London Daily Mail takes on white bread again
 

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

I recently read that Bulgaria has one of the highest rates of PD in the world. In looking at their diet it consists of white bread (spread with lard or cheese) for breakfast, bread soup (bread with broth poured over it) and dinner is more white bread and potatoes with some meat and steamed or fried vegetables.

The article stated that Bulgarian Gypsies, on the other hand, have one of the lowest rates of PD. These Bulgarian Gypsies generally traveled in caravans and raised no cattle or crops. Instead they traded things for their food and thus it was said that they ate a more well balanced diet that was mostly vegetarian. Interesting. The low nutritional value of white bread comes to the surface again and could be one of the many culprits in developing PD later in life...

Lexie

you can create correlations between unrelated factors until the cows come home. until someone does a study specifically designed to show eating bread increases your chances of developing pd, i'm not buying it. poor diet deficient in antioxidants, maybe.

you can correlate the increase in diabetes to the increased use of cell phones, they both have gone up.

sorry to be so contrary but science is about testing your hypotheses, examining all the evidence. otherwise your're just picking and choosing "evidence" to support an opinion.

the northern chinese have been eating noodles made from white flour and the italians have been eating pasta made from processed durum wheat for how long? at least 100years? same stuff as white flour which has had the germ and seed coat removed, originally to prolong shelf life. admittedly no yeast used there but baking kills yeast and isn't brewer's yeast considered a health food?

just my 2 cents.

the yeast is different from what it once was. I do not believe that wheat itself is the problem. Maybe what they do with it, and what they add to it.