great news for retailers' profits. They have us all brainwashed that fresh food really does last for days on end and so, if we only have time to shop once a week in their stores, then that's all fine and dandy.

Since 85 per cent of all bread is sold in supermarkets, they can effectively dictate to bakers what they make, hence the pallet-loads of fatty, health-challenging, long-life technobreads that line our shelves.

Thanks to our supermarkets, the Lord's Prayer needs to be rewritten to read, "Give us this day our weekly bread ..." But what of the nation's health?

Chemically hardened hydrogenated fat - the type routinely used in bread, cakes, margarines and biscuits - is manufactured by crushing seeds in chemical solvents such as methane and propane, heating the resulting oil with nickel and then bombarding it with hydrogen gas.

This alchemist's trick produces neat little plastic beads of hardened "transfats" which would not melt even if you held them in the palm of your hand on a hot day.

While excess fat of any natural kind added to bread would soon announce itself with a greasy mark, retailers can pile in hydrogenated fat and consumers are none the wiser, just left puzzled as to why our waistlines inexorably expand.

The supermarkets' defence is that they label their ingredients clearly and that fat is added because shoppers want the bread to last longer. Also, some of the fat listed may be in the form of unprocessed seeds, which contain healthy oils.

But a raft of research now suggests that where hydrogenated fats are added, they can wreak considerably more havoc in our bodies than even naturally saturated fat. A major Harvard University study conducted over 12 years concluded that consumption of hydrogenated fat is directly related to heart disease, cancer and obesity. This isn't the only trick our retailers are up to with what was once the staff of life. They sell breads that will remain miraculously soft and fresh until they suddenly go green, thanks to the inclusion of enzymes.

Some of these enzymes are genetically modified, yet, amazingly, they do not need to be declared on the label. Likewise, the lion's share of all in-store bakery bread is not baked from scratch, simply "baked-off " in the store from frozen, pre-formed industrial dough, which is why it turns to dust within a day. Yet this does not appear on the label.

Once more, the trusting purchaser has not an inkling of the major technological interventions, some might say adulterations, that go on behind the scenes.

Supermarkets pose, unconvincingly, as responsible champions of public health. They sell what looks like fresh, pure pork when, in fact, it has been injected with additives and water.

They attempt to make fresh food last longer by sealing it in packs filled with modified air from which the natural ageing element - oxygen - has been removed, although tests show that this seriously depletes vitamins.

They continue to sell us flaccid, prepared salads washed in water which is 20 times more chlorinated than the average swimming pool, and ready-meals and sandwiches with salt levels that are way above limits recommended for health.

Like "produce lights" designed to make fruit and vegetables look fresher than they really are, and fine-mist sprays that keep everything looking rosy on the meat counter, these are all techniques to make food look better and fresher than it really is. How much longer are we prepared to swallow it ?