May 6, 2006

Arnold Healthy Multi-Grain Bread

Arnold Healthy Multi-Grain Bread is the bread that I switched to when I started realizing that perhaps white slices of nothingness were not the best selection nutritionally. The dark color and the variety of seeds at the top lead me to believe that there would be much more of an offering than the simple white flour and yeast in the other packaged breads available. I was correct, but only to a point.

Arnold Healthy Multi-Grain Bread is a perfect "transition" food. With ingredients like unbleached enriched wheat flour, wheat bran, brown rice and oats, and no artificial colors or preservatives and no hydrogenated oils, it has more nutritional value than its ghostly cousin. However this bread also has three different types of sugar in it: sugar, brown sugar and sucralose. As a reader of ingredient lists, generally the healthiest breads have either no sugar or natural, unrefined sugars such as honey, or molasses. With that much sugar (and wheat flour that must be enriched because it has been stripped of nutrients) I would classify the Arnold multi-grain bread as a good middle ground between junk food and health food.

The Arnold multi-grain has a fluffy consistency for a wheat bread, not far from the airiness of white. The taste, while more flavorful than white, is slightly sweet and less intense than true grain breads.

So, if you grew up on slices of bread that easily turned into marshmallow in your mouth, and are looking for something a little more substantial but aren't willing to commit to something as intense as sprouted grain breads, Arnold Healthy Multi-Grain Bread is a good health food starter item. Just keep in mind that the word 'healthy' is a subjective term.

About the Arnold brand:

Arnold Bread was started in 1940 when Dean and Betty Arnold baked their first two dozen loaves (and more healthful than today's bread, in my opinion -- unbleached, spring wheat flour, honey, butter and eggs) in their house in Stamford, CT. In the sixties, they grew to become the largest bakery under one roof in the world in Greenwich, CT. Today, Arnold is a part of the George Weston Bakeries.