One thing is for sure – Our food is making us sick!
More and more people suffer from being overweight, metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance (early stage diabetes type 2), food intolerances and allergies. These health issues, also referred to as ‘lifestyle diseases’, mostly have one common cause: carbohydrate-heavy, highly-processed and artificially modified foods which overburden our organism.
Healing through low-carb diet
Changing to a low-carb diet with natural, minimally processed industrial foods with good fats and high-value protein usually will lead to an improvement of the above-mentioned symptoms very quickly.
However, a diet change is not often something easy to achieve. All of a sudden, the grocery store can seem like a wilderness of forbidden foods for low-carb lovers, as most of the products offered are very high in carbs: bread, pasta, pizza and snacks made of grains, starchy sweets, sugary dairy products, rice etc….
But the hardest thing would most possibly be to give up bread. Here it’s not just about the taste of bread itself, it’s rather a matter of the ’functional’ aspect of bread: the rolls for breakfast on which you spread some cheese, a sandwich to go or the bread rolls you dip into the soup.
And also pastries and cookies are so hard for most of us to resist. A muffin as a little snack in-between, a small piece of cake or the cookie served with your coffee…
Increase in gluten sensitivity – It has already caught you?
Gluten sensitivity has increased because today’s highly cultivated wheat contains up to 10 times more gluten than it did approx. 50 years ago. The higher the gluten content, the better you can process the dough for industrial purposes.
Gluten definitely isn’t healthy for anyone!
However, the question is when and to what extent you’ll begin to recognize any health effects. Lectin, a protein that is naturally present in gluten, also called gliadin, induces increased intestinal permeability, whereby dietary proteins can undigestedly pass through the gastrointestial tract and enter our organism, which may provoke inflammatory reactions there.
„But we used to eat bread in the past and had no problems at all?“ …is often put forward as a counter-argument.
Apart from the fact that, many years ago, wheat contained far less gluten, bread making was based on a traditional sourdough leavening process. The sourdough broke down the gluten (fermentation) and made the bread easier to digest afterwards.
Many people have been already suffering from gluten sensitivity for several years and do not even know it!
Does one or more of the following symptoms sound familiar to you?
- Digestive disorders after a meal (bloated stomach, constipation, diarrhoea, ‘nervous’ bowels)?
- Excessive tiredness, a feeling of ’fogginess’ in the head after a meal?
- Migraine attacks?
- Allergies (hay fever, food sensitivities)?
- Psoriasis?
A gluten sensitivity may lie behind all this!
The progression of the disease is closely related to your gluten intake. The process develops sneakily and is most often only recognized when the symptoms have become more severe. The symptoms may be similar to those of a celiac disease or an irritable bowel.
To check whether gluten is the true cause for your discomfort, do this self-test and you will quickly find out: Strictly remove gluten from your diet for some weeks, watch yourself and see how you feel! Many people will feel a significant improvement within just a few days!
But BEWARE! Most of the gluten-free breads consist mainly of different types of starches (potato, rice, millet, corn etc.), what makes them even higher in carbs than traditional bread. Bread makers very often use a chemically modified cellulose fiber (hydroxypropyl methyl cellulose) or genetically modified soya products such as soy flour or soy protein to substitute the gluten.
The label ’gluten-free’ on a product does not automatically mean that it is healthy!
Dangerous trend: protein breads with high gluten content
Protein breads containing gluten have been around for quite some time and are now even availabe at discounters. Gluten (also known as wheat protein or wheat gluten) in conventional bread makes the bread dough stretchy and easier to process and ensures that the dough will rise properly during the baking process. Starch gives the dough stability as it gelatinizes immediately during the baking process. Producers cut out the starch from most of the protein breads on the market, and add a lot of extra gluten instead. This way, you’ll still get a rather solid bread, however, its texture is often slightly rubbery. At first glance, those gluten-rich protein breads appear to be a more or less tempting alternative to commercially-baked bread. However, since you’ll have an even higher gluten intake level than before, you may in turn enhance the risk of developing gluten intolerance.
Conclusion: protein breads that are rich in gluten do more harm than good!
We, the Dr. Almond team, have made it our goal to develop healthy food that contains no gluten, no soy and just very few carbohydrates, but tastes so good that you don’t have a reason to miss any conventional products.
Bread without carbohydrates AND zero gluten?
This is where the real challenge begins. Once you throw out not only the starch, but also the gluten from a bread recipe with e.g. almond or linseed flour (as a substitute for wheat flour), this will most probably result in a complete collapse of the whole system, and you’ll get a ‘bread’ that is really very tasty but is much more similar to a compact loaf cake than a bread, when it comes to structure and consistency. Our aim, however, always was to get a bread with a crumb that is just as tender and elastic to the touch as you are used to from conventional bread – using only natural ingredients. To achieve this, we had to start right from scratch when developing the recipe and we had to analyse the influence of the ingredients coming into question on baking properties, structure and consistency.
Our main ingredients are de-oiled flours of nuts, kernel and oilseeds, which are low-carb, gluten-free and high in protein by nature. In addition, these flours are very rich in fiber, minerals, vitamins and trace elements. We also use spray-dried egg white powder from free-range eggs, cream of tartar and ascorbic acid (vitamin C) as a natural preservative.
But after more than 500 baking experiments in our test kitchen, we finally made it and found our first ’perfect’ recipe. We further developed and varied it in order to provide you with a broad range of delicious and wholesome food.
But our development is not standing still and we are constantly working on new products to expand our range of services. Do you have any ideas, suggestions and wishes that may help us improve our products?
We look forward to your feedback!
The Dr. Almond Team
Contact: info@dr-almond.com (or use the comments function below)