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A Few Things About Wheat Flour

Wheat

I love being able to share things that I have learned that can help people become healthier! Today I wanted to share a few things that I have learned about food processing. More specifically I want to share with you a little about wheat. I know that wheat and gluten really have been vilified by many in recent years. I personally don’t think it is wheat itself that is the problem, but rather how it is processed and used. So today I wanted to share some of how wheat flour is made and changes in milling over the years.

The Wheat Berry

To understand flour, we need to know a little bit about wheat. The kernel of wheat or wheat berry is what is ground to make flour. The wheat berry has three parts to it: bran, germ, and endosperm. The bran is the hard outer covering of the wheat berry. It contains a small amount of protein, several vitamins and minerals as well as fiber. The germ is the part of the wheat kernel that will sprout. It contains vitamins and minerals as well as some healthy fats. The endosperm is the largest part of the wheat berry and is what is used to make white flour. It does contain several vitamins and minerals, but is the most ‘starchy’ part of the wheat berry.

Flour Today

The vast majority of flour that is used today is enriched bleached white flour. It is probably what you think of when you think of flour. Let’s take a look at what exactly that flour is. First off, enriched bleached white flour is only made with the endosperm of the wheat berry. Then it is further processed with a bleaching agent, which also helps to ‘age’ the flour as well. And finally it has been ‘enriched’ with some vitamins and minerals to make up the lost nutrients from not using the whole wheat berry. But how did we get to this point that this is what most of our flour looks like?

Milling Flour

Back to when flour was first made, it was done by hand by grinding the wheat between two stones in mortar and pestle fashion. Later developments in milling wheat still used two stones but they rotated against one another grinding the wheat into flour. These stones may have been turned by any number of ways: water, wind, animal- or man-power, and later motors. But in all these cases the whole wheat berry was ground together. If you wanted white flour, the whole wheat flour was then sifted through a series of cloths to help remove the bran and germ from the flour. Some of the nutrients from the bran and germ still remained even after this sifting. Because of this, white flour used to be very expensive. Also any flour would have had a shorter shelf life because of the oils in the germ would eventually go rancid.

Then around the late 1800’s the stones were replaced with metal or porcelain rollers. The advantage of the rollers is that you could separate the bran, germ, and endosperm before grinding the wheat to make flour. So now to make white flour you simply take the endosperm portion and grind it. This made white flour much easier and affordable to make, however it is missing the nutrients from the bran and the germ. Even whole wheat flour processed with rollers is separated into the three parts and then recombined to have the proper proportions. While this is a little better, personally I think this is not equivalent to grinding the whole wheat berry.

Bleached Flour

Another change with the processing of flour is bleaching it. Unbleached flour needs to sit and ‘age’ for months to get proper texture to be used in baking. Bleaching flour with chemicals will do the same process but much faster and also improves the color giving the very white color that most of us are used to. However, it does add chemicals to the process and many of the chemicals used in the US to bleach flour are not allowed in other parts of the world to be used in food processing. If you have ever looked into food processing here in the US compared to other countries this will come as no surprise.

Bromated Flour

Along with the chemicals from bleaching, another chemical that has made its way into much of the baked goods we eat is bromine. Why is bromine a problem? Well it is a halogen like iodine and can compete for binding of iodine. Your body needs and uses iodine, especially the thyroid gland. It cannot use bromine but the bromine binds on in place of iodine. So it can act as a goitrogen meaning it can contribute to a goiter of the thyroid gland. Before the 1980’s iodine was used instead of bromine in many bakery products, but unfortunately it was later replaced with bromine. Bromated flour may not need to be specifically mentioned on the label as best I understand the labeling requirements when “potassium bromate is added in a quantity not exceeding 50 parts to each million parts of the finished bromated flour, and is added only to flours whose baking qualities are improved by such addition.” Now you can get flour that is specifically unbromated, but if it does not specifically say it is not there, there may not be a way to know if bromine is present or not.

So what are the consequences of all these changes in processing? Well to be honest it is hard to know for sure, but it is likely one small piece in the epidemic of many of the metabolic diseases we see today. When you take out nutrients and add chemicals even in small amounts, over time it is going to have some effect on health.

What we have done in my family is gotten a little stone wheat grinder that can be run by hand (or attached to a motor with some additional parts). We have started grinding our own whole wheat and then also use some unbleached unbromated white flour as a mix to make homemade bread. I don’t expect everyone to do the same thing but I know I feel better about what I am eating because I know what is in it (or not in it). And if you want to skip some of those chemicals you can look for unbleached unbromated flour to make your own baked goods. After all, who doesn’t love homemade bread?

References:

http://www.californiawheat.org/industry/diagram-of-wheat-kernel/

http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=&SID=9ae58c949df73c10b03c4d4de757ee28&n=sp21.2.137.b&r=SUBPART&ty=HTML#se21.2.137_1155

David Brownstein, MD Iodine Why You Need It Why You Can’t Live Without It, 5th Ed. Medical Alternatives Press, 2014.

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