WHEATMEAL BREAD

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 101, 22 January 1921, Page 8

WHEATMEAL BREAD

ITS VALUE AS A FOOD STATEMENT BY BRITISH GOVERNMENT (Published under the Authority of the Education Department.) The British Government in 1918 published a report based upon work done in the Government Laboratories at Cambridge, Glasgow and London, and various factories and hospitals in which Government .war bread experiments were conducted. “When the whole wheat bread was tried on various sufferers from tuberculosis,” declares the British report, “most of them gained weight. The main fact established is that the human body can make better use of the parts of the wheat grain which have hitherto bedn discarded, than pigs and poultry, to which these rich and nutritive by-pro-ducts of milling have been given in the past. The country has gained enormously in food and energy from the compulsory inclusion in the loaf of these rejected by-products.” Opinions of Physiologists. Dr. E. S. Eddie,and Dr. G. C. Simpson, members of the research staff of the School of Tropical Medicine, University of Liverpool, have carried on investigations in which the effects of refined flour and white bread upon children and adults were carefully studied in contrast with the effects of whole meal or whole wheat bread. “Our experiments hare heen extended to work in relation to the stripping of the outer case from* the wheat’ grain so as to produce a white bread instead of brown, and we find tnsr the exclusive use of white bread as a diet leads to a form of acidosis or peripheral neuritis. This disease does not occur in those who use whole wheat as a diet? Benjamin Moore, chief of the biochemical department of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, says: “All the recent work done in the bio-chemical laboratories of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine .proves beyond question that in all cereals, such as wheat, barley, oats, and rice, there are a series of important, substances incorporated in the inner layer of the husk which aie essential to the nutritive value of the grain. If these elements are eliminated in the milling or preparation of the grain, a diet largely composed of cereals or bread thus denatured will not only fail adequately to nourish the body, 'but will tend to set up active disease. White Bread a Common Cause of Disease. "Certain of the diseases of malnutrition among children, notably rickets, scurvy-rickets, tetany, and convulsions, present symptoms very similar to. those we note in animals fed on white bread. So striking is this similarity that physicians who have followed up our work are already treating certain of their malnutrition patients with a diet of whole wheat bread. '‘Our nerves as a nation are mucii less stable than in the days prior to a white bread diet: All our work suggests that, the growing tendency of the age to neurasthenia, ‘nerves,’ etc., is not unlikely due to removing from our diet those very elements of cereal food which nature has hid in the husk of the grain, which man, in his ignorance, difc. cards.”