Who invented bleached flour

But how did it get that way? Well when flour is chemically bleached, it is similar to bleaching your clothes in the laundry!!! Flour bleaching agents are a food additive added to flour in order to make it appear whiter source Wikipedia.

A few of these toxic chemical bleaching agents used are:. Use of chlorine bromates and peroxides is not allowed in the European Union! In Australia and Europe the use of azodicarbonamide as a food additive is not approved!

Source: Wikipedia. This brings us to bromated flour …. Besides bleaching the flour another process is called bromating. Bromated flour is a flour that has been treated with potassium bromate to improve the doughs elasticity and produce a higher rise. Nearly all the flour in your supermarket has been bromated. Home bakers use it for the same reasons. The substance, in theory, is supposed to bake out as it cooks, but if any remains behind it can be very harmful.

According to Wikipedia, bromate in drinking water is undesirable because it is a suspected human carcinogen. Bromate has been banned in most developed countries since , including the UK and Canada! Baked goods sold in California would have to bear a store level cancer warning if they contained more than a certain level of bromate. As a result, most California bakers have switched to bromate-free process. In the US bromated flour is legal, however labeling is NOT required, although some states may require flour producers to label the flour if it has been bromated.

When buying flour unbleached unbromated is the way to go. Be a label reader! That includes breads, cookies, biscuits, donuts, pie crusts, rolls. Eat whole wheat breads, rye breads. The real difference between GMO and regular food is that GMO is more precise at getting the consumers target which also decreases the amount of time needed.

For those that think that we shouldn't touch nature, I have some news for you Cross-breeding takes time, and may lead to the desired characteristics but may remove other characteristics that were needed. There are a few flaws with GMO such as patent laws, but we have the same problem with medicine, technology, and other fields. So please, if you want to remove GMO food, then give your food to people who don't have the luxuries that you have and let your family starve, because people like you make me regret being a Homo Sapien.

Basically it is a tool like any other ie plant or animal breeding and whether the products produced with that tool are bad or not just depend on how that tool is used. In fact the results can be the same as conventional plant or animal breeding except it is much much quicker.

As an example lets say there are two strains of corn: Corn A is a heavy producer but very susceptible to a new fungus blight, corn B is a poor producer but is resistant to the fungus. A conventional plant breeder would cross the two strains of corn AxB and after many generations and thousands of test plants and probably 8 or 10 or more years later the breeder my have a strain of corn that is a good producer and also resistant to the fungus.

Using genetic techniques someone in a lab could isolate the gene for the fungus resistance from corn B assuming it is just a single gene and transfer that gene to the heavy producing corn A and in much less time end up with the same or similar results as the conventional plant breeder.

The problems start when they start using genes from other organisms that, using conventional techniques, one could never breed into a plant or animal. The biggest example, and the one that is causing the most concern as far as I understand it is corn that contains the gene for the BT toxin. This is a gene from Bacillus thuringiensis a bacteria. BT toxin has been sold and used for years and years I used it at lest 20 years ago and it had been around long before that and when sprayed on plants it will kill any caterpillar that consumes leaves with the toxin on it.

The toxic effects are specific to that stage of the insects life cycle and supposedly it is not toxic to any other organisms. Of all the sprays non-organic that is one can buy to kill insects, this has always been considered the least toxic. By the way there are lots of certified organic sprays that are way more toxic than BT toxin.

It seems there are now some studies linking the BT corn to health problems. What they really need to do is take BT corn and grow it side by side with BT corn that has had the BT gene knocked out deactivated so the corn no longer produces the BT toxin. This way everything else is the same and the only variable that has been changed is the presence or absence of the BT in the corn.

So anyway, to ban all genetically modified crops to me would be foolish. It is just a tool and weather it is bad or not really depends on how it is used. You all should be growing your own food or buying it from a local farmer you know anyway.

Stop reading the headlines and go plant a garden. Clearly you know absolutely nothing about GMO. Just because we have been breeding many species into a monoculture that is easily wiped out by disease - doesn't mean we should. Traditional cross-breeding has one redeeming quality - it doesn't put fish genes in tomatoes because getting a fish to mate with a tomato just wouldn't happen. GMO is frankenscience creating frankenfood.

Lets not forget the vested interest that companies like Monsanto have. They don't care about the starving children in Africa - they are only selling them GMO seed, so that they then have to buy Monsanto's herbicide as nothing else will work.

GMO is all about the bottom line. Why do you bring up Monsanto's profits? What has that got to do with whether the products are safe or useful? Too often I find the jealousy of supposedly "Liberal and Progressive" people is not related to their desire to improve society but only to their envy and jealousy against others who are making a lot of money.

Everyone in a free society has the opportunity to attempt to get rich. That is the equality of a free enterprise system. Many of society's advantages come from the incentive to get rich. Communist China, and Communist Russia had to finally capitulate to a free market free enterprise system because their people would not work hard without the incentive to get rich.

I thought this discussion was about the science of genetic modification of food species. Let's keep our envy or profits and the rich in its proper place.

Wherever envy and jealousy have a proper place? No, Monsanto's profits do not have a cause-effect relationship, but they definitely show a potential motive to introduce unsafe foods without adequate testing, or to hide potential problems. It is only by identifying potential conflicts of interest that we as a society can keep an eye on corporations to ensure that they are not harming people in the name of the almighty dollar.

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Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. Flour is aged to improve certain qualities for baking.

This chemical process significantly changes the taste, texture, and appearance of the final product, as well as its nutritional profile and potential uses in baking. On the other hand, unbleached flour is aged naturally after the milling process is completed. Natural aging takes significantly longer than the bleaching process, which is why bleached flour was created. Both varieties are sometimes enriched, which is the process of adding certain nutrients back into the flour 1.

The chemicals used to speed up the aging process in bleached flour cause it to have a whiter color, finer grain, and softer texture. Though there are minimal differences in taste between the two varieties, people with a very sensitive palate may notice a slightly bitter taste in bleached flour.

Bleached flour has a whiter color, finer grain, and softer texture, while unbleached flour has a denser grain and tougher texture. Bleached flour is treated with chemical agents to speed up the aging process. Both varieties contain the same number of calories and amounts of protein, fat, carbs, and fiber per cup grams. However, unbleached, unrefined, whole-wheat varieties may be richer in several important nutrients.

In particular, whole-wheat flour packs more fiber, vitamin E, manganese, copper, and antioxidants 4. Both bleached and unbleached flours are also often enriched with B vitamins like folate, niacin, vitamin B6, and thiamine 1.

Bleached and unbleached white flours are nearly identical in terms of nutrition. Other varieties of unbleached flour, such as whole-wheat flour, may contain more fiber, vitamin E, manganese, copper, and antioxidants.