WHOLEMEAL AND OTHER BREAD
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
Sin,—A statement in a letter by Mr. Stokes in your issue of April 11th, under the above heading, should not go unchallenged. He says "When eating white bread we arc simply eating starch." This assertion, though often made, is quite inaccurate. White bread contains 7 per cent, of protein, and bread made from stone-milled flour does not contain appreciably more than this. It would, of course, be impossible to make a loaf from starch only ; the presence of the highly nitrogenous protein, gluten, is necessary to allow the flour to rise. I am afraid, therefore, that Mr. Stokes, in spite of his disclaimer, cannot be acquitted both of " exaggeration " and of "scare-mongering."
The fact of the matter is, Sir, that the Wholemeal versus White Bread controversy is really not worth all the space you have lately been devoting to it. Where bread is the
main constituent of the diet the advantage, especially for children, certainly lies on the whole with stone-milled flour, but where anything like a reasonable mixed diet is taken the kind of bread selected does not matter. After all, the health and stamina of the race are certainly not inferior to what they were seventy or eighty years ago, when, as Mr. Stokes says, stone-milled flour was the staple food, so there cannot be so much wrong with our present bread as many of your correspondents would have us believe.—! am,
Sir, Fee., ROBERT Hurenesost, Th.! Athenaeum, Pall Mall, S.W .1. .
Previous page
