Health benefits from freezing bread

I watched a YouTube video a few days ago by "Dr Alex" in which he made the astounding statement that freezing bread - or even storing mashed potatoes in the fridge - causes the starch in the food to change its structure, and as a result, the starch becomes 'resistant starch' that the body has difficulty in metabolising. This transformed starch behaves more like dietary fiber, delaying glucose release into the bloodstream. Not only that, the undigested resistant starch passes into the large intestine, where beneficial gut bacteria ferment it into short-chain fatty acids like butyrate. This process is called retrogradation.

At first, I thought that this was another crank video, and indeed another video popped up that purports to bust this myth of converting normal starch into resistant starch. But I do have a master's degree in research and know that hearing something from one source does not make it so and that YouTube is not a reliable source of information.

Thus I looked at the literature: the first paper that appeared, entitled 'Effect of freezing and heating white bread on the glycemic response of healthy individuals'. Here's an extract:

Results: The glycemic response of the participants to frozen and reheated white bread was lower compared to fresh white bread at all time intervals. The maximum blood sugar level was reached after 30 minutes of consuming fresh bread, at 132 mg/dl. However, for reheated bread, it reached 120 mg/dl. The prolonged freezing time did not increase the amount of resistant starch, and similar results were observed for 3, 5, and 7 days of freezing in terms of decreasing blood sugar levels.

Conclusion: Frozen and reheated white bread leads to lower blood sugar levels compared to fresh white bread. This can be attributed to the formation of resistant starch during the freezing process.

I could look for more but there are plenty of hits that conform this. As it happens, the bread that I eat is baked by an artisanal baker of the kibbutz and is far from the white bread sold in supermarkets. I normally have a spare loaf in the freezer in case the baker decides to take a week off (his mother is seriously ill at the moment) and I keep the current loaf in the fridge so I am unknowingly taking advantage of this health benefit. I also keep a loaf of white sweetened bread in the freezer for the grandchildren: we take a slice out and toast it, so again even though they are eating the worst possible type of bread, we are actually mitigating the qualities that make it so bad.

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