Bread and pasta are the two most common wheat staples in a Western kitchen — but comparing them gram for gram is trickier than it looks, since one is shown baked and the other dry.
| Nutrient | Whole Wheat Bread | Wholewheat Pasta |
|---|---|---|
| Calories | 262 kcal | 362 kcal |
| Protein | 9.8 g | 13.5 g ✓ |
| Total Carbohydrate | 55.9 g | 73.1 g |
| Dietary Fiber | 6.1 g | 10.1 g ✓ |
| Total Sugars | 2.87 g | 2.6 g ✓ |
| Total Fat | 1.71 g | 2.68 g |
| Saturated Fat | 0.21 g ✓ | 0.35 g |
| Sodium | 408 mg | 11 mg ✓ |
Notable compounds in each
When to choose each
These two aren’t quite on the same footing: whole wheat bread is shown here in its finished, baked form, as you’d actually eat it, while whole wheat pasta is shown dry, before cooking. Since pasta roughly doubles or triples in weight as it absorbs water during cooking, the per-100g figures for protein, fibre and calories all look inflated for pasta compared with how it’s actually eaten — a real cooked portion would land much closer to bread’s numbers, or lower. The one comparison that holds up regardless of basis: bread carries dramatically more sodium, almost all of it from salt added during baking, something plain pasta simply doesn’t have until it’s salted in the pot or a sauce.
Common questions
Does whole wheat pasta really beat bread on protein and fibre? Not once you account for cooking. These figures compare dry pasta to baked bread — since pasta absorbs a lot of water as it cooks, a real cooked portion is far less concentrated than the dry weight shown here suggests, closing most of the apparent gap.
Which has more sodium, bread or pasta? Bread, by a wide margin — whole wheat bread carries salt added during baking, around 408mg per 100g here, while plain dry pasta has very little sodium until salt is added to the cooking water or a sauce. This comparison holds up regardless of how the pasta is prepared.
Nutrition values are USDA FoodData Central approximations — see our editorial approach for how we source and verify data.