White bread with health benefits?! Say a big hello to PURPLE bread
We all know white bread has a really bad reputation. It's criticised by nutritionists for spiking blood sugar levels and not really offering you much else in nutritional value.
Well, now PURPLE bread has surfaced and it just might make eating white bread way better for you.
Now, we're not crazy. Health fanatics have clung onto this new baked good of late and food scientists have discovered that adding anthocyanin (a natural pigment that gives aubergines, plums and black rice their distinctive colour) to white bread can slow down your digestion as well as provide some natural cancer-fighting antioxidants.
CNN spoke to a food scientist, Zhou Weibiao at the National University of Singapore, who said that purple bread is digested 20 times slower than your regular white bread and it also lowers your glycemic index.
As well as that, because it brings down the digestible starch content, people will eat less of it as oppose to regular white bread.
"The challenge was to see if we could change the formula of bread, without changing the smooth texture of white bread that people really love," Zhou told CNN.
"You are eating the same amount of starch and wheat flour, so the nutritional value is the same. The key idea here is slowing down the energy release, so you use those calories over a longer period of time."