Hello and welcome to the Nutrition Diva podcast. I'm your host Monica Reinegel. A listener

wrote with some questions about sourdough. He says, I use homemade whole grain sourdough

daily and I'm convinced it has exceptional health benefits. But I can't find any nutritional

info on it. It seems to me that it has to have probiotics, for instance. With so many

people stuck at home over the last year, bread baking in general and sourdough in particular

have seen a big rise in popularity. And I think that many people share this listener's

conviction that sourdough must somehow be more nutritious than just regular bread. But

are those beliefs backed up by any science? Sourdough is a traditional method of making bread

that's a bit more time and labor intensive than modern methods. And maybe that's why

we assume it must also be better for us. A lot of bread these days is made with dried baking

yeast, which are reanimated when they're combined with warm water. And then when mixed

with flour, the reanimated yeast starts to digest the sugars in the flour, releasing carbon

dioxide gas. And this gas gets trapped in pockets in the dough and causes the dough to rise.

Sourdough bread also uses microorganisms to generate the gas that makes the bread rise.

But in this case, lactobacillus bacteria are the ones doing the heavy lifting. These

bacteria, along with some uncultivated or wild yeasts, are naturally present in the flour,

as well as just in the air. So to make a sourdough starter, you just combine flour and water

and you let it sit loosely covered for several days in a warm room and just let nature do its

thing. As the bacteria in the flour start to reproduce, they give off carbon dioxide gas and

lactic acid. And eventually, you end up with a tangy, bubbly mixture with enough oomph to

leaven a loaf of bread. So sourdough bakers will typically take a cup or two of this starter

out of the batch and then replace it with fresh flour and water. Because unlike a packet of dry

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