Poison in Bleached Flour

https://www.seleneriverpress.com/historical-archives/all-archive-articles/119-white-flour-poisons-let-this-be-a-lesson-to-us

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: Dr. Royal Lee was one of the original fighters against the bleaching and refining of flour products. He considered it a national crime, and spoke out about it tirelessly from the early 1920s through the end of his life. In this article, aimed at homemakers, Dr. Lee gives a brief history of the practice of flour bleaching as well as the noble efforts to stop it. He also highlights the discovery by scientists that the chemicals involved in flour bleaching were deadly. "It seems that English investigators have found that the bleaching chemical universally used in this country for many years has been found poisonous enough to kill dogs in a few weeks if they receive the bleached flour, or bread made from it." 1947.

[The following is a transcription of the original Archives document. To view or download the original document, click here.]

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/03/26/The-Little-Known-Secrets-about-Bleached-Flour.aspxby Dr. Mercola

Nearly everyone knows that white flour is not healthy for you, but most people don’t know that when white flour is bleached, it can actually be FAR worse for you.

It’s generally understood that refining food destroys nutrients. With the most nutritious part of the grain removed, white flour essentially becomes a form of sugar. Consider what gets lost in the refining process:

• Half of the beneficial unsaturated fatty acids
• Virtually all of the vitamin E
• Fifty percent of the calcium
• Seventy percent of the phosphorus
• Eighty percent of the iron
• Ninety eight percent of the magnesium
• Fifty to 80 percent of the B vitamins

And many more nutrients are destroyed -- simply too many to list.

The Journey of the Wheat Berry

Have you ever wondered how white flour is made?

The website Healthy Eating Politics has an interesting article about the process.

Most commercial wheat production is, unfortunately, a “study in pesticide application,” beginning with the seeds being treated with fungicide. Once they become wheat, they are sprayed with hormones and pesticides. Even the bins in which the harvested wheat is stored have been coated with insecticides. If bugs appear on the wheat in storage, they fumigate the grain.

A whole grain of wheat, sometimes called a wheat berry, is composed of three layers:

• The bran
• The germ
• The endosperm

The bran is the layer where you’ll find most of the fiber, and it’s the hard outer shell of the kernel. The germ is the nutrient-rich embryo that will sprout into a new wheat plant. The endosperm is the largest part of the grain (83 percent), making up most of the kernel, and it’s mostly starch.

White flour is made from the endosperm only, whereas whole-wheat flour combines all three parts of the wheat berry.

Old time mills ground flour slowly, but today’s mills are designed for mass-production, using high-temperature, high-speed steel rollers. The resulting white flour is nearly all starch, and even much of today’s commercially processed whole wheat flour has lost a fair amount of nutritional value due to these aggressive processing methods.

White flour contains a small fraction of the nutrients of the original grain, with the heat of the steel rollers having destroyed what little nutrients remain. But then it is hit with another chemical insult--a chlorine gas bath (chlorine oxide). This serves as a whitener, as well as an “aging” agent.

Flour used to be aged with time, improving the gluten and thus improving the baking quality. Now, it is treated  with chlorine  to instantly produce similar qualities in the flour (with a disturbing lack of concern about adding another dose of chemicals to your food).