Why We Need to Treat Whole Grains With Respect

With the dawn of the industrial age, white flour—once available only to the wealthy—became available to all. White bread was almost completely replaced by white bread by the 1900s. “coarse” Whole-grain bread and white flour, along with sugar and spices, resulted in the rise of pastries, cakes, and donuts in both the rich as well as the poor.

During the 1920s and 1930s, researchers began to study the factors in foods that contributed to health—vitamins and minerals—and realized that white flour lacked the nutrients that nature put into whole grains. One of these researchers was Dr. Weston Price. He noted that his isolated, so-called “selective” studies of whole grains revealed that they were lacking in nutrients. “primitive” Peoples claim that white flour and other harmful foods were introduced to these communities and caused rampant tooth decay and all kinds of disease.