The last posting about protein has produced comments among the few in my local group who didn’t realize the tremendous effect that advertising from the food industry had achieved without their awareness. In a little group conversation about food in general the subject became bread, and how or if it too had changed over the years. I went back to the health files and pulled out an article that I wrote during an early winter spell not long since, and updated it a bit. It is still valid, like so many old articles, because the truth takes a long time to filter through the layers in this country, deliberately inhibited as it is by commercial barriers and armies of corporate lawyers.

Those same lawyers are now figuring out ways to get the word ‘organic’ on the labels of the products of their clients, whether justified or not. Since that word can up the profits they will figure out ‘legal’ ways to get it on those products, however they are produced. Take a magnifying glass to the store to read the fine print, or a pendulum if you aren’t shy about other people in the health food store seeing you check things out that way.

Here is the slightly amended article.

Shortly before sitting down before this blank screen I went out into the garden to put bird food down on the stones where I usually do this. What I saw brought back some memories. The only thing that hadn’t been eaten from the previous batch was the white bread that someone had left in our refrigerator. We don’t eat the stuff so I had put it out in crumbs and pieces with the other bird food.

The memories involved visiting a hippy friend who lived by choice in a cockroach- infested apartment around South 35th Street in Chicago on the right side of the street. Some of his resident insectae came out to investigate the crumbs and debris on the floor after our messy meal. The light apparently didn’t bother them one bit. He watched them rather fondly, because he regarded them as family, in a macabre sort of way and said, “Yuh know Len, these little buggers are really particular about the bread I buy. They never eat any of that real cheap white bread. I could leave it out on the counter all night.” (Len was my name in those days).

And so the connecting dots carried on to a statement by Dr. Paul White some years ago that I used in a health article about Vitamin E in the 70’s. He said, “…when I graduated from medical school in 1911 I had never even heard of coronary thrombosis. Now it’s one of the chief threats to life in the US and Canada…an astonishing thing to happen in one’s own lifetime.” Think about that. A veteran physician who hadn’t even heard of what is now a major killer disease. It began during his lifetime. What could have caused such a change? The food industry and their need for long shelf life for their products was the cause.

It is not a coincidence then that the generation initiating the heart troubles and constipation problems that now plague so many Americans was the one after the new milling processes involved in flour production, begun in 1870, became widespread. Steel rollers took the place of stone and could be run at high speed.

Over the years the food manufacturers have done horrendous things with food in the name of profit, but the effect of the new milling system on the health of a whole nation, takes a bit of beating.

After ‘educating’ the public to believe that ‘white’ equals ‘pure’ they began to make white flour and white bread, thereby initiating tremendous health hazards due to diet deficiencies for the people who purchased their products. Industrialists have done the same by making sure that smoke from some of their chimneys is always white, no matter what the components of it. People are more comfortable with white smoke than black smoke. The only difference is the mental attitude produced by PR.

The commonest flour was that made from the red winter wheat grown in the Great Plains. When we made our own flour we ground the whole grain in our little hand powered mill. For the industrial production of white flour from this nutritious grain, the outer shell of the grain and the kernel are first removed by a milling process, and what is left goes through further processing.

The kernel that was part of our home made flour contains the wheat germ and its oil. This is the most nutritious part of the grain. It contains vitamin E and the whole vitamin B complex. Removing the kernel makes sure that the factor that nourishes the heart and circulatory systems, and the factor that sustains the nervous system are both absent from the stuff to be made into flour. It also ensures that the shelf life of the bread is increased, the main reason for the process. Wheat germ oil, like all organic oils goes rancid if exposed to air for a period of time. No problem with home made bread. Big problem with bread that is going to travel for miles to a store and then wait around.

The outer shell, which was also removed for the sake of whiteness, contained the bran, the fiber that is an essential part of a healthy diet. Nowadays everybody talks about the great value of the fiber in food, as though it hasn’t been known for years that lack of roughage in the diet causes all sorts of intestinal problems, and is connected with cancer of the colon.

Shortenings and vegetable oils may be added to what is left of the wheat, and the fats will probably be hydrogenated to ensure that they do not readily turn rancid. It also ensures that what remains will be more difficult to digest.

