Keep going high fibre, by George Hayter

Health expert Dr O’Donnell stood in front of a bull and, speaking to the TV camera, advocated eating less meat. He promised viewers longer and healthier lives if they would instead eat more food high in fibre. 

Roughage-rich vegetable-based whole food, he told me and millions of other viewers, would make possible a longer and healthier life. 

I wouldn’t mind a longer life, I thought to myself as I watched the life-changing programme. And being healthier probably wouldn’t do me any harm either, so I followed his recommendation, choosing wholefood wherever available. 

Wholefood is vegetables, fruit and most of all grain which has not had the fibrous parts chucked away. 

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After switching to my more fibrous diet, every day at work I carried on having afternoon tea with scone and butter. In the staff café they sold ordinary scones, made with white flour, and wholemeal scones, made with what I now considered the only satisfactory flour. The rich texture made it more tasty. So much so that, if the café ran out of my favoured wholemeal I would not have a scone at all. No wholemeal no eat. 

Bread too. I only ever bought bread that was wholemeal. Then I discovered that Sainsbury’s had started selling wholemeal shortbread, so I stocked up on that too. It was heavenly, a bit like grazing on delightful shards of sharp honey. Seemed nicer than over-milled shortbread made from white flour, which tastes like sugary blocks of dust. 

At this time, food shops seemed to be offering more and more of their products in a wholemeal version. Clearly I wasn’t the only person converting to wholemeal. Wholemeal was taking off. 

I even found – and I wouldn’t have thought this possible – wholemeal rice pudding. Either the O’Donnell programme had been extraordinarily influential, or else Sainsbury’s decided wholemeal was going to be the new food normal. 

The medical profession has long preached the benefits of wholemeal, which in America is known as “whole grain” or “whole-grain”. All three terms refer to food made from the whole wheat seed, including the casing. In white flour, the casing is removed during the milling process. 

The casing, also known as the husk or bran, contains no molecules that are absorbed by the gut and used by your body. But what the bran does do is give your gut something to grip as it tries to massage food through your tummy and prevent constipation. Fibre is as important to the smooth running of your body as the oil is in a car engine. It can also reduce risk of cancer and heart disease – which relieves pressure on the NHS. 

Wholefood, wholemeal and high fibre may be modern terms but they are not describing anything modern. The words indicate natural food, eaten by man for millions of years, before guilty machines in factories started annihilating fibre. Trouble is, people got used to the texture of over-refined food and assumed it was best. 

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Sadly, the return to foods high in natural fibre seems to have run out of steam since the dawn of the current century. Wholemeal shortbread and wholemeal rice pudding are no more. Wholemeal’s ascent has flattened, as far as I can see.  

Perhaps it is being further eclipsed by the growing popularity of sourdough bread, which is nothing to do with fibre, concentrating instead on fermentation to ease digestion. Sourdough bread is rarely offered in wholemeal. 

With no recognised national standard, it is difficult to be sure of true wholemeal. What is described as wholemeal can include a large proportion of white flour. Personally, for reliable labelling of wholemeal I mostly trust supermarkets, who have their nationwide reputations to protect. 

The word wholemeal is crucial. “White or brown?” customers are often asked, unaware that brown bread is usually white flour with colouring added.