It is generally accepted that whole grains (brown rice, oatmeal, whole-wheat bread) are good for you and for your diet. They contain more natural fiber, so they digest slower, keeping blood sugar levels steady, which helps you burn more fat throughout the day.

That kind of fiber has been shown to help keep your arteries clean and your gastrointestinal tract running smoothly. As a result, many brands of bread, cereal and crackers have, in an effort to promote their health benefits, redesigned labels that indicate they include whole grains.

This has clearly put those products that don’t contain whole grains at a disadvantage, so, feeling the market pressure, many similar products have taken to calling themselves multigrain. But multigrain doesn’t mean the same thing as whole grain. Beware of the following the next time you’re shopping for whole-grain products.

Damaged Goods When a product says it’s multigrain, it doesn’t mean that all of the grains are whole – it just means that it contains more than one kind of grain. In fact, those grains (wheat, rice, oats, corn) can be ground up and processed as much as the wheat is in white bread.

Eat a slice of that bread at the wrong time, and you could be endangering your lean look by incurring inappropriate insulin surges and depriving your body of much-needed fiber.

Wheat Watch One way to ensure you’re eating whole-grain bread is to look for some variation of “whole wheat” on the front. But it may not be as easy as that. Breads that are advertised as multigrain may be whole grain, too. To know for sure, as always, look the ingredient list.

If the words “enriched wheat flour” (bleached or unbleached) appear as the first ingredient, you are not holding whole-grain bread. And, any grain that no longer contains its bran is no longer whole. So, if you’re in the market for whole-grain bread, be sure the one you buy has the words “whole-grain wheat” listed as the first ingredient. [via]