Nowadays, there are so many varieties of bread on sale that it makes your head spin. There’s brown bread, white bread, bread with different seeds, bread with flax, bread with fruit, and bread with vegetables. It has even reached the point where, here in England, I have discovered black bread with orange and chocolate! Yes — bread, not a bun or a pastry.

In short, the choice is enormous. So how do you make sense of all this abundance? And you really should, because if the packaging of a baguette proudly claims in huge letters that it contains healthy pumpkin seeds and flax, it doesn’t mean you should rush to buy it without reading the ingredients.

How many times have I mentally congratulated myself for not being too lazy to read the label of a loaf that initially caught my eye. Time and again, the flour turned out not to be wholemeal but soft white flour; yeast was used instead of sourdough; and in some seemingly decent-looking loaves I once even found palm oil — can you imagine?

To be honest, I never thought any manufacturer could stoop to such an outrage. Everyone knows that dreadful, cheap palm oil is the bane of most sweet pastries, as well as many sweets and candies. But why put it in bread, one wonders? Of course, it’s all for the sake of cost reduction — but surely not to this extent!

It is very important to understand that healthy bread is high-quality baked goods made with natural sourdough, not artificially leavened with commercial yeast. The second key point is the flour: it should be wholemeal, not stripped of its natural nutrients and fibre. And, of course, any decent bakery product should have a clean ingredient list, without even a hint of palm oil.

By the way, yeast-based bread is easy to recognise by its excessive fluffiness. When you pick it up, you get the persistent feeling that you are holding a huge piece of damp cotton wool — so soft and unattractive, just like an oversized dishwashing sponge.

Dear friends, my strong recommendation is to give up fluffy yeast bread and switch to healthy wholemeal sourdough bread. Yes, it is more expensive. And if you don’t yet have the opportunity to bake it yourself, then buy it — and only it — without hesitation. It is definitely worth it!