VALUE OF WHEATMEAL BREAD.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2230, 25 January 1921, Page 4

VALUE OF WHEATMEAL BREAD.

STATEMENT BY THE 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 been discarded, than pigs and poultry, to which these rich and nutritive byproducts 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-pro-ducts." THE 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 Hour and white bread upon children and adults were carefully studied in contrast with the effects of whole meal or whole wheat bread.

“Our experiments have been extended to work in rclatoin to tbc stripping of the outer case from the wheat grain so as to produce a white bread instead of brown, and we find that 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 dirt."

Benjamin Moore, chief of the bio - chemical department of the Liverpool School ot Tropical Medicine, says: — “A*!! the recent work done in the biochemical laboratories of the Liverpool School or. 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 are 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 lo up active disease. \YIIfT.E BREAD A COMMON CAUSE OF DISEASE.

“Certain of the diseases ol malnutrition among children, notably rickets, seurvey-riekets, tetany and convulsions, present symptoms very similar lo 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 much less stable iluai 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, and which man, in his ignorance, discards."