WAR BREAD AND ITS CONSTITUENTS 33 



bread as we were eating before the war the miller had 

 to blend the wheat he ground with a proportion of 

 hard wheat from Canada, America, or Russia. Nor- 

 mally it is possible by such admixture to secure a 

 satisfactory average strength in the flour supplied to 

 the baker. At the present time it is less easy to do 

 so. War bread must remain an article less standard- 

 ized than the bread of peace time. 



We return now to what is at the present time a 

 more important question, namely, the actual nutritive 

 value of our war bread. It is really, as we saw, a 

 question of the nutritive value of those parts of the 

 grain which are excluded from the white loaf. 



Controversy concerning this point has proceeded 

 somewhat on the following lines: The supporters of 

 brown bread or standard bread point to the fact 

 that material rich in protein lies immediately under 

 the husk, and this it is wasteful to remove. The 

 germ, again, is specially rich in protein. They insist 

 also upon the fact that breads containing more of the 

 outer parts of the grain are very much richer in phos- 

 phoric acid than white flours, and the human body 

 requires phosphates for its nutrition. Further, some 

 of the advocates of whole -meal bread have insisted 

 upon the supposed importance of enzymes contained 

 in the germ. To such arguments the supporters of 

 white bread have replied that, while it is true that the 

 presence of offals in the bread increases somewhat the 

 amount of protein, this advantage is more than lost, 

 because the outer layers of the grain are less digestible 

 than the endosperm. On a balance there is loss 

 rather than gain, because the materials of the coarser 

 loaf are less available to the body. As to the phos- 

 phoric acid, while brown bread undoubtedly supplies 

 more, white bread contains enough, so there is little 

 point in the difference. The germ in any case only 



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