Real Bread, Real Healing: How Grinding My Own Wheat Saved My Gut and Deepened My Faith

I might be one of the few people in this country who will say this out loud: bread healed my gut.

But not the kind you’ll find on grocery store shelves. I make my own—and I don’t just mean tossing some white flour in a bowl and calling it homemade. I grind my own wheat berries and bake bread from scratch, the way it was meant to be made. It tastes better, makes me feel better, and it’s packed with way more nutrients than anything you’ll ever pick up in the bread aisle.

And here’s the hard truth about that bread aisle: most of it is fake.

Still skeptical?

Take a walk through your local store and try to find a loaf that doesn’t contain preservatives, added coloring, or synthetic vitamins. I’ll save you some time—you won’t find one. Not unless you make it yourself.

The reason bread made from freshly ground wheat is so much better for you comes down to the anatomy of the wheat berry (yes, we’re going there—stick with me!).

Wheat has three parts, kind of like an egg:

• The germ, like the yolk, is full of nutrients.

• The bran, like the shell, is where all the fiber lives.

• The endosperm, like the white, is mostly starch.

When flour is processed commercially, the bran and germ are stripped away—literally fed to livestock—while the starchy endosperm is bleached, preserved, and sold to us.

Why? Because once the germ is exposed to oxygen, it starts to go rancid within a few days. So instead of dealing with fresh flour, companies remove the good stuff and “enrich” the flour with synthetic vitamins to make up for what they took out.

Learning all this only deepened my appreciation for the true Bread of Life—Jesus.

In John 6:35, Jesus says, “I am the bread of life.”

And in Matthew 4:4, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

Today, we might hear that and think, “Well, yeah, you can’t live on bread—it’s just carbs!” But back then, bread was the foundation of survival. It was real food—nutrient-dense, sustaining, complete. So when Jesus said man cannot live on even that bread alone, it was profound. It’s like saying, “You can’t live on food alone—you need the Word of God.”

How powerful is that?

Maybe it’s time we return to the way God originally designed food—nourishing, whole, and full of life. God created food to heal. It’s about time we started trusting that He knew exactly what He was doing.

Check out our recent episode on the Crunchy Stewardship Podcast where we dive deeper into food & nutrition. I believe that what we nourish out bodies with can truly be an act of worship!