VALUE OF WHEATMEAL BREAD

Evening Post, Volume CI, Issue 19, 22 January 1921, Page 9

VALUE OF WHEATMEAL BREAD

STATEMENT BY THE BRITISH

GOVERNMENT

(Published under th© 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 broad 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 by-products of milling havo been given in the past: The country has gained enormously in food and energy from the compulsory inclusion in tho loaf of these rejected by-products."

THE OPINIONS OF PHYSIOLOGISTS.

Dr. E..8. Eddie and Dr. G. C. Simpson,' members of the research' staff of tho School of Tropical Medicine, University of Liverpool, have carried on investigation in whioh the effects of refined flour and white bread upon children' and adults were carefully studied in contrast with the effecte of whole meal or whole wheat bread. . '

"Our experiments have been extended to work in relation to the stripping of tho outer case from tho 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 acidoßis or peripheral neuritis. This dieease.does not occur in those Y»ho use whole wheat ac a diet." .

Benjamin Moore, 1 Chief of tho Bioochemical Department of tho, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, s^ys: — "All the recent work done, in the biochemical laboratories of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine proves be-. yond question that in all cereals, such as wheat, barley, .oate, and rice, there are series of important substances incorporated in the inner layer of the husk which aro 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, tctany, and _ convulsions, present symptoms very similar to thosb 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 than in-the days prior to a white bread diet. All our work suggests that the growing tendency of the ago 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 whioh man, in his ignorance, discards."