Bread Essential To Daily Diet

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31116, 20 July 1966, Page 2

Bread Essential To Daily Diet

Even for those who must watch their weight, bread is still a valuable and important part of their daily diet, and it does not matter if it is white or brown, according to Professor R. A. Morton. “The policy of enriching or fortifying food represents an insurance against a possible dietary inadequacy and the aim is to protect the vulnerable minority. Following the recommendation of the Cohen Panel on flour, 14 ounces of precipitative chalk are added to every 2801 b of flour, and also powdered iron, pure synthetic vitamin 81, and niacin. The public thus gets the white bread it wants with its ‘defects’ corrected. “Soon after the Second World War, Professor R. A. McCance and Dr. Elsie Widdowson seized an opportunity

to make comparisons of white bread and wholemeal bread on children in orphanages in occupied Germany. At the outset all the children were under-nourished and below normal in weight. They all did well. Most nutrition experts would have expected 70 per cent extraction white flour to give the least satisfactory bread. In fact, all the breads, white, enriched and wholemeal, proved to be very nutritious. These experiments proved beyond doubt that white bread is an extremely good food, especially as part of a mixed diet. “For those of us in more affluent countries who need to eat cautiously but nutritiously, it is far wiser to cut down our bread intake than to cut it out altogether from our diet.”