Two Guys Lose Weight: When it comes to calories, bread is not just bread

One thing I learned this weekend in my effort to eat right was that I needed the right foods in my house -- including bread -- so on Day 2 of my eat-right campaign, I went to the grocery store.

My cart had never seen so many vegetables, grains and water -- or such a profound lack of chocolate, sugar and fruit.

It was pretty easy getting the romaine lettuce, reduced-fat Wheat Thins and Diet Dr. Pepper, but I learned a little something about bread that I never knew before.

Usually, I would buy whatever bread was on sale. I learned in college to learn to love the seven-grain bread -- the rest of the day, it was guaranteed I’d be getting no vitamins or nutrients, so I may as well get them in my sandwich. Thus, the $2.50 loaf of seven-grain wheat bread was usually an easy choice.

But in checking the labels of three different loaves of wheat bread that billed themselves as healthful, I saw three radically different caloric options. Unlike labels on which it’s hard to decipher the number of calories per serving, bread is often marked by the slice.

Sara Lee had a delicious-looking loaf of 100% wheat bread marked “0g Trans Fat, Good source of Fiber, 100% Natural.� It was dark brown with some flakes of ... oats? ... on top of it. And it even said “with Honey� on the front. The nutrition label revealed that each slice contained 120 calories.

Oroweat had a 10-grain loaf proudly announcing 80 calories per slice right on the front of its label.

But the one I chose was Nature’s Own nine-grain enriched bread -- 40 calories per slice. What was the catch? It felt as soft as Wonder Bread. It declared “3x the fiber of enriched honey wheat bread.�

I took it home, made a sensible sandwich, and it tasted as good as any other store-bought bread I’d had.

For lunch, I had a salad with a bottle of apple juice. The juice, by the way, had more than 200 calories. It hurts to turn my back on my favorite beverage. But a can of Coke is less than that.