What happens when you eat sourdough?
As you know from my introduction, about 25 years ago, as a young baker, I was poorly and within weeks I couldn’t eat anything with wheat in. I was newly qualified and just at the point my career was about to take off, and instead, I had to stop doing what I loved most – baking. It was pre the gluten-free fad, and the only bread or flour available made dreadful baking. I gave up the job I loved.
When I discovered, a few years later that I could eat sourdough it was the start of an obsession. I needed to understand why it was it that I could digest sourdough and not other bread? As I set to on what became a lifetime of studying sourdough and researching why it is more easily digestible I discovered I needed to understand the digestive system itself.
Knowing how the microbes in sourdough transform sourdough is just one part of the picture. The other half was to understand who happened to bread after I ate it, and in being curious I came across the gut microbiome and so this was why I was talking about it two decades before anyone had even heard of it.
Whilst most bakers were keen to perfect their open crumb structure or shaping I was getting strange looks in my classes. Some student were very challenging and dismissive of my rudimentary understanding of the gut microbiome, and laughed at my theories. I remember one student called me ” beautifully eccentric,” but this didn’t put me off reading every study I could find ( there were not so many in the early days. ) I spoke to doctors and nutritionists and wheat breeders, or in fact anyone who could help, looking at the nutritional value of grains and flour, all to gather the knowledge about the impact of the gut microbiome of our immune system, and our physical and mental health.
It was when Tim Spector’s work was first published I could have cried with delight. Finally here was the validation, the understanding, the proof, the evidence and the explanation from someone who people would listen to. So along my way, I realised that truly understanding why sourdough is more nutritious is actually only meaningful if you understand why it it matters, and it all starts with understanding what happens when eat sourdough and the central role of the Gut Microbiome.
So this is the poster that is on the wall here at the School with an overview of the human digestive system.
I hope you enjoy it – You can print this human digestion starter card by following this link.
