Nearly every Monday after work I head over to the Aunt Millie’s bread factory just down the street from the newspaper building for 35-calorie Healthy Goodness bread, whole wheat bagels and whatever else looks interesting.
My go-to bread.
The timing is perfect: Monday is mark-down day at the thrift shop, and my shift ends at 10 a.m., before most of the good stuff has been snatched up. I usually come out with a big bag of 75-cent loaves of bread, 59-cent bags of bagels and 50-cent packages of Slimwiches to stuff into the freezer.
I love the giant Sunbeam sign with the revolving bread slices that’s gazed out over Pearl Street for as long as I can remember. (When I first started working at the paper it overlooked a seedy stretch of porn shops and transvestite bars. Now there’s a yoga studio, a coffee bar and a shop that sells custom denim creations I can’t afford.)
It’s cool that the company that makes my favorite diet bread – I prefer Healthy Goodness to Healthy Life the way some folks prefer Coke over Pepsi – is just a short walk from my workplace. Though Aunt Millie’s (formerly the Perfection Biscuit Co.) has bakeries throughout the Midwest, its headquarters are in Fort Wayne. They don’t make “my” bread here, though. According to the company’s website, that’s produced in Jackson, Mich.
Underneath all these warm fuzzy feelings, however, I’ve often wondered just how they – and their Healthy Life rivals, Lewis Bakeries out of Evansville – can make a 35-calorie slice of bread. It’s not just that the slices are smaller, though that’s part of it. The key is something called resistant starch. My preferred whole grain variety contains both resistant corn starch and something called resistant maltodextrin. The 35-calorie Healthy Goodness potato bread I picked up yesterday has both of those plus a third variety, resistant wheat starch.
According to Wikipedia, resistant starch is “starch and starch degradation products that escape from digestion in the small intestine of healthy individuals. Resistant starch is considered the third type of dietary fiber, as it can deliver some of the benefits of insoluble fiber and some of the benefits of soluble fiber.”There’s a boatload of information and studies out there, and I haven’t begun to sort it all out. Here are the conclusions I’ve formed so far:
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