White Flour
Were given a sandwich made with white bread on a daily basis when you were a kid, but white bread and other products made from refine flour are poor choices for food.
REFINED FLOUR
Refined white flour is just another example of how a wonderful, God-given food get from mugged on the way to the grocery shelf.
White bread delivers little nutrition (even with all those added vitamins and minerals they advertise on the package of enriched products) and converts to sugar rapidly-almost as fast food as candy bar. When diabetic patients switch from eating white bread t whole grain bread, their cholesterol and blood sugars almost always go down.
You can be sure that any flour not labeled as whole wheat or whole grain is refined white flour, even if it looks brown. That’s right, some manufacturers add molasses to the ingredients to give the bread a darker appearance and mislead health-conscious consumers into thinking they are buying whole-grains bread.
LABEL DECODER WHOLE GRAINS
It seems that the more we lean about healthy eating, the more food makers try to con us into thing their products are good for us. Here’s a tip to help you decide whether a bread, crackers, or cereal product is truly whole grain or just an imposter.
As a general rule of thumb, don’t trust the words whole grains on the front of the package. Instead, read the ingredients. You’re probably looking at a whole-grain product if the words whole wheat; oat’ rye’ are near the top of the ingredient list.
THE JOURNEY FROM WHEAT TO WHITE
All bread starts out as whole grain, but make white bread, the manufacturer removes the outer shell of the grain with all its healthy fiber and B vitamins. Then the nutrition- packed wheat germ is extracted. Both the fiber and wheat germ are actually resold to health food stores. Meanwhile, the denuded white flour heads to the mainstream market to be made into white bread, buns pastries, crackers, pasta, and so on.
White bread is created from one part of the grain head- the starchy endosperm that is ground into fine power. Since the brain and the germ are removed, approximately 80 percent of the wheat’s nutrient are gone. The milling process involves such high temperatures that the remaining grains is damaged by oxidation and has grayish appearance. Could you imagine buying gray- colored bread?
But because consumers don’t want to buy gray bread, the manufacturer bleaches it white. If there were any vitamins and minerals left, most are destroyed in the bleaching process. Then low- grade vitamins and minerals are added, along with man-made cyber-fats, sugars, food addictive, and maybe a sprinkling of grains on the top and the food is marketed to moms as healthy sandwich bread.
