The modern society gets more and more concerned about what we are eating, and this is good because we do have plenty of harmful foods in our stores today!
However, sometimes it gets harder to define whether a certain foodstuff is bad or not. For instance, when it comes to banana bread, people often get stumbled since this dessert is often homemade and thus is considered to be safe.
Is that true? Join us to figure it out.
To Eat Or Not to Eat Banana Bread
To begin with, we need to clarify those different kinds of banana bread can affect our health differently. Why is that? Simply because the foodstuff we usually buy in a store is more or less processed and contains additives and artificial components (like preservatives and stabilizers) that help those products last longer on the shelf.
In addition, it is way cheaper to use simple and cheap ingredients for making the mass-market foodstuffs. And as everyone knows, cheap things are often of a low quality.
For this very reason, store-bought banana bread or the one you buy at the coffee shop on the way to work can hardly be called completely healthy food.
Such desserts are way closer to ordinary cakes regarding the content, besides, they use white flour, sugar, and various additives and flavorings to make them tastier and more good-looking, and long-lasting.
That banana bread is not very nutrient or nourishing, besides, it is way easier to overeat because it consists of several different ingredients mixed in the same foodstuff. One slice of commercially produced banana bread has more than sixty grams of carbs (which is equal to four slices of ordinary bread), in addition, it contains from twenty to thirty grams of fat and nearly four teaspoonfuls of sugar! That doesn’t sound much healthy, does it?
So is it only bananas that are good in this dessert?
In fact, not only them.
If we put aside the banana bread that is sold on every corner in Starbucks and other coffee shops and take a closer look at the initial recipe of the foodstuff, we will see that it consists of only the natural ingredients such as ripe bananas, flour, eggs, milk, and sometimes dry fruits and/or nuts (optional).
Moreover, if we substitute sugar with a healthier sweetener, for instance, honey or maple syrup, the dessert will become even more health-beneficial.
Of course, most of us would prefer grabbing a piece of this cake at the nearest store simply because they don’t feel like wasting time on making the dough and baking. Nevertheless, a homemade banana bread that contains only those ingredients that you put into it is a way more preferable option rather than a sugar-filled dessert.
Making your own banana bread at home has one more benefit: it allows adding the ingredients that are healthier than the initial ones. What does it mean?
For instance, instead of refined flour, take a whole wheat one, spelt, or make flour yourself by blending the oat flakes. People with celiac disease can use gluten-free flour as an option.
Sugar can be replaced by honey or maple syrup.
If you are vegan or vegetarian, even eggs can be substituted according to your diet. Fortunately, today it is not a problem, but in this case, consider that the taste might slightly differ from the original one.
You can add nuts or dry fruits and berries making the cake even tastier and healthier.
Fatty butter can also be replaced by a reasonable amount of unrefined oil (for instance, virgin coconut oil that will add its coco flavor to the dessert).
Such a dessert will contain about eleven grams of fat per 100 grams and will be way more difficult to overeat due to the absence of sugar.
Nevertheless, since any bakery contains several ingredients combined in the same foodstuff, this makes it simpler for us to eat more than we need. That is why consider how much sweets you consume even if they are homemade all-healthy treats!