Charcoal buns - what the?

Last week I was chatting to a chef about the menu in his new café. Amongst other things - like serving an egg in a jar with a bunch of other stuff - he mentioned he was serving burgers on charcoal buns. A few days later at another well-known healthy café I saw the charcoal buns he was referring to. They were just like any other soft round bun only black. Hardly appetising to look at so what is the deal about charcoal buns?

Before I leapt to any conclusion, I called nutritional scientist Dr Joanna to ask her what she thought about the charcoal bun. With two young kids and a very busy working life, the charcoal bun fad had not yet reached her radar but we were very quickly laughing at the absurdity of it all particularly at the mention of the once vegetarian café now offering Paleo burgers on charcoal buns with sweet potato chips! Business is business right?

Let's look at the science on the function of charcoal medicinally because there are some uses for it, particularly in an emergency situation when you've just ingested poison or overdosed on drugs. Charcoal, or should I say activated charcoal, works by trapping chemicals and preventing their absorption into the bloodstream. To make activated charcoal, manufacturers heat charcoal in the presence of a gas to produce a porous charcoal with spaces which help to "trap" or adsorb these toxic chemicals and transport them out of the body. It's useful in an emergency situation but, as Dr Joanna pointed out, it may also "trap" valuable minerals and get rid of them as well.
Further Google searches suggest activated charcoal may help to reduce cholesterol, decrease flatulence, and prevent hangovers but so far none of the research studies agree about how effective it really is and in each case suggest more research is required.

With my marketing hat on, I get the angle: Detoxing is big business and we like bread, so if we add an ingredient which makes a huge visual impact to something quite ordinary and allude to its detoxifying properties we'll have a big hit on our hands. A bread roll which helps us detox, may even fool the Paleo devotees who'll be so excited about the charcoal they might forget that they've sworn off grains.

Frankly I think decoy is a better word than detox. The black colour is distracting us from the more important fact that the buns are soft, burger buns. They're not wholegrain, seeded or sourdough, bread we know to have nutritional benefits, and I suspect, given that the charcoal may interfere with the natural leavening agents used in a true sourdough starter, the buns never will be.

As Dr Jo so rightly pointed out, the body has natural systems in place to get rid of unwanted chemicals, natural or otherwise in the gut. It's why 70% of our immune system is located in the gut, and anything that does make it through is tackled by the liver. So let's leave detoxing to nature and focus on eating a healthy natural diet.

I'm not suggesting these buns are especially bad for you, I just doubt that they're especially good for you.

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