Some Other Additions
But we have not yet baked our bread. The recipe calls for still more chemicals. Even though microorganisms would have a hard time surviving in the stuff, commercial bread dough must have mold and "rope" inhibitors and preservatives to ward off that tell-tale black carpet which means the bread is not exactly oven-fresh. Calcium propionate and sodium propionate are the main ingredients. Other substances have also been used — mainly sodium diacetate, bromates, persulphates, acid calcium phosphate, ammonium chloride, fungal amylases, bacterial proteases, and a few others.
Once all the chemicals have been added, a modern bakery can produce multiple thousands of loaves which will look the same, taste the same, and stay the same!
No one really knows how harmful the chemicals may be. You eat them with the bread. When Dr. Robert S. Harris of the Nutritional Biochemical Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology once fed a certain anti-staling agent (sorbitan mono laurate) to a group of rats, most of them died within ten days. But as yet, the chemicals used in commercial bread have not enjoyed the same infamy as cyclamates or saccharin.
Perhaps more important than the addition of chemicals, however, is the removal of certain NATURAL nutrients in wheat.
Eccentrics?
The shortcomings of bleached white flour have been warned against repeatedly by students of nutrition since the days when Sylvester Graham (originator of Graham flour) denounced the bread sold by certain Boston bakers.
At the time, those outraged merchants made an unsuccessful attempt to keep him quiet. For years persons such as Graham were considered eccentrics who had gotten much too excited over something they couldn't prove. There was "no real scientific basis" for claiming that white flour was nutritionally inferior to whole meal.
But the discovery of vitamins and trace minerals changed things. Two prominent nutritionists had this to say: "The superiority of whole meal over white flour could be demonstrated in a variety of experiments on animals. Moreover it was shown that in man the nutritional disorder beriberi could arise as a direct consequence of a diet in which bread made from white flour predominated.
". . . This demonstrable deficiency of thiamine and other vitamins in low-extraction flour, and the practical knowledge of the diseases that could arise there from . . . convinced most nutritionists between the two world wars of the advantage of high-extraction flour (Human Nutrition and Dietetics, by S. Davidson and R. Passmore, p. 254).
What about "Enrichment"?
In both Britain and the United States, bakers began to "enrich" bread. In the U.S., enrichment of white low-extraction flour began on a voluntary basis in 1941. It was made mandatory for all bakery white breads and rolls from 1943 to 1946. When this war measure was rescinded in October of 1946, more than half the states continued to require enrichment, and some processors and bakers continued to enrich their products on a voluntary basis. It is economically feasible to replace only what are called vitamins B1, B2, B3, and iron. The iron is generally in ferric form, which the body cannot absorb as well as ferrous iron. Recent tests have shown that the body absorbs greater amounts of iron from whole wheat flour than from enriched flour containing a like amount of iron.
The term enrichment is unfortunate.
In fact, it is almost humorous to call such bread enriched, when milling removes 40% of the chromium, 50% of the pantothenic acid, 30% of the choline, 86% of the manganese, 16% of the selenium, 78% of the zinc, 76% of the iron, 89% of the cobalt, 60% of the calcium, 78% of the sodium, 77% of the potassium, 85% of the magnesium, 71% of the phosphorus, 77% of the vitamin B1, 67% of the folic acid, most of the vitamin A, 80% of the vitamin B2, 81% of the vitamin B3, 72% of the vitamin B6, most of the vitamin D and 86% of the vitamin E.
How important are these elements? Read the following and judge for yourself.
What Deficient Flour Means to You
Heart attack and diabetes victims are generally deficient in the chemical element chromium. When experimental animals are deprived of this element the inner walls of their blood vessels become thick with fatty deposits much like those which clog the arteries and cause heart attacks in humans.
Chickens and other experimental animals deprived of manganese grow improperly and become sterile.
Rats and chickens deprived of selenium undergo liver deterioration.
Zinc speeds the healing of wounds. And a severe deficiency of zinc has been known to produce dwarfs.
Cobalt is vital to the maturing of the red blood cells which carry the iron, which in turn carries the life-bearing oxygen in every warm-blooded animal and man.
Calcium is essential in bone and tooth formation. Without sufficient sodium the body cells will either dry up or swell to the bursting point.
Magnesium activates exchanges of energy within cells.
Phosphorus mediates all the energy exchanges throughout the body, enabling us to move and think.
