Bleached Flour Gives Dogs Fits, But it’s Still Sold to Consumers

Co-Author of “Tomorrow’s Food”

Most of the white flour sold in this country is bleached, or “improved” by the agene process which whitens it, keeps it from spoiling–and makes it unfit for dogs to eat, because it gives them fits.

The milling and baking industry has known this for six months; ever since Dec. 14, 1946 when Sir Edward Mellanby, secretary of the British Medical Research Council published the findings of his experiments in the British Medical Journal.

Since then, at least one of the large milling companies has ordered that no more of its agene-bleached flour be sold for the manufacture of dog feeds.

But this and all the other milling companies go right on using the process to bleach or “improve” flour for human consumption–and praying that the murder will not out, through publication of the facts.

Maybe it’s not murder, of course. Dogs aren’t human beings. Maybe the nitrogen trichloride deposited in the “agenized” flour is too small in amount to give human beings fits, or damage human health much, that is, although since the chemical is definitely toxic it would seem highly improbable that it causes no damage whatever.

As Sir Edward pointed out in his report, “It is clear that investigations must now be made to see whether human beings are affected by bread made from flour improved by NCL3.”

It would seem equally clear that until, as and if agenized flour and bread made from agenized flour are proved wholly harmless to human beings, the process should be discontinued and existing stocks destroyed or withheld from the market.

It is in fact reported that some of the bakers feel that this should be done, although not a word about the whole business has appeared in the trade publications of the industry.

Millers Refuse

But the millers are standing pat. “Prove that agenized flour gives human beings fits,” they say in effect. “Bring us the corpus delicti. Give us one man, woman, or child caught in the act of rolling on the floor and chewing the rug as a provable consequence of eating agenized flour or bread. Until you can do this, we intend to give ourselves, our convenience, our capital investment in the process, and our profits the benefit of the doubt. The consumer should worry.”

As he should, of course. And maybe the millers and bakers worry a little, too. Because quite possibly the research nutritionists who are now conducting experiments with flour and bread, bleached or “improved” by the agene and other processes will give them the proof they are asking for.

Elvejhems’ group at Wisconsin had no difficulty at all in repeating the Mellanby experiments and their findings were the same. In fact, the Wisconsin investigators were able to give one dog fits in a week. And the brain waves of the hysterical agene-poisoned canine were very like those found in human epilepsy.

Well, it’s a crazy world, whether or not agenized flour has contributed to the alarming increase of mental disease in recent years, as one eminent nutritionist firmly believes.

Crackpot?

He’s just a crackpot, the millers and bakers will tell you, he and the substantial number of colleagues who share this suspicion. I’m a crackpot, too, and so is my collaborator, Dr. N. Phillip Norman, consultant nutritionist for the Departments of Health and Hospitals of the city of New York. Harvey W. Wiley was a crackpot forty years ago when he tried to ban bleached flour, so determinedly that the millers and other food processors ganged up on him, forced him out of his job, and, brought about in effect the abrogation of a Supreme Court decision which said that the consumer, not the milling and baking industry should be given the benefit of the doubt in this matter of flour bleaches and “improvers.”

 (That is a separate and very interesting story to which I shall return in a later article.)

Why No Publicity?

A crazy world indeed, and with a certain rather disturbing quasi-totalitarian method in its madness. Why didn’t the Journal of the American Medical Association reprint Mellanby’s article, which certainly ranks as one of the most important health reports in recent years? Why were not his findings cabled immediately by every press bureau in London? Why have not the Mellanby and subsequent confirming experiments been fully reported and discussed in the official press of the nutritionists, dieticians, and home economists, not to mention the trade press of the milling and baking industries? Why did not the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council make public recommendations? Why did not the Food and Drug Administration use its emergency powers to confiscate existing stocks of agenized flour?