Healthy Food: How can I tell the difference about starch?

How can I tell the difference?

Picking out foods in the store that are whole grain can be confusing. You cannot tell by the color of the food. Some manufacturers add coloring to make pasta look brown for example. Reading the ingredient list is the easiest way to tell if a food is made from whole grains. Look for the first ingredient to be whole wheat flour, brown rice, rye flour, barley, or oats.

When you start reading ingredient lists, you will notice another term on most bread products made in the United States. It is enriched wheat flour. This is not the same thing as whole grain. In the United States, we enrich -- or add some vitamins and one mineral back into refined grains. For example, if a whole grain of wheat is ground into flour, you retain the vitamins, minerals, and fiber from all three parts of the grain. But when the germ and bran are removed before making it into flour (refined flour), your food will contain only the starchy part of the grain. So, wheat flour in the United States adds back a few of the nutrients that are removed. You lose about 11 vitamins and minerals, and five are added back. The nutrients added back are iron, and four of the B vitamins -- Niacin, Riboflavin, Thiamin, and folic acid.

Enriched wheat flour is a refined grain. You also see enriched wheat flour listed as all-purpose flour, cake flour, bleached flour, and bread flour. You find it in breads as well as baked products like cake, cookies, muffins, and snack bars. Other refined grains are white rice and white pasta.

Often, products that used enriched wheat flour and have added sugar and fat are called processed foods. A good rule of thumb, especially for grains is that the further away a food is from its natural state, the less nutritious. For example brown rice contains more nutrients than a cookie.