engleski

Can we measure the real nutritional quality of bread through nutrient density methods?

Bread often had been described as the stuff of life and still today in nutrition recommendations bread has an important place in human diet on a daily basis. In order to act on dietary advice, consumers will need easy ways of comparing different foods based on nutrient density, nutrient-to-energy ratio, or some other objective measure of nutritional value. The WHO/FAO endorsed the use of glycemic index (GI) method for classifying carbohydrate-rich foods and recommended that the GI values of foods be used in conjuction with information about food composition to guide food choise. The aim of the study was to detect the sensibility of known methods to measure the nutritional quality of breads. Five previously published methodologies based on nutrition density and four methods derived from those previously published five were used as well as the new nutrition score (NS) which take in account only "unbeneficial" nutrients. As a model only wheat breads were chosen from the Danish Food Composition Databank. The relative scores of all 9 methods indicated the different types of bread as breads with the best nutrient density scores compared to the other varieties, as well as the worst. In conclusion, all methods discriminate the bread with the best and the worst nutrient density. According NS sodium was outside the first and second category which makes the bread a preferable consumer choice to none. A more sensitive score needs to be developed in order to evaluate the real nutritive quality of bread, especially those with added value. In the meanwhile GI value, NS value and one nutrient density method could be used together according the values obtained by each method and ranking positions of these three methods as a sum to evaluate nutrition quality of breads. Lower sum of rank number is correlated with the higher nutritional quality of bread.

bread; nutrient density methods; nutrition quality

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