A s a health-conscious consumer, you may — in recent times — have made the virtuous decision of switching colours when it comes to laying out your bread basket for breakfast. White is out, brown is in. The reason is obvious — nutritionists have maintained for sometime now that brown bread does score a few brownie points over the regular white variety on the health front. But before you load that toaster with the next lot of “healthy” brown bread slices, pause for a moment to ask yourself if your brown bread is really brown.

Confused? Well, if experts are to be believed, the goodness of bread may not necessarily lie in its colour. So don’t just stuff yourself with those loaves thinking you’re doing yourself a whole lot of good. It’s time to read between the lines.

Brown bread — whole-wheat or wheatmeal bread, as it is technically called — is considered a healthy option since it is made out of whole-wheat flour (atta), as opposed to plain flour (maida) that goes into the making of white bread.

Experts say that to make white bread, the flour has to be refined, which largely removes the germ (the nutrient rich part of the grain) and the bran (the fibre-rich part), leaving mainly the starch-rich endosperm. While the process makes the bread soft, fluffy and good to eat, it robs the flour of essential nutrients such as fibre, vitamins and minerals.

Whole-wheat bread, on the contrary, retains all such nutrients. Research data show that bleaching robs white bread of as many as 22 vital nutrients. In certain cases, bakeries may make an effort to later enrich the flour with iron and vitamins such as thiamine, niacin and riboflavin. But other nutrients such as vitamin B6, zinc, manganese and folic acid are still missing. Most importantly, a single slice of whole-wheat bread can provide around two to three grams of fibre, versus only half a gram provided by a slice of white bread.

“But the lack of refinement makes brown bread coarser and harder than white bread, and one has to acquire a taste to really appreciate it, apart from recognising its healthy constitution,” says K. Khanna, nutritionist and principal of the Institute of Home Economics, New Delhi. In such a situation, experts say that manufacturers may be tempted to artificially colour white bread, so as to pass it off as brown bread while retaining its taste and consistency.

“Some manufacturers are known to darken white bread by adding caramelised sugar to it or other colouring agents,” says Khanna. “It is a marketing gimmick which might allow many bakeries to score over their rivals in the brown bread business by making their bread tastier and softer than other brands of brown bread available in the market.”

The All India Food Processors’ Association (AIFPA), on its part, says that it is yet to hear of Indian bakeries engaging in such practices. “However, it would be wrong to say that bakeries would never think of artificially colouring their products,” says D.V. Malhan, former executive director of Modern Foods and current executive secretary, AIFPA. “Since whole-wheat bread is the choice of thousands of consumers across the country today, some bakers might just take the easy way to making their bread taste good and look brown, both at the same time,” he says.

What further adds to the problem is that nutritional labelling has still not been made mandatory in India, whereby manufacturers would be obliged to provide every detail regarding the nutritional value of their products on packages. The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), interestingly, has a standard for wheatmeal bread, formulated in 1979, in view of the fact that “wheatmeal bread is sold at a premium... and some manufacturers might sell white bread coloured with caramel as brown or wheatmeal bread.”

The BIS standard (IS:1960 – 1979) says brown or wheatmeal bread ought to be made out of not less than 65 per cent atta, while not adding any colouring agent. The optional ingredients prescribed by the standard include milk or milk products, sugar, honey, liquid glucose, malt products, other edible flours and starches and emulsifying and stabilising agents. “The wheatmeal bread shall be baked in the conventional form... shall have a good volume... [and] the flavour shall be characteristic of fresh, well-baked wheatmeal bread,” it specifies.

“However, BIS certifications are purely voluntary,” says S.C. Khosla, director, food and agriculture, BIS. “Hence if a manufacturer chooses not to approach us for certification, the product will go uncertified and untested,” he adds.

Bejon Misra, consumer activist and chief executive of the Delhi-based-Consumer VOICE, a consumer organisation, agrees with Khosla. “In fact, we’ve been thinking of testing the different brands of brown bread available in the market to analyse their ingredients,” says Misra. “It is surprising that despite the rising demand little has been done to standardise and define the production of brown bread in our country,” he says.

But even in the absence of standards, experts say that there are indeed a few ways for consumers to find out if they are getting their money’s worth in picking up loaves of brown bread from shop shelves. “First, the colour and texture of bread can easily indicate whether or not the bread is genuinely whole-wheat bread,” says Ishii Khosla, clinical nutritionist and director of Whole Foods. “Anything that appears to be darker than the colour of rotis is sure to be coloured artificially,” she says.

“Besides, anyone who has even the slightest of idea about bread baking would know that baking a soft, light loaf of bread with whole-wheat bread is nearly impossible,” says Khosla. So if the bread sold at the neighbourhood shop is brown yet soft, light and fluffy, it is unlikely to be significantly made of atta.

Manish Malhotra, managing official at the popular Delhi bakery and confectionery Wenger’s, points out that no brown bread can wholly be made of whole-wheat, and will have to contain some amount of regular flour. “Our brown bread, for example, contains about 40 per cent maida,” he says. However, while buying from the market, Malhotra says consumers should watch out for the coarseness of the bread. “The coarser the texture, the more the amount of fibre in the dough,” he says. “Besides, coarseness could also indicate the presence of other grains such as jowar, bajra or dalia, all of which boost the nutrient content of the bread.”

Experts say that mandatory nutritional labelling, if and when implemented, will make whistle-blowing a lot easier. But until then, all that one can go by is conjecture.