John_Yudkin_-_Pure_White_and_Deadly_revised_1986_OCR

Refined and unrefined
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Refined
and unrefined
I t is popular nowadays to speak of 'refined' and
'unrefined' foods, and in particular of 'refined' and 'unrefined'
carbohydrates. These terms are most often used in speaking of white
sugar and of bread made from white flour. I deplore this custom for
two reasons.
The first is that the refining of sugar and of flour are not really
comparable. White flour is made by the removal of the bran and
germ, and perhaps some of the outer layers of the endosperm, the
innermost part of the wheat berry. Everything that has been
removed is in fact edible, and would have been eaten if the whole
of the berry had been ground. Such flour would contain 100 per
cent of the wheat berry; what is called wholemeal flour consists of
92 per cent of the wheat berry, and white flour usually about 72 per
cent. On the other hand, the first stage in producing sugar from
the cane is the preparation of the cane juice, which leaves behind
the major part of the cane as inedible fibre and associated gums and
insoluble materials. The following stages of clarification, precipitation,
concentration and crystallization remove further unwanted
materials, so that the resulting 'unrefined' raw sugar represents only
a small proportion of the original cane from which it was produced.
This product is far removed from the original sugar cane; the fibrous
bagasse from which the cane juice is extracted, and the materials
removed from the juice, amount to well over 80 per cent of the cane,
and what is removed is either inedible or undesirable. Raw cane
sugar thus consists of about 20 per cent of the original sugar cane,
white cane sugar of perhaps 15 or 16 per cent. It does not make
sense, therefore, to imply that unrefined sugar is somehow the
'whole' or 'natural' product of the sugar cane, while refined sugar is
in some way 'unnatural' or 'de-natured'. Thus, while the use of
these terms, much as I dislike them, may to some extent be justified
in regard to wholemeal flour and wholemeal bread, they are invalid
where sugar is concerned.
There is a second reason for pleading that you do not speak of
refined and unrefined carbohydrate. It is true that refined sugar
is the pure carbohydrate sucrose, while raw sugar is mostly this
carbohydrate with small quantities of other materials. On the other
hand, white flour is not, as some people imagine, virtually nothing
but the carbohydrate starch. For example, white flour contains only
fractionally less protein than does wholemeal flour - about 13 per
cent instead of about 13·5 per cent. And in many countries such as
the U SA and the UK some of the vitamins that are partly removed
in the milling process are replaced by the flour millers. Moreover,
other nutrients are sometimes added to a much higher level than
was present in the original wheat grain - for example, calcium in
the UK. Altogether, then, it is wrong to call white flour or white
bread 'refined carbohydrate'. And particularly it is not sensible to
put on the same nutritional level raw sugar and wholemeal bread,
or white sugar and white bread.
Fibre
There are many who consider that the dietary
change most relevant to the pattern of disease in Western countries
is the change from diets with a high proportion of unrefined foods
to diets with a high proportion of refined foods. The evidence for
this claim is largely the fact that the diets of people living in rural
areas of Africa consist largely of fibre-rich unrefined cereals, and it
is in these areas that coronary thrombosis and other diseases of
affluence are rare. In the West, where these diseases are common,
we have changed from eating brown bread to eating white bread, so
that our diet now provides substantially less fibre.
This idea is based on the assumption that cereals are a sizeable
and 'natural' part of the human diet. This is, literally, a short-sighted
view: cereals entered our diet less than 10,000 years ago, which is
about one half of one per cent of the period since we emerged as a
separate species. Before this, for at least two million years, our ancestors
were - like all other species - hunters and gatherers of food.
The brief period since the advent of agriculture, which resulted in
a diet containing large quantities of starch-rich, high-fibre foods,
such as cereals, is far too short for the human species to have completely
adapted to such a diet. In other words, there has been far too
little time in evolutionary terms for there to have been a significant
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