Normal manufacture of DNA and RNA, the chemicals which pass along the genetic code from one generation to the next, depends a great deal on an adequate supply of vitamin B1, vitamin B12 and folic acid. Steroid hormones cannot be produced in the human body without pantothenic acid, nor can sound cell walls be built without choline. Vitamin A is essential in the maintenance of good vision and unblemished skin.
Vitamin B2 is important in the maintenance of mucous membranes of the eyes, mouth, and tongue. Vitamin B3 is an important safeguard against pellagra. Vitamin Be is an important element in the metabolism of the amino acids from which are built the proteins that make up most of the body. Vitamin D is an important mediary in utilizing calcium to strengthen the bones. Vitamin E is important in retaining the structural integrity of cell membranes.
All these are vital elements found in wheat; all these vital elements are missing to one degree or another in white flour. All these vital elements are found in the correct ratios and balance in whole wheat.
With this in mind, it is a little disgusting to hear the disciples of enrichment refer to white bread as a "modest miracle." Doesn't it seem a little odd to take most of the original organic food value away, put a few chemical substitutes back in, and joyfully call the result miraculous?
Dr. W.H. Sebrell of the U.S. Public Health Service was strong in his remark during the forties when the original controversy was on. "To me it does seem a little ridiculous," he said, "to take a natural foodstuff in which the vitamins and minerals have been placed by nature, submit this foodstuff to a refining process which removes them and then add them back to the refined product at an increased cost. If this is the object, why not follow the cheaper, more sensible, and nutritionally more desirable procedure of simply using the unrefined, or at most, slightly refined natural food?"
The Finished Product
White bread may look nice. It smells all right. It is very handily sliced into convenient uniform sections. It also bounces if you wad it up into a little ball.
Nutritionally, it is more or less worthless.
So far, it has not been controversially linked to cancer, although some of the nutrients removed from it help the body fight this disease. It won't kill you instantly — your death may be long and lingering.
President Nixon's French-born nutrition advisor, Dr. Jean Mayer, says America's white bleached dough products would not even be called bread in his native land. Its food value is negative. White flour is preferred by food industry executives because it keeps on the shelf longer than the more nutritious whole wheat bread and because insects avoid it — it doesn't have enough food value to keep them alive.
Our Way of Devitalization
Wheat is not the only devitalized food on the market.
Rice is polished, refined and denutriented. So are nearly all the major grains — and then "enriched" with a few chemicals. Sugar is refined and is so "pure" that it will not support life.
According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, most Americans eat upwards of 100 pounds of the "white death" per year! Sugar is everywhere: soft drinks, ice cream, baby food, canned fruit. Brown and raw sugars contain a few trace elements, but still have been refined. Most experts, realizing the dangers of normal sugar consumption, advise the use of unrefined honey or unrefined molasses as a sweetener whenever possible.
Nearly all convenience foods — such as the popular instant frozen dinners — are preserved in a great deal of potentially harmful chemicals. Read the labels and find out! Highly processed foods, when compared to natural products, have far less nutritional value.
Needed: A Change of System
The industrial societies have built for themselves an environment that will not ALLOW them to live a healthy life. To add to the gargantuan problems of overcrowding and overpopulation, over-urbanization, pollution, drugs, crime, etc., etc. — men have knowingly added the further problem of "food pollution."
Because the basic tenets of this society involve profit-making at a large volume, food production has been made to conform to industry — rather than industry conforming to the quality of food people should be eating.
Yet, eating nutritious food in the right amounts and of the right kind and of the best quality, is one of the basic laws of radiant health. Once we break that law on a national and international basis, we will have to pay the penalty.
In a world busy leaping on the ecology bandwagon, it is easy to forget that environmental pollutions are no more dangerous than the changes in the composition of the food we eat — changes which, like environmental pollution, have come as a result of advancing technology coupled with an economic philosophy encouraging growth at all costs.
If we are to maintain the technology and the economy which allow the sought-after "good life" — and maintain it without increasingly sick and debilitated bodies — something will have to change. We must upgrade the quality of food, rejecting today's chemical-laden, foodless, "empty-calorie" foods, or we will continue inexorably on the same path of degeneration.
Individually, it is a relatively simple matter to avoid refined sugar. And by taking a little time and expending a little effort, people can substitute whole grain products for devitalized ones. They are available — but not popular. It takes a while to establish a pattern of avoiding over-preserved and processed instant meals, but the results are well worth it.
There is a lot the individual can do if he tries. How much is good health worth?