m*- w - Clpdigital.org

OLD-FASHIONED WHITE
BREAD AS A FOOD
H A S any person ever cornered
you, begged and implored
you not to eat white bread ?
Has any member of the
family forsaken it with scorn
and insisted on being fed altogether on
whole wheat bread, bran bread, or some
new fangled kind of "health bread"?
You yourself may like white bread, in
fact, you don't feel that a meal is complete
without it but your friends who
"read up" on carbohydrates, protein,
and the other food elements say that
you shouldn't eat it.
If you like it then, by all means eat it
in peace, and remain in peace for it will
not kill you.
A while ago a New York paper printed
a sensational article called "Don't Give
Him White Bread", and gave the following
table, to show the relative food
values of the several articles named:
Barley bread
83.3
Whole wheat
...81.7
White
.. 54.9
Rye
... 57.2
Swedish speise bread. . 87.0
Zweiback
. ..85.2
Macaroni
.. .86.9
Corn
...80.0
At this rate, white bread would be the
least beneficial of them all, and Swedish
speise bread the most nourishing. Now
for war times, Swedish speise bread and
zweiback are fine, because they do not
contain water. When we buy white
bread we buy 35 to 45% of water, but
then white bread with its water is not as
expensive as speise bread and zweiback,
and it would be dry and harsh to us
without water.
One woman, when asked if she
planned her meals with reference to the
right proportions, that is, a certain
amount of carbohydrate,—starch and
?6S
sugar, a certain amount of fat—butter
or cream, and bacon, a certain amount of
protein—meat, eggs, fish, vegetables, a
certain amount of salts—soups, lettuce,
salads, etc., said "My land, No! My
husband said if I fed him those things
he'd leave home." Here was friend husband's
menu for one dinner—
Fried oysters
Mashed potatoes
Lima beans
Cottage cheese
Corn starch pudding—
all perfectly good things in the right
place. Well, the man was sick a few
times every month, and devoured oranges
at a great rate at each attack. The carbohydrates
seemed to prove too much for
him without acids, salts in fresh vegetables,
and fresh lettuce to balance.
It is perfectly true that whole wheat
bread, bran bread, Swedish speise bread
contain ten per cent more of the above
carbohydrates, fats, and proteins than
white bread contains, but they also contain
a larger proportion of crude fiber.
The fiber portion of these flours are of
little value as food, and so much of the
protein and carbohydrate is so incorporated
in the woody fiber that it is not
digested, nor made available for use of
the body. While only ninety per cent of
the dry matter of wheat meal—that is,
meal used to make whole wheat bread
and speise bread—is digestible and nourishing
to the body, nearly the whole of
the dry matter of wheat flour, used for
white bread, is available for the use of
the body.
This is true not only of the white flour
of wheat, but also the white flour of rye,
corn, barley, oats, etc. Moreover, the
coarse woody fiber of bran and brown
breads produces a mechanical irritation
of the intestines, which makes it less
valuable as an extensive article of food.