The Bread Enrichment Fallacy
The Bread Enrichment Fallacy Why We Have No Flour for Starving Europeans and Asians By Winifred Ramhenbwh and Dr. N. Philip Norman WHEN America's foot! scientists decided in 1941 that Americana...
...This documentary evidence clarifies Rasslan alms in the Middle East...
...Barnett Sure produced failure of lactation and sterility in the second and third generation of female rats...
...Enriched bread restores part of five of these food elements and doubles the amount of riboflavin...
...White bread, which Magendle, father of modern nutrition, had long ago found would kill dogs In two months, was found to have inferior proteins, approximately a fourth of the mineral content of the wheat berry, and only traces of the Vitamin B complex of which wheat is an extremely rich source...
...Alice Fay Morgan of the University of California fed dogs on synthetic B vitamins and discovered that when some of her experimental animals were given vitamins of which they had hitherto been deprived, they died...
...To keep its vitamins, minerals and its flavor, wheat needs to be ground not over a week before it is used for baking...
...While the milling and baking industries were being raked by the cruel search-lights of nutritional science, the American Medical Association gallantly came to their rescue...
...W. II...
...The baking and milling industries are »«ry powerful...
...No ether country in the world used synthetic vitamins to improve its war - bread...
...By greatly increasing dosee of Vitamin D, Dr...
...Clarence Mills found that overdoses of thiamin by Panama Workers produced toxic effects...
...The relatively valueless starchy center of the wheat grain is sold by the millers for human consumption, while the highly nutritious outer layers of the wheat and its germs are sold primarily for animal consumption...
...And who profited by bread enrichment...
...If we had decided in favor of whole wheat bread in May, 1941, we would thereby hava made available for human feeding a billion bushels of wheat with which we could supply the subsistence cereal requirements of perhaps 300,000,000 people...
...Aside from the inadequacy of a handful...
...The fact that white bread has always had a bad press did not bother the bakers until World War I. In 1919, Dr...
...For the change from 72 to 80 percent extraction wheat flour which President, Truman announced on February 6, 1946, together with what fata we can supply, will provide subsistence rations for only 50,000,000...
...Within the next few years, three of them, R. K. Williams, synthesixer of thiamin...
...E. V. McCollum discovered Vitamin B, or thiamin, and the same year Mendel and Bell proved that in baker's white bread ninety percent of the thiamin was eliminated...
...Paul...
...Arthur J. Cramp, director of the Bureau of Investigation and Propaganda of the A MA, suggested to the baking industry that both doctors and the public needed "education" about the virtues of white bread...
...Six months later we had "Enriched Bread...
...England made mandatory a high extraction brown wheat flour...
...Why waa thia sensational story by L. S. It...
...Because the Food, and Nutrition Board extended its sanction to the use of vitamin and mineral pills in bakery products, we may expect that the manufacturers of every kind of food product from cereals to cocktails, who have not already added synthetics to their products, will be rushing in to do likewise...
...Commenting on this experiment, she remarked: "Fortification of foods with vitamins, which are available in large quantities, may precipitate conditions worse than the sub-acute deficiency state produced by the usual diet balanced in all its deficiencies...
...Consumption of excessive quantities of aynthetic vitamins and minerals such as are used to enrich highly processed foods and pills or capsules containing these artificial substances in concentrated form may upset the delicate nutritional balance and produce an unfavorable biological result For instance, vitamin A, taken in excess, paradoxically produces much the aame symptoms as Vitamin A deficiency...
...The word "enriched" has been distasteful to many nutritionists from the beginning, for it so grossly overstates the merits of this wartime bread...
...This means that whole wheat flour would probably have to be ground and sold to bakers and housewives locally, instead of being ground in the great northwestern milling area that centers around Minneapolis and St...
...M. L. Wilson of the US Department of Agriculture suggested that the milling and baking industry call a closed meeting in Chicago, during a recess in the public flour hearings, and get the same elements together under their auspices...
...In 1939, Dr...
...A year before the adoption of the bread enrichment program, most of the well-known nutritional scientists of the United States were opposed to fortification with synthetics and in favor of whole wheat bread...
...By 1940, when the American bread enrichment program was conceived, much more was known about white bread than in 1925...
