Bread is a product with a wide presence in our diet. However, it is a food that goes bad very easily. How many times have you found mold on your sliced bread? Surely you have had this unpleasant surprise on many occasions.
A solution that many adopt is to remove the moldy parts with a knife, or throw away the affected slice, but consume another from the same package. Even if you do it with the good intention of saving money and not falling into food waste, the truth is that by eating moldy bread you are putting your health at risk.
Dr. Karan Raj, from the National Health Service in England, has explained on his TikTok social network profile why you should not risk consuming moldy bread, even if you remove it from the affected parts. “You should know that there is no clean part in moldy bread,” he warns.
He comments that the “hairy” things we see on the surface of the slice are just the “crown jewels” of the mold. “The reproductive organs called sporangia release thousands of spores that will spread everywhere,” the doctor illustrates.
“If you see them, you are definitely not seeing the hidden roots called haifi,” he warns. So he is blunt about what we should do: throw away the slice in question and also the loaf or the entire package. Furthermore, he insists that there is no point in toasting it in the hope that it will solve it, as the heat will not destroy the mycotoxins that contaminate the bread.
He adds that there are different types of mold, so we cannot compare the mold of antibiotics and others such as that of blue cheese, with the mold that affects bread. Specifically, it is Rhizopus stolonifer, which is commonly found in foods such as bread. “It's almost impossible to tell whether a mold is harmless or not just by looking at it, because some can produce very nasty mycotoxins that can be lethal,” he concludes.