The manufacturers then have the effrontery to call this garbage ‘enriched,’ when they add the cheapest possible synthetic B vitamins and iron to the mixture. The stuff is still deficient in many B vitamins, and fiber, and vitamin E, and of course, nutritional value. But it IS white.

It is fairly easy to take a living thing apart, but quite a different matter to put it together again. This is the whole point of the story of Humpty-Dumpty and the wall.

Corporations have long ago realized that they can sell their waste products to the public, given enough PR. The aluminum and atomic energy industries led the way when it persuaded the public to consume the useless, and chronically poisonous sodium fluoride, a by-product of the aluminum and atomic bomb production processes.

That it is a chronic poison has been known for decades by every physiologist and chemist. It was a component of a very efficient rat poison. Now people drink it in their water and wonder where their bone and teeth problems come from. PR says it’s good so it must be good. Even dentists believe the story. Anyone who says otherwise must be a crank. Look at the money it makes. It must be good.

Scientists from all over the world read the American research papers on the effect of fluoride in water and had their governments legally ban ANY form of sodium fluoride in ANY food product. The major research was based on a piece of scientific double crossing to ensure the results the scientist wanted to get. That was clear to everyone else except the authorities here because money could be made from the spurious results. Now it is almost impossible to find a toothpaste that doesn’t contain it here, and children are given this chronic poison in mouth washes in schools. PR wins over truth every time since truth is always under funded, lies go first class.

The lumber industry had a similar problem with their waste product of mountains of useless sawdust. Clever PR made people welcome the new fiber enriched bread. Technically of course, sawdust put into the bread could be called natural fiber, and that’s what happened. They put sawdust in the bread and called it natural fiber and charged extra.

And of course the manufacturers could always call on a tame doctor or nutritionist to tell of the wonders of the fiber in the bread, just as the sugar industry had tame PhD’s who would sing their tune (and get media coverage) no matter what unpublicized contrary evidence there might be.

We all know now about the blatant lies of the tobacco industry when testifying to Congress. All manufacturers of consumables do this with highly qualified and highly paid unethical professionals acting as shills. Why does it take so long for the public to realize it, and to listen with more care?

The editor of the Journal of the AMA for years got huge retainer fees from two major cigarette companies. He even advocated the use of certain filtered cigarettes, even though he knew that the filter contained asbestos. The portfolio of the AMA contained a great many shares from tobacco companies for years after the connection between cigarettes and cancer could no longer be spun away. A white coated front man always seems to work in America.

We must get away from the propaganda that bread is fattening,” said Dr. Olaf Michelson of Michigan State University. “Bread is one of our chief sources of nutrients.”

After removing the most nourishing part of the bread, and then filling the gap with chemicals and sawdust,“… bread is one of our chief sources of nutrients!?” Who is he kidding? Lots of people apparently.

The whole wheat contains the natural fiber. There would be no need to add anything if the manufacturer hadn’t taken it out in the first place for the sacred shelf life. What’s left of the wheat after the bran and kernel have been removed has about the nutritional value of laundry starch, which it closely resembles. We used to use flour paste in ye days of olde to put up our wall paper.

This is the stuff that is then made up into what used to be correctly called ‘The Staff of Life.” When I was a young weight trainer a very famous physical culturist named Maxalding had a challenge that he was willing to stay in a prison cell for a month, with only bread and water as his food, and he would guarantee to increase all his amazing measurements, except his waist, using his exercise system. Then, bread was the Staff of Life and water wasn’t fluoridated. He couldn’t do that with the modern offerings.

When the Elder Shirley was a teacher she always saw to it that her primary classes made real bread, and real butter from scratch, at least once. The kids took turns exercising their arms and ground whole wheat berries in our hand operated grain grinder. Then they knew where the old time light tan colored flour came from. And they made butter with an old fashioned hand operated butter churn. Then they made the dough, and baked their bread and ate real bread, with real butter. And they knew where all these things came from in the first place; from the wheat field and the cow, not from the supermarket. And the supermarket offering was vastly inferior even in the judgment of ten year olds.