...Accordingly, the baking industry advertised in the AMA's two magazines, and the Council on Foods of the AMA issued a pronunciamento, quoted in advertisements, which began: "White bread is a wholesome and nutritious food...
...The public hearings on flour set by the Food and Drug Administration tor September, 1940, provided a rallying point for all the elements interested in fortifying white flour with vitamin pills...
...In fact, one soft drink manufacturer has already had the bright idea of selling a fizz drink spiked with thiamin...
...C. A. Elvehjem noted that normal growth in chicks could not be obtained with synthetic B vitamins and warned: "Synthetic vitamins should be ueed with caution in order to prevent the development of deficiencies more serious' than the deficiency we see out of control...
...Once again, we are too late with too little...
...And they have seldom concealed the fact that they do not want whole wheat or even underniilled wheat flour forced on them by nutritional science or by public opinion...
...As the Government's white paper on bread enrichment remarked: "When the flour hearings were resumed in mid-November, industry, sciei e and Government were thinking together as they had not been i.ble to do before and harmony of opinion prevailed...
...Whole wheat bread has twenty known elements, and everyone agrees that it probably contains other unidentified elements as well...
...Surgeon General Parian and Dr...
...Certainly the postwar starvation of many millions was predictable long in advance...
...Statements taken from the deliberations of the American Medical Association favoring "the use of vitamins in certain staple foods, including flour" were read into the record...
...Ruasel M. Wilder erf the Mayo Clinic, and Dr...
...of synthetics as against all the known and unknown elements of natural foods, the biological danger is that an excess of synthetic vitamins and minerals may be consumed, because of the indiscriminate dosage of processed foods with pills, and because of the indiscriminate self-dosage of individuals with pills...
...In addition the millers would probably oppose the decentralization 61' milling which might be necessary, if Americans were going to eat the same appetizing whole wheat bread that European people have lived on for thousands of years...
...Hitler and Ribbenthrop rejected (he proffered military alliance because Russia's demands were too great...
...Russia and Germany ate whole grain breads...
...Who was it decided that we should eat white enriched bread in wartime...
...No experiments were made prior to the adoption of the bread enrichment program, and no adequate experiments have been made since, to determine whether or not synthetic bread enrichment is of value In maintaining health or in eliminating deficiency diseases...
...Further, by 1938 five of the dozen so far identified vitamins of the B complex had been synthesized and were available as pills...
...The results were all the baking industry could wish for...
...Canada used a new process of selective milling which removes only the outermost of the six skins of the wheat j berry, but failed to make the use of the new flour mandatory...
...The far greater danger provided by the bread enrichment program is political...
...Almost simultaneously a committee of America's National Research Council recommended that Army and Navy flour be fortified with thiamin...
...Shapiro buried on page 19 of the NY Timet of March 197 It is front-page stuff, answering the question, "What ia Russia ap to now...
...The baking industry fears that a whole wheat loaf would decrease bread sales...
...Why have the Government agencies dealing with food failed us in so spectacular a fashion...
...The milling industry would like to continue selling a diversity of products instead of just flour...
...scientists decided in 1941 that Americana •hould continue to est wasteful and nutritionally inferior white bread, lightly needled with synthetics, they thereby lessened the survival chances of millions of starving Europeans and East Asians this winter...
...The bakers demanded and got similar pronouncements from academic nutritionists and from Government, in May, 1930...
...RUSSIA OFFERED NAZIS MILITARY ALLIANCE ThE US State Department has captured German documents to prove that a few weeks before the Nazis launched their invasion of Ruaaia, Molotov went to Berlin to try to avert the impendingsattack, aad offered the Naiis "a full military alliance" in return for territorial concessions: Eastern Poland, the Bailie States, the Karelian isthmus, Beeaarabia, Bukovina, control of the Dardanelles, a free hand in Iran and Iraq, control of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Aden...
...Sebrell of the U. S. Public Health Service, made a complete about-face...
...British and Canadian scientists, equally besieged by the baking and milling interests which wanted synthetic fortification of bread, have held firm against it...
...The bread enrichment program may condemn us to live in a permanent vitamin pill era at the very moment when we were about to abandon this particular medical fad...
...In July, 1940, the English decided to fortify their white bread with thiamin, a derision which was later revoked...
Vol. 29 • March 1946 • No. 12
