Exploring the role of cereal dietary fiber in digestion

Increasing the dietary fibre of staple foods such as bread is an attractive way to promote healthy eating in a large part of the population, where dietary fibre consumption is reportedly below the recommended values. However, many consumers prefer white breads, which are typically low in dietary fibre. In this work, white bread was made from two wheat cultivars with differing fibre contents. The resulting breads showed similar quality parameters (volume, specific volume, firmness, inner structure characteristics) with any differences maintained below 7%. Bread digestibility was evaluated using a novel dynamic in-vitro digestion model. Reduced digestion rates of 30% were estimated for the high-fibre white bread compared to the control. Overall, this work demonstrates the potential to produce healthy, high-fibre white breads, acceptable to consumers, and with reduced rate of starch digestion by exploiting genetic variation in dietary fibre content of wheat cultivars.