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New research makes the bread you love healthier without loss in quality

Published: 02 December 2024
Solja Pietiäinen

Adding wheat bran to bread makes it more nutritious but also makes bread dense and unappealing. New research from SLU is about to change that. By altering the fibre structure, the quality of bread with added wheat bran extracts can be improved.

Wheat is one of the world's most important crops, and much of it is milled into flour, generating large amounts of by-products in the form of wheat bran. Although wheat bran contains valuable nutrients, it is mostly used as animal feed. Baking bread with wheat bran improves its nutritional but it also makes the bread dense, something which many consumers dislike.

- Most swedes prefer white, fluffy bread to whole grain. At the same time almost 70 procent of the people here don’t eat enough fiber. I wanted to address that by making a fiber ingredient that can be used to produce bread with a lot of fiber and improve the bread quality, says Solja Pietiäinen, the author of the thesis from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

To solve this Solja Pietiäinen has focused on a particular fibre (arabinoxylan) in wheat bran and how its properties can be improved.

- By reducing the size of the fibre I have been able to bake bread from wheat bran that has both better texture and higher volume. At the same time, this is a bread with a high fibre content. In other words, the kind of bread most people prefer but more nutritious, says Solja Pietiäinen.

Wheat bran is commonly looked upon as a side stream from flour production. This research could change that.

- Being able to use more wheat bran as ingredient does not only improve the consumer health but also makes cereal processing more efficient - that is both more sustainable but also creates more value out of the side stream. So this really benefits the consumers, the industry and the planet.

- Hopefully, this can be positive for both consumer health and the food industry, says Solja Pietiäinen.

 

 

 

 

 

Facts:

Read Solja Pietiäinen's thesis.

Solja Pietiäinen will defend her thesis “Modification of wheat bran arabinoxylan extracts for functional properties in breadmaking” on December 13, 2024.

The research is funded by Lantmännen and Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research.