THE ETHICS OF FOOD— BREAD 545 



and is also applicable to the bread from 80-per-cent. flour ; the 

 presence in the latter of the germ and of the inner coatings 

 of the husk, to say nothing of the fact that it is supposedly 

 made from weaker flour, renders it impossible for the baker to 

 obtain a satisfactory result with it. 



Standard flour will not give the light vesiculated loaf which 

 the baker can make from his ordinary mixture of foreign and 

 English patents flour and in well-known words the eater of it 



Gets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread. 



Henry V. 



Even in the case of white bread the absorption in the body 

 is not complete, the loss amounting to about 4*5 per cent, of the 

 total solids. A closer study of this loss shows that the greatest 

 share falls on the proteins, of which 20 per cent, are unabsorbed: 

 this fact is in agreement with the statement already made that 

 the body does not require an excess of a particular protein, 

 although it has been also attributed to the large amount of 

 starch present. The carbohydrates of bread are practically 

 completely absorbed but only three-quarters of the mineral 

 matter is made use of. In the case of wholemeal bread, the 

 total loss is as much as 14 per cent, and one half of the mineral 

 matter is unabsorbed, so that the supposed value of the 

 additional mineral constituents is considerably discounted. 

 Rubner, Goodfellow and others have made this fact quite 

 certain and it is difficult to see how any rational body can 

 advocate the advantages of a bread containing increased mineral 

 matter in view of these facts. It is true the amount of ash in 

 flour has steadily decreased of late years, indeed the low per- 

 centage of ash is an important criterion of purity of the best 

 patents. This, however, is due to improved methods of 

 cleaning the wheat from adherent dirt and to the fact that the 

 flour no longer contains the detritus of the milling stones, not 

 to the removal of the intrinsic mineral constituents of the flour. 



Weight for weight bread is one of the most nutritious of the 

 ordinary foods and it is also amongst the cheapest, yet it is far 

 from being a perfect food for the reason that it contains rather 

 less than half the proportion of protein to carbohydrate required 

 for an ideal food and the proportion of fat is very small. In an 

 ordinary mixed diet, these deficiencies are supplied by the other 

 foods that are taken, many of which are of a highly concentrated 



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