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Wheat Quality Key To Nutritious Bread
Published in Herald of Health, May 1963.
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We all have noticed the fact that the smallest meal we prepare at home tastes better than anything we can get in a restaurant.
Why? What is the “priceless ingredient” that we put into it at home? Simply that we refuse to compromise with quality when we are preparing food for ourselves.
For cooking fat, do we use stale rancid grease or good butter? Rancid grease is a potent liver poison, known to be carcinogenic. Certainly it destroys flavor of otherwise good food.
Have you heard of the experiment made at the University of Minnesota a few years ago where 28 head of cattle were fed for one year with only ONE vitamin removed that we normally get in freshly ground whole wheat flour? Thirteen of the animals dropped dead from heart failure with no premonitory symptoms.
The vitamin in question is lost by oxidation from fresh flour at the rate of ten per cent a day. It is destroyed by flour bleach. So you see, if you want to feed your family on honest, health-building bread, there is only one way to ensure that result. Grind your own wheat in a household electric mill, and bake your own bread, pastry, pancakes and devil’s food cake.
When you bake such a pancake or bread, offer a piece to your dog in one hand and the finest hamburger in the other and see which he eats first. It will always be the bread or pancake. Why? Simply because he knows which is best. Even a mink thrives on such food, while he gets stomach ulcers quickly on anything rancid, and cannot tolerate the slightest amount of common cereal animal foods.
But you still must obtain wheat from a high-protein source, not grown on worn out soil. Remember Dr. Albrecht tells us the protein content of grain is an index to the soil quality. (The national average of protein has been droppíng almost ½ per cent a year, while 20 per cent protein in wheat was once common.)
Much wheat that has passed through public elevators has been fumigated and will cause gastric irritation. This is, of course, true of any commercial cereal product. The best suppliers of health food quality wheat avoid this hazard by picking up the wheat at the growers’ farm in their own tank trailers and use carbon dioxide gas to smother any bug that may try to stow away in the load, instead of using such poison fumigants as methyl bromide. Such are the problems that must be solved to get good nutrition for you and your family. The real reward is the flavor with more years to your life, as well as more life to your years.
The small neighborhood mill gave our grandmothers that kind of flour. Centralized milling can never do it. We are sure that is why heart disease is our leading cause of death, and practically non-existent in countries like China where centralized milling is unknown.