Place two loaves of wheat bread next to each other. The same weight. One is baked from refined white flour, the other – from whole grain flour, unrefined from coarse grain components, from plant fibers. The first loaf is lush, large, ruddy, white. The second loaf – or better to say a loaf – is nondescript, clearly smaller in size, all kind of shriveled, the flesh is gray. What kind of bread do you choose to eat? That’s right, the first one. There is nobility in him, to become a king … And what is this plebeian lump next to it, besides, it must be tasteless? Yes ugh on him, throw it out, and all the cases …
The choice you make will be your mistake. Especially if you do not have experience in making bread from whole grain flour, because it is also quite lush and noble, if baked correctly. And white bread is good, normal, but not suitable for daily nutrition. But more on that later. One thing is important here: manufacturers and sellers, who have long studied the thin strings of our consumer psychology, have taken these points into account. And they play beautifully on them. This is the first thing.
The second is the interests of the baking industry itself. It is well known that refined flour is stored several times longer than whole grain flour, besides, it is not so demanding on storage conditions, and its volume and weight are less, if we take into account the same initial raw materials. So why spend extra money on warehouses and also take the risk that flour will deteriorate even before it is sold? The reasons are quite obvious.
The third factor has developed historically. And, oddly enough, he refers to science.
Remember sci-fi movies and stories where a man eats a pill for breakfast for lunch, drinks it with water, and here’s a good portion of fried chicken with peas? Two tablets are already two chickens with peas, the third is a good addition to the first two in the form of bacon with blood and a loaf of bread. For a snack, you can eat the same loaf with a large can of black caviar, also in a pill, although this is already too much: so many dishes (pills) at once. In short, down with pots, pans, plates, knives, forks, spoons! Down with the kitchens! Long live the liberated time for productive labor for the good of mankind!
Such revolutionary scientific ideas were very intensively debated at the beginning of the XNUMXth century. They were based on the statement that it is enough for a person to consume the right amount of energy, vitamins and minerals in a concentrated form for the body to function normally. And the rest is slag, ballast substances. Which can be easily removed and thrown away.
These ideas have not died even now: food in tubes and tablets is prepared for astronauts, for special forces. In stores, we meet it in the form of a typical “guest worker’s set”: instant noodles, dry mashed potatoes, etc. Even food is sold directly in tablets: one contains vitamins and minerals, the other – compressed cellulose. I ate a couple of such pills, and everything is in order, a charge of vigor for the whole day.
If you turn on a calculator in your brain, then a huge number of various benefits appear again: even less space in warehouses, scanty transportation costs, and other goodies. For manufacturers.
And for us consumers?
Swallowing pills instead of a juicy piece of meat or a fragrant apple is everyone’s own business. Cooking with refined flour instead of whole grain is absolutely the same individual preference. Lawless Heart. The stomach too. But the purpose of this material is somewhat different: to explain what we are losing by eliminating whole grain flour from the diet.
What is Whole Grain Flour?
In the flour production process, the grain is first ground and then sieved through a sieve. The finer the grind, the more ballast can be sifted out.
The purest flour in this sense is flour of the highest grades. Fine grinding allows you to sift out absolutely all impurities, including the flower shell and grain germ – vitamins, unsaturated fatty acids, minerals and other components of the grain necessary for the body – leaving only pure starch (easily digestible carbohydrates). The nutritional value of such flour in terms of the energy supplied is really very high. But from the point of view of the biological value of the product, this is a primitive dummy. In such flour, nothing useful and necessary for the body remains. He cannot create new cells from carbohydrates, for this he needs all the variety of macro- and microelements that nature has put into whole grain. But all this unused energy the body is happy to put in reserve, in fat deposits.
Together with the grain germ, vitamin E is removed from the flour – a powerful antioxidant, unsaturated fatty acids – the main food for the brain and central nervous system. The product is also deprived of the aleurone layer, which contains a thin layer of living cells rich in storage proteins and essential amino acids necessary for the synthesis of proteins and hormones. In addition, the removed complex carbohydrates (fiber) are the main food for intestinal bacteria (intestinal microflora), the vital activity of which directly affects the state of our health and the work of the entire immune system – the body’s natural self-defense mechanism against diseases.
As a result, out of all the variety of substances laid down by nature in grain, we leave only the most harmful and useless for nutrition – starch purified from all living things – the most easily digestible carbohydrates, which are already abundant in our diet.
A completely different matter is the coarse wallpaper flour, that is, the coarsest grinding. The wallpaper flour is sifted through a coarse sieve. During wallpaper grinding, absolutely all the components of the grain remain in the flour: this is the flower shell of the grain, and the aleurone layer, and the grain embryo. In wallpaper flour, all the biological value of whole grain, all its healing qualities, which were mentioned above, are preserved.
The situation is completely different in the West, where bread is the number one dietary product. There it is rightfully called a medicinal product against obesity, diabetes mellitus, atherosclerosis, and decreased intestinal motility. Whole grain bread effectively removes harmful substances from the body, such as salts of heavy metals, radioactive substances, toxic components, residues of biological products. It really increases life expectancy and improves its quality.
Scientists in the United States have been able to prove that the mortality rate of people who regularly consume foods from whole grains is reduced by 15-20%. Including wholemeal bread in your diet every day, a person fully satisfies the body’s need for fiber and dietary fiber.
Modern nutritionists have found that wholemeal flour products are the best source of iron and zinc. They urge to eat wallpaper bread containing the entire palette of minerals, B vitamins, vitamin E and dietary fiber.
By the way, the authority of the terms “whole grain flour” and “wholemeal flour” in Europe is so high that manufacturers use them as a means of unfair competition and outright deception by manipulating the consumer’s mind. An example is the controversial report “Wholegrain Of Truth”, which made a lot of noise in the UK. The research underlying the report was conducted in the second half of 2012 and covered 11 industrial companies producing bread of this type. At the same time, the analysis of products was carried out not only under the brand name “whole grain” and “from wholemeal flour”, but also similar to the degree of confusion of terms: “healthy (healthy) white” (wholesome white), “from wheat grain” (wheatgrain), ” goodness whole’n’white.
It turned out that soy flour and refined powdered wheat gluten are present in huge quantities in the composition of this bread. In a single sample of White & Wholegrain bread, the amount of whole grain flour was only 6%! “You can safely throw one teaspoon of whole grain flour into the dough to make a whole loaf, and then call this loaf whole grain,” the speakers note with indignation. So even if you live in an enlightened Europe, where literally every step is regulated by many consumer protection laws, the best way to make sure that a loaf of bread contains all the nutrients necessary for life is to bake your homemade bread from whole grain flour.
The grain of cereal is the main food of man, as history has decreed. Over many millennia of evolution, the human body has adapted so much to the composition of the grain of cereals that they have become for us not only food, but also medicine. Our body was built and developed on the diversity of the structural composition of grain. The whole grain of domestic cereals – wheat, rye, barley, oats, buckwheat, millet – contains almost everything that our body needs.
Therefore, it is completely illogical and harmful to abandon the healing agent given to us by nature, inexpensively and with a proven effective beneficial effect on the body.
At least since the time of Hippocrates (V-IV centuries BC), people have always known that “Separating bran from flour is a luxury, and for nutrition it is more harmful than useful” (Justus Liebig “Letters on Chemistry”).