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medica! standards - persons who con–
tinue to eat their traditional foods do
not develop the "new'' diseases.
If
they
switch over to refined modern foods,
they become ill from Western diseases.
They begin to experience tooth decay,
stomach ulcers, high blood pressure and
all the other
civi/ized
diseases.
One primary culprit is
diet.
The Offenders
Ten years ago anyone who questioned
the nutritional worth of our "civilized"
diet was flatly labelled a food fanatic.
Yet even then, travellers and traders in
remote areas reported that certain peo–
ples with simple diets were com–
paratively free of "dvilized" diseases
until they started eating "white man's
food," at which time they started get–
ting "white man's diseases." The
si~
ation has changed drastically of late.
It
has become painfully obvious that
our declining state of nutrition is
directly linked to our declining state of
health.
So-caUed foodless foods have borne
the brunt of the strong attack on the
failing state of nutrition during the past
year. Foodless foods of the obvious
types - like candy bars and the much
maligned diet soft drink - are, how–
ever, not wholly
to
be blamed.
The prime offender is the basic food
we eat
EACH
and
EVERY D.AY -
the
food we consider to be healthy and
nutritious! The food we consider
staple.
Today, in the "overkill" discussion
on pollution, everyone seems concerned
with the foreign material we are putting
into
the air we breathe, the water we
drink. Even when food is considered,
the emphasis seems to be on the chem–
icals
inserted into foods.
But what
about the "unfoods" - the natural
foods which have had precious vita–
mins, minerals, and other essential
nutrieots takeo
OUT
of them?
The Wobbly Staff of Life
Take bread, for instance. Bread, we
have been led to believe, is capable of
fantastic feats, from building strong
bodies umpteen ways to effecting mirac–
ulous special-diet weight losses. Bread is
good for making sandwiches and for
spreading butter on.
But is it good to
eat?
The
PLAIN TRUTH
Bread used to be called the staff of
life.
HistoriC_!lily, bread was highly es–
teerned in Egypt, dassical Greece and
Rorne, and in ancient Israel. The wheat
was ground between millstones which
crushed the grain, but did not remove
any part of it. This rather "primitive"
milling process produced flour of a very
high extraction rate. (The extraction
rate is the percentage of the whole grain
actually used for flour after milling. For
example,
85%
extraction rate flour con–
tains 85% of the whole grain - 15%
having been discarded.)
Most people at that time ate whole–
meal bread. A relatively low extraction–
rate white flour was available - but
only for the wealthy. Jt was produced
by sieving the coarse flours through
papyrus, rushes, horsehair,
oc
flax.
Wholemeal bread was symbolic of
the "simple life and the good con–
tryside." Tragically, it was also equated
with downright poverty. Through the
Middle Ages brown flour was relegated
to the lower class. It was the only kind
they could afford.
Things changed with the coming of
the Industrial Revolution. White flour
became much more common, produced
easily by machines which could mechan–
ically separate the different components
of the grain. The
cost
of white flour
was drastically reduced. By the begin–
ning of the 19th century, relatively
high-extraction
WHJTE
flour products
were the acceptable food of the poor,
although sorne "old-fashioned" families
continued to produce their own whole–
grain flour for another century.
Is Refined Flour Improved?
As the Western standard of living
rose, so did a demand for more of what
people considered to be "purity'' in
their food products. The idea of
"purity'' was being foisted off on a gul–
Jible public by mass advertising. This
"purity" invariably consisted of separa–
ting, or isolating, one part of a natural
product from the rest of it. One part
was called "lit for human con–
sumption," the other discarded. As the
standards of "purity" went up, the sep–
aration process became more involved,
and the propoction of discarded parts
becarne greater.
August 1971
The first portion of the wheat grain
to go was the
bran.
Sorne white bread
proponents insist that bran is an irritant
to the digestive system. (A few self–
styled autborities have even prodaimed
.ALL
wheat products to be irritants to the
digestive system, and therefore, unfit for
human consurnption
!)
lronically, bran is often
ADDED
to
breakfast cereals to enhance what is
delicately referred to as "regularity." In
other words, it will prevent constipation
- an affliction caused, to a surprising
degree, by eating white flour products.
Hippocrates knew that white flour
passed through the digestive system
more slowly than whole. He even rec–
ommended it in cases of diarrhea.
Bran contains the fust tbree layers of
the grain. Directly beneath the bran is
the
leJta.
Then there
is
the
alertrone,
rich with protein rnatter, rninerals and
certain useful fatty substances. Another
component of the grain is the
germ,
containing a higb percentage of protein,
natural sugars, a considerable quantity
of wheat oil, and a large arnount of
vitamins and minerals.
These components of the wheat grain
constitute only about 12% of its
weight. But remove them and you also
remove nearly
ALL
the valuable nutri–
ents of the grain. We feed them to tbe
animals and reserve the germ for health
food stores.
No wonder Dr. Emanuel Cheraskin of
Birmingham, Alabama, remarked that
the American horse and other farm ani–
mals have a better general diet than the
American people! The people are stuck
with the rernaining endosperm -
mostly plain starch and poor quality
protein.
The Chemical Bath
Because of its depleted food value,
white flour has a tremendous resistance
to spoilage. lnsects will not touch it -
nor will microbes. They know better.
Too bad people don't. Modero produc–
tion methods demand that flour be kept
on shelves over very long periods of
time, so
someone
had to figure out a
way to keep those tons and tons of
Rouc
from ruining between the
mili
and
the consurner. Modero chemical tech–
nology has provided the answer.
The unmilled grains are generously