White bread is the crack of the carbohydrate kingdom. I had this thought while enjoying a completely fiber-free roasted pork sandwich made with pillowy, white bread. Most of the time I stick to whole grains, and I had almost forgotten how seductive the sweet, soft kiss of white bread could be. As I chewed, the pork mostly since the bread melted instantly in my mouth, I tried to think of metaphors to describe the experience. The bread was like cotton candy, or your favorite 1,000 times washed t-shirt, or like a baby bunny or the under skin of an old lady’s arm. I stopped there. Suddenly the name Wonder Bread made sense. If you had been eating rough, grainy, sandpaper bread your whole life, white bread would seem like a culinary wonder; such a shame that it’s also a nutritional quagmire.

Like most Americans I struggle to get enough fiber in my diet.  I probably think about fiber more then I actually eat it, and I’m troubled whenever I read the statistics. If they are even close to true the Great American bowel is not going anywhere and very slowly.

In a wheat kernel, fiber is the indigestible parts of plant based foods. It acts like dumbbells in your GI track, stimulating the muscles to stay smooth and strong as they move the weights along. White bread is more like pillows in your intestine, fun to play with, but not much of a workout. This probably explains why fiber lovers generally have lower rates of colon cancer. Besides personally training your GI track, wonder fiber also helps lower blood cholesterol, risk of heart disease, diabetes and other digestive track ailments, assists with constipation and probably a lot of other good things they haven’t even figured out yet.

There is lots of fiber in whole grains, but it is taken out, along with almost all the other nutrients during the modern refining process. When people first switched over to modern white bread they started getting rickets and other weird diseases, so in 1942 Congress Passed the US Enrichment Act. This law forced bread makers to put back some of the nutrients they strip mined out during the milling process, specifically iron, thiamin, riboflavin and niacin. The law did not address fiber and the nation has been getting a lot of reading done ever since. Perhaps there will be a million constipated man march on Washington some time soon and Obama will make whole grains the law of the land.

Until then to keep your GI track sleek and buff eat lots of whole grains, fruits and vegetables, beans and brown rice. If it’s been nothing but pillow fights in your pipeline for a while start slowly and drink lots of extra water. You may not be able to show off your hot healthy colon at the beach like the rest of your muscles, but there are lots of other benefits I know you will enjoy.