WHOLEMEAL BREAD

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 143, 20 June 1925, Page 16

WHOLEMEAL BREAD

A NECESSITY AS'HUMAN FOOD,

Wholemeal bread is necessary for the physical wellbeing of, the race, writes W. A. G. F. Stokes, in the "Spectator." The so-called wholemeal bread at present sold by the bakers is not germ bread at all, but white bread made with devitalised flour, to which has been added a certain amount of "offal" or.bran,.almost worthless as food and withal indigestible. , The true wholemeal or germ bread" which was the staple food of England seventy or eighty years ago, can only be made from Hour from which the vitamines have not been extracted by overmilling. This flour, so vital to the stamina, of our race, the elaborate roller mills of this country are unable to produce. Only, the old-fashioned stones of the oldfashioned mills, most of which have been dismantled, could produce it. The majority of us at some time or other have held a few - grains of, ripe wheat in the palms of our hands, and noticed that they are covered .with a golden-coloured skin, with a hard and somewhat: shiny surface.- If one of these grains be cut in half with a sharp knife wo pso that the interior consists of a dead white substance, which bears much tho some proportion in bulk to the skin that encloses it as' does the contents of an egg to its shell. Now, tliis dead white interior is little more than starch, and comparatively worthless as a food, whereas the skin contains almost all the blood and boneproducing vitamines of the wheat. As corn is at present milled in England this skin is entirely .eliminated. Consequently, when eating white bread we are simply eating starch; and when eating tho so-called wholemeal bread, as at present supplied, starch plus a little meal or bran, fibrous, indigestible stuff which the bakers mix with the white flour to discolour it, so that tho public may be led to believe that they are eating the oldfashioned stone-milled vitalising germ bread of our fathers, tho true staff of life. Such a condition of things in the production of tho most vital item in the food o£ the nation must surely be of the utmost importance to all. It calls for immediate It is an Imperial : matter. This is no exaggeration, no scaremongering.;