BROWN BREAD.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 221, 4 December 1875, Page 19

BROWN BREAD.

(From Herald of Health.) Few people practice the economy of making domestic bread. Servants either do not know, or will not take the trouble. It is so much easier to get it off tlie baker. There is the bother of getting tlie flour and yeast, of raising the bread, and then of baking it. At the best, white bread made of the innermost portion of the wheat is often a cause of disease. Unless one eats considerable portions of fruit and vegetables with it, it produces constipation. The sweetest and most nutritious, the healthiest bread in the world, is that made from unbolted wheat flour—brown bread; not the dry and tasteless stuff sometimes made by bakers by mixing bran with their ordinary dough, but bread made of the “ whole meal" of good sound wheat and containing all its nutritive elements. Chemists have found bv analysis that the nitrogenous or flesh forming portion of wheat resides chiefly in its outer layer—the very portion thrown away or given to cattle; and physiologists have also discovered that it is this portion which keeps up a healthy action of the bowels. No person who lives chiefly or largely on genuine brown bread, or its equivalent, in perhaps a hotter form—porridge made of coarse wheat meal—ever sulfors from constipation, aud long-standing cases are speedily cured by a diet of pure wheat and fruit. I have never known a case, even of years standing, and constant use of aperients, that did not soon yield to such a diet. From the earliest known ages brown wheat bread has been famed as a moat healthy, invigo-

rating food. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, proscribed it; the hardy Spartans lived on it; the Romans of the heroic ages lived on it, and their armies conquered the world on a diet of brown bread. The most healthy peasantry of Central Europe oat it as their common food. Baron Steuben said the peculiar healthfulncss of the Prussian soldiery a century ago was owing to their living almost entirely on unbolted wheat bread. During the naval glory of Holland her sailors ate the the same kind. During the years of Napoleon, when wheat was dear in England, the army, from motives of economy, was supplied with brown bread. The soldiers at lirst, refused to eat it—threw it away—all but mutinied ; but in a few days they liked it better than the white, and their health so much improved that in a few months disease was almost banished. Many of the nobility adopted it, and physicians prescribed it. An Orphan Asylum in New York was cured of epidemic ophthalmia by the use of brown bread in place of white. And this brown bread, with its equivalent prepartions, is the purest, the healthiest, the best form of human food. The model food for childhood and youth—the food of growth, purity, beauty, intellect, in one word, of health, is brown bread, milk, and fruit. There is absolutely no need of any other. A pound of wheat has more nutritious value than three pounds of beef or mutton. Lean beef or mutton is 75 per cent, water to begin with ; the remaining elements—-fibrine, gelatine, albumen—are identically the same as in wheat, but mingled with animal impurities, and the wheat is superior in heat-forming elements. Bread and fruit are the natural food of man ; the liesh of animals is an artificial substitute.