— Blanca Martinez

Yeah, absolutely. Uh, bread depends what kind of bread now, uh, the whole grain bread, uh, it's chockfull of vitamins and minerals and even some healthy fats. Uh, but those are found in parts of the grain that are taken away when they're processed. So you wanna make sure that you're getting a lot of fiber in the bread that you're eating. And there, you know, there's many improvements that are happening in terms of creating different types of wheat that are high in fiber but don't necessarily have that texture that people might, um, wanna avoid. But we are, less than 10% of Americans get enough fiber in their diet. So bread is an essential if you can handle bread, for instance, I'm gluten intolerant, so I miss it on a daily basis. I have my gluten-free breads. Um, but they, they don't pack the punch that, you know, regular bread does because it's usually really, really low in fiber, the grains that are used in gluten-free bread. So I just need to make a pitch here because I brought up gluten-free. Do gluten-free diet is not a healthy diet unless you really are allergic or sensitive to gluten. And one of the reasons for that is it's really, really low in fiber. And when we did this work with the culinary medicine textbook, fiber is an essential, essential element for both feeding ourselves and the trillions of little bugs in our intestines that really promote health, the microbiome. That was the other thing that came outta this culinary medicine project. And that's the new frontier. We know very little, we haven't even gotten to the tip of the iceberg and how to, how to benefit our microbiome, but it's, it's feed and they, those little guys feed on, on, on healthy foods like grain bread with a lot of grain in it.