This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Karen Hopkins. This will just take a minute.

You can help yourself grow bigger and stronger, eight ways with Wonder Bread.

You can beat on Wonder Bread all you want.

When you can make a completely credible pillow out of this stuff, like...

But it just keeps bouncing back.

Because despite its nutritional bad reputation, white bread appears to boost the

growth of good gut bacteria. That's according to a paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Food

Chemistry. In recent years, white bread has been shunned as a

glutinous slab that lacks the health benefits of whole wheat, but this new

study suggests there's more to the story. The researchers were looking at the

effects of foods on the type of microbes that live in our intestines.

They gathered data on the diets of 38 healthy adults.

Then they analyzed the bacteria present in the subject's stool samples.

Hey, it's for science. Turns out that volunteers who ate white bread had more lactobiscillas,

a type of bacteria that wards off digestive disorders. Seems the starch and fibers in this sandwich

staple are good for these germs.

But before you make your lunch, another recent study shows that eating white bread is associated with obesity.

So you should take all these findings with a pinch of salt, but not too much salt, especially if you have

high blood pressure.

Thanks for the minute.

For Scientific Americans 60 Second Science, I'm Karen Hopkins.