Wheat
Food · Grain · Food, Typed Supps
White flour is wheat with the outer layer and the seed's embryo taken out. That is the whole difference.
Stage by stage
- Intake (Chewing and grain structure): Chewing and cooking break down the grain; intact kernels shield their starch in a way flour cannot.
- Digestion (Amylase on the starch): Starch is hydrolysed to glucose at a speed set largely by how finely the grain was milled.
- Absorption (Glucose absorbed, fibre passes): Glucose enters the bloodstream while bran fibre continues on undigested.
- Downstream (Colon, bulk and fermentation): Bran bulks the stool and speeds transit, and the germ's magnesium and vitamin E are absorbed along the way.
Time to effect
- Wks: Bowel regularity responds within one to two weeks of a genuine increase in wholegrain intake.
Allergens
Contains: Gluten. Derived from what this food is, not from a product label.
Eating patterns
Fits: Vegan, Vegetarian, Pescatarian, Halal, Kosher.
Satiety
148 on the satiety index, where white bread is 100 — high. Modelled from the Holt et al. (1995) measurements.
Environmental footprint
1.6 kg CO2e and 648 litres of freshwater per kg, matched to "Wheat & rye" in Poore & Nemecek (2018), Science 360.
Cost band
Cheap — roughly £2.5 per kg, as a band midpoint rather than a price.
Key nutrients
Nutrition per 100g
- Calories: 326
- Protein: 11.2g
- Carbohydrate: 58.3g
- of which sugars: 1.3g
- Fat: 2.4g
- of which saturated: 0.4g
- Fibre: 11.4g
- Sodium: 2mg
Food vs. supplement
Wheat bran supplements bulk the stool effectively and are a reasonable tool for constipation. They do not deliver the germ's magnesium, vitamin E and B vitamins, and they do not carry the structure that makes whole grain foods filling — which is why trials of isolated fibre rarely reproduce the wholegrain evidence.
Kitchen tip
Wheat berries — the whole intact kernel — boil like rice in about 45 minutes and keep for a week in the fridge. They are the slowest-digesting form of wheat and the easiest way to see how much of the difference is structure rather than label.
Common myth
"Modern wheat has been bred to contain far more gluten than it used to." In reality: Comparisons of wheat varieties across the past century find gluten content broadly unchanged. What has changed is total consumption, the fineness of milling, and the shortening of fermentation times in industrial baking.
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