Why Some People Can Eat Real Sourdough When They Can't Eat Bread

The conversation I kept having as a health coach

For years, one of the most common things I heard from the women I worked with was some version of this: 'I gave up bread and felt so much better. But then I had proper sourdough on holiday in France and was completely fine.' It came up so often that I stopped treating it as a coincidence and started treating it as a clue.

The clue turned out to be fermentation. More specifically, the difference between what long fermentation does to bread and what happens when that process is skipped or shortened. The bread most of us grew up eating and the bread that was causing problems is not the same thing as bread that has been properly made.

What makes bread hard to digest in the first place

Wheat contains several components that can challenge the digestive system. Gluten is the most well-known, but it's not the only one. Fructans — a type of fermentable carbohydrate — are present in wheat and are a known trigger for bloating and discomfort in people with irritable bowel syndrome. Modern wheat also contains higher levels of certain proteins than heritage varieties, and commercial bread often includes additives and emulsifiers that add further complexity to what your gut is being asked to process.

Add to this the speed of industrial baking — no fermentation time, no bacterial activity, no pre-digestion of the grain — and you have a product that arrives in your gut almost entirely unprocessed, demanding maximum digestive effort.

What fermentation changes

During a genuine long sourdough fermentation, the lactic acid bacteria in the starter begin breaking down many of the compounds that make conventional bread difficult. Fructans are significantly reduced — research has shown that a 24-hour ferment can reduce fructan content by more than 70 percent. Gluten proteins are partially broken down, changing the structure in ways that make them easier for the gut to handle. The overall acidity of the dough creates an environment that is more favourable to digestion before the bread has even been baked.

This is not a workaround for coeliac disease, which requires complete gluten avoidance and is a serious medical condition. But for the many people who sit in the grey area — who find bread uncomfortable without a clinical diagnosis — the distinction between real sourdough and commercial bread is often the entire explanation.

Why the flour matters too

Digestibility isn't only about fermentation. The grain itself plays a role. Heritage wheat varieties like einkorn have a different gluten structure to modern bread wheat, which many researchers believe contributes to easier digestion. Stoneground flour preserves the bran and germ of the grain, which changes how the body processes it compared to refined white flour.

At The Considered Loaf, every loaf starts with stoneground heritage grain from Bruern Farms and ferments with Ooma, my starter, for a minimum of 24 hours. The women who come back to bread through our loaves, after years of avoiding it, are not imagining the difference. They're experiencing it.