[reverett123]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/ar...s-bad-you.html

Particularly interesting in light of several recent threads.

"ne hundred years ago, this newspaper was nearly the size of a bedsheet. The Daily Mail was a campaigning paper back then — just as it is today — and its campaign, in 1911, to improve the standards of British bread was one of the most important and influential the Mail has ever mounted.

In 2011, this story should be no more than newspaper history. Shockingly, though, the fight for better bread as being key to better health continues to this day.

Back then, standards of nutrition in Britain were of major concern to the government. During the 19th century, as the industrial revolution pushed millions of Britons from the countryside into the cities, the nation’s diet got rapidly worse — and many health problems seemed linked to that.

By 1902, the Army had been forced to reduce the minimum height requirement for recruits by six inches, to just five foot. And still it rejected 40 per cent on grounds of poor health and bad teeth.

The low quality of bread, which made up 40 per cent of the diet of the poor in Britain in 1911, was widely blamed: modern nutritional science has shown that bread was indeed a crucial villain.

....

Bread historians bemoan the day in 1961 when the Chorleywood Baking Process (CBP) was introduced.

By juggling chemicals, flour types and adding three times as much yeast as had been used by bakers before, and then mixing at high speed, the scientists at Chorleywood Food Research Institute brought out a bread that was 40 per cent softer than previous loaves, and lasted twice as long.

This was the beginning of modern bread — ‘plastic bread’ to its detractors. Eighty per cent of all bread is still made the Chorleywood way.

The most significant charge against CBP is that by increasing the yeast element, it may also have given birth to modern bread-related digestive illness, by introducing more yeasts to the gut flora that help us break down food.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/ar...#ixzz1POHYze5o