It Might Be Good For You,

but would you eat purple bread?

Professor Zhou Weibiao, of the National University of Singapore is hoping you will, trying to keep the same flavour and texture of normal white bread he started by extracting anthocyanin, the natural blue pigment found in foods like grapes and blueberries from black rice, leaving behind its starchy compounds, he infused the anthocyanin into bread dough and used it to bake loaves that are apparently much better for you than white bread,

when the dough is baked at 200 degrees C, 80% of anthocyanin’s antioxidant qualities are preserved, the compound reacts with starch enzymes in the flour, making purple bread 20% easier to digest than traditional bread and this qualifies purple bread as a superfood, given that one of the main problems with white bread is that it digests very quickly, making the sugar go directly into the bloodstream, ‘if you want to enjoy the texture of white bread and slow down digestion, this is probably the best formula,’ Weibiao explained, ‘you are eating the same amount of starch and wheat flour so the nutritional value is the same, the key idea here is slowing down the energy release, so you use those calories over a longer period of time,’ anthocyanins are also believed to control obesity, help prevent cardiovascular and neurological disease, and even keep cancer away, so I guess we will see purple bread on supermarket shelves soon?