In the 1920s, a business leader named Elmer Cline invented a shocking new bread for the market. It felt like cotton candy, was white as milk, weighed an unheard of 1.5 pounds. He marketed his “slo-baked wonder bread” to massive appeal. His food became a symbol of scores of ideas: the cheery 1950s, industrialism, cheapness and unhealthiness. For much of the time since, white bread has dominated the market. But recently, questions of health have threatened sales.

White flour, the central component of white bread, uses only the starchy “endosperm” from a wheat germ. It lacks thirty nutrients that can be found in whole grains, including fiber, which helps the eater feel full. White bread causes an insulin spike on par with sugar. It’s a major contributor to the obesity epidemic. A 2004 Reuters study found that white bread was “the food most strongly related to obesity incidence.”

Even for athletes, who are sometimes required to eat less healthy food to get extra energy for sports, white bread is detrimental. The quick digestion rate means that the energy from white bread all comes in a single rush rather than gradually. Soccer player James Hargens tends to eat whole wheat bread during training, though he admits, “I don’t really know [why] it’s just healthier.”

Not everyone, however, opposes white bread. Writer Aaron Bobrow-Strain, in his oddly specific White Bread: A Social History of the Storebought Loaf, wrote that some of the backlash against white bread comes from its connection with “lower-class” eating. “Industrial white bread called up a lack of pretension- unfussy and authentically American- but also irresponsibility and shame.”

We’ve known about the adverse effects of white bread for a long time. But, for whatever reason, unlike other unhealthy foods, the tradition of white bread seems to be just recently fading away. Though white bread was a childhood staple in the 1950s, in 2009, whole wheat bread outsold white bread in the United States for the first time ever.

The switch may not be easy. Most bread isn’t labeled as simply as “white” or “whole wheat”; there’s several other confusing options. “Enriched wheat” bread is simply white bread that has had some (but not all) of the minerals added back to it. “White whole wheat bread” is a type of whole wheat bread made with white instead of red flour, which are nutritionally the same. And don’t trust the color of the bread: much white bread has caramel coloring added to it to make it look whole wheat. Reading the packaging is more important

There are even healthier ways to eat than whole wheat bread. Katie Haarala, a nutritionist with St. Paul’s Nutritional Health and Wellness, recommends you “get your carbohydrates from foods like sweet potatoes, vegetables, and true whole grains such as [brown] rice and quinoa.” It might not be feasible for everyone to eat that healthy, but there’s always options. And those options include staying away from white bread.