The Little-Known Secrets about Bleached Flour...

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The Little-Known Secrets about Bleached Flour...

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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_

(http://www.healthy-eating-politics.com/white-flour.html) 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_ (http://www.conejobread.com/wheat_kernel.htm) :

* 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).

According to _Jim Bair_ (http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/08/347999.html)

, Vice President of the North American Millers Association:

“Today, the US milling industry produces about 140 million pounds of flour

each day, so there is no way to store the flour to allow it to age naturally.

Plus, there is a shelf life issue.â€

It has not been determined how many mills are bleaching flour with chorine

oxide, but we do know the use of chlorides for bleaching flour is considered

an industry standard.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines _chlorine gas_

(http://proliberty.com/observer/20050718.htm) as a flour-bleaching, aging and

oxidizing

agent that is a powerful irritant, dangerous to inhale, and lethal. Other

agents also used include oxides of nitrogen, nitrosyl, and benzoyl peroxide

mixed with various chemical salts.

The chlorine gas undergoes an oxidizing chemical reaction with some of the

proteins in the flour, producing alloxan as an unintended byproduct. Bair and

other milling industry leaders claim that bleaching and oxidizing agents don’

t leave behind harmful residues in flour, although they can cite no studies

or published data to confirm this.

Why Bleaching Makes White Flour Even Worse

It has been shown that alloxan is a byproduct of the flour bleaching

process, the process they use to make flour look so *clean* and -- well, white.

No,

they are technically not adding alloxan to the flour -- although you will

read this bit of misinformation on the Internet. But, they are doing chemical

treatments to the grain that result in the formation of alloxan in the flour.

With so little food value already in a piece of white bread, now there is

potentially a chemical poison lurking in there as well.

So what is so bad about alloxan?

Alloxan, or C4 H2O4N2, is a product of the decomposition of uric acid. It

is a poison that is used to produce diabetes in healthy experimental animals

(primarily rats and mice), so that researchers can then study diabetes

**treatments** in the lab. Alloxan causes diabetes because it spins up enormous

amounts of free radicals in pancreatic beta cells, thus destroying them.

Beta cells are the primary cell type in areas of your pancreas called islets

of Langerhans, and they produce insulin; so if those are destroyed, you get

diabetes.

There is no other commercial application for alloxan -- it is used

exclusively in the medical research industry because it is so highly toxic.

Given the raging epidemic of diabetes and other chronic diseases in this

country, can you afford to be complacent about a toxin such as this in your

bread, even if it is present in small amounts?

Just How Much is Too Much?

Similar to disinfection byproducts (DBPs) in water, alloxan is formed when

the chlorine reacts with certain proteins remaining in the white flour after

the bran and germ have been removed. Protein makes up between 5 percent and 15

percent of white flour, depending on whether it’s cake flour, or high-gluten

flour, such as what’s used for pizza crust or bagels.

So, this would suggest that perhaps 5 to 15 grams of protein per 100 grams

of flour could be contaminated.

However, according to Professor Joe Schwarcz, Director of the McGill

University Office of Science and Society, alloxan is the byproduct of

xantophyll

oxidation only. _Xantophylls_ (http://oss.mcgill.ca/everyday/alloxan.pdf) are

yellow compounds in wheat that react with oxygen, causing flour to turn white.

According to Mr. Schwarcz:

“One of the possible minor side products of xantophyll oxidation is alloxan.

It may therefore be found in small amounts in flour. There is no available

research that shows trace amounts are a problem or that alloxan builds up in

the body. The amounts, if present at all, must be small because xantophylls

themselves only occur to the extent of 1 microgram per gram of flour.â€

Alloxan has not been studied in terms of human exposure, particularly

long-term. There is just so much we don’t know, and you know what assumptions

will

get you.

Alloxan in Rats vs Alloxan in Humans

Scientists have long known that alloxan produces selective destruction of

the beta cells of the pancreas, causing hyperglycemia and ketoacidosis in

laboratory animals. Alloxan is structurally similar to glucose, which might

explain why the pancreatic beta cells selectively take it up.

According to Dr. Hari Sharma*s Freedom from Disease, alloxan causes free

radical damage to DNA in the beta cells of the pancreas, causing them to

malfunction and die. When they fail to function normally, they no longer

produce

enough insulin.

Even though the toxic effect of alloxan is common scientific knowledge in

the research community, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) still allows

companies to use chemical processes in which the end result is toxic food.

Until

they unequivocally prove something is toxic by way of human deaths, severe

side effects, or when the public screams loudly enough, the FDA is not likely

to protect you.

Until then, it is you who must protect yourself.

If you have diabetes, or cancer, have a compromised immune system, or if you

are in some other high-risk category as tens of millions of North Americans

are, you need to know what foods contain hazardous ingredients so you can

avoid them. But in the case of alloxan, _there is no way to know, either by

reading the ingredient list or by any other means, that it might be in your

food_ (http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/08/347999.html) !

History of Bleaching Flour -- Pillsbury and the FDA

An interesting sideline to this whole flour story lies in the origins of the

FDA.

Bleaching and oxidizing agents weren’t developed to produce quick aging of

wheat flour (within 48 hours) until the early 1900s. Prior to that, it

required several months for oxygen to condition flour naturally.

When bleaching was introduced, it was vehemently opposed.

The first major consumer advocate was Harvey W. Wiley, MD, who eventually

became known as the “Father of the Pure Food and Drugs Act†of 1906. Mr.

Wiley was head of the Bureau of Chemistry, which was the precursor to the FDA.

Wiley crusaded against benzoic acid, sulfites, saccharin, and bleached flour,

among other food additives and adulterants.

Dr. Wiley felt so strongly about preventing the bleaching of flour that he

took it all the way to the Supreme Court. They ruled that flour could not be

bleached or “adulterated†in any way. However, it was never enforced.

Wiley believed that foods posed a greater risk to the public than

adulterated or misbranded drugs. He constantly butted heads with Secretary of

Agriculture James Wilson and President Roosevelt over food regulation.

Soon, Wiley’s personal administrative authority was undercut when Wilson

created the Board of Food and Drug Inspection in 1907 and the Referee Board of

Consulting Scientific Experts in 1908, one of which was reportedly headed by

someone who had been working at Pillsbury, although I have not been able to

verify this addendum.

Finally, in 1912, Dr. Wiley quit as director out of frustration, although he

continued as a vocal consumer advocate for many years.

The government replaced Dr. Wiley with Dr. Elmer Nelson. Dr. Nelson was the

polar opposite to Wiley , and was quoted as saying:

â€It is wholly unscientific to state that a well-fed body is more able to

resist disease than a poorly fed body. My overall opinion is that there

hasn’t

been enough experimentation to prove that dietary deficiencies make one

susceptible to disease.â€

Therein lies the foundation of the FDA. Since Dr. Wiley resigned, the FDA

has continued to shift its focus on drugs, since Wiley was never able to

convince the government of the dangers from chemicals in our foods. He was

truly a

pioneer and a century ahead of his time!

Food For Thought

The important point to take away is, beware of any processed food because

chemicals are always used. And we simply don’t know what the long-term

effects

will be of ingesting chemicals, on top of chemicals, on top of more

chemicals.

Strive to stick to whole unprocessed foods that are as close to their

natural state as possible. If you’re going to eat grains, make sure they are

at the

least unbleached, whole, and organic, and eat them in the proportion that is

best for your nutritional type