They loved the taste, color, and filling power of real bread and butter, and I have often been with the Elder Shirley when she has been stopped in a store parking lot by some young woman with a couple of children who reminisces about the bread they baked in 4th grade. Everyone remembered it vividly.

The stuff produced by the manufacturing process doesn’t make real bread, or anything like it. Oftentimes the flour is also bleached to ensure that the obsession with whiteness is fulfilled. Any amount of bleaching destroys all the vitamin E that may have escaped the other processes.

The physician who discovered that treating his cardiac patients with vitamin E often helped them tremendously had to move to Canada because of persecution by the AMA for unorthodox treatments. Canada and Mexico have clinics run by American physicians who are not allowed to go outside the drug, cut or burn system applauded by the AMA machine, but use methods that cure, instead of merely suppressing symptoms. It took decades before physicians even realized that what you ate had an effect on your health. Now they talk about the heart-vitamin E connection as if they had known about it all the time.

That bleaching agent used for years was eventually discovered to be a nerve poison that severely damaged dogs fed on white flour. This chemical is no longer used in bread, but the attitude that profitability is more important than public safety, until you’re caught, still runs through the food industry, You can never be 100% certain of the safety of their choice of any chemicals. Read Fighting the Food Giants by Paul A. Stitt.

Consider too the amazing discovery that people who drink chlorinated water have a greater chance of developing intestinal cancer than those who don’t. Who but a totally uninformed idiot would be surprised at that? Chlorine was used as a poison gas in WWI, and killed or permanently incapacitated many soldiers. It kills just about any living thing. Why should it be a surprise that it is still poisonous when put into water as a chemical compound?

The dog-damaging chemical previously mentioned was also a chlorine compound, and very poisonous. If chlorine were to be suggested today as a new chemical to make drinking water safer, it would not pass the current FDA standards.

And let’s mention again that the fiber that the happy, smiling people on TV want you to eat may well have come from a lumber yard sawdust pile. That fiber-enriched bread is going to cost more than the un-enriched , of course, though the fiber was free. That we could figure out because of what happened with leaded and unleaded gasoline prices. The public pays more whatever happens, whether something is added or taken away.

The real fiber taken from wheat is sold with a great hullabaloo as bran, as a health food. The Vitamin E is sold separately to health conscious people by the pharmaceutical companies, as is the vitamin B complex. Once it was all in the bread, and the disease of coronary thrombosis was unknown to a prominent physician!

All this destruction of the food value of bread is done in the name of a longer shelf life. And since the government does NOT have the uneducated public’s health interests at heart, the money, the manufacturers and their lawyers get their way.

In Switzerland, it is the white bread that is heavily taxed, and the money raised goes to help those bakers who bake real bread, so that the healthful food is available at a reasonable price. Try that on your next political candidate. This country is NOT the center of the world. Things are done differently, and often much better, elsewhere. Vote for him or her IF they agree and then hold them to it. You may be helping a whole generation. Real toast anyone, simply oozing with real butter?

Addendum: Since I wrote this I have been made unhappily aware that the health of the people of this country is a totally insignificant political issue when compared with the issue of whether a pregnant woman can be forced to have a baby she doesn’t want to have.

I do seem as a non-voter to notice a partisan bias in favor of anti-abortion without regard to circumstances. Many of the same party and the same people also think that the Earth was created in six days, is around 6000 years old and Tyrannosaurus Rex was a vegetarian, because death only entered the world after Eve chose consciousness, sorry, sinned.

Such ignorance in high places is scary. And if one such ignorant and bigoted fundamentalist person becomes high in government circles how would they manage a diplomatic visit to the Pope, who according to them runs the whore of Babylon set, or a Muslim religious leader who belongs to a false religion? Should make interesting reading in the bomb shelter, if you are rich enough to have one.

But to give them their due, those same scientifically ignorant people are also very long term thinkers when it comes to making profits from the masses. So maybe the opponents of abortion are just taking the long term view that if women stop having babies there won’t be any cannon fodder for the next totally just war in twenty years. And war is always the greatest boost for business isn’t it. Ask Halliburton and Exxon. Health writers are often accused of being naïve about the real world. Take that into account when they start connecting dots.