The article's not massively long, Ellbell - here is is. I don't think it's in flour - but I would say try to get decent stuff:
"The poisonous truth about our daily bread
It's thought of as the staff of life, but the truth is that some loaves are actually harming us
Andrew Whitley
Sunday September 17, 2006
The Observer
Take charge of your health, says the government, by choosing the right foods. This is easier said than done with our most basic food - bread. To make sensible choices, we need to know what goes into our daily loaf and how it is made. But the big bakers won't tell us, exploiting a loophole in the law which classes certain substances used in bread as 'processing aids' that need not be declared. While they refuse to be open about the way bread is made, we should assume that they have something to hide.
A recent, much-publicised statement by teachers, writers and psychologists claimed that childhood is being 'poisoned', in part by the 'junk food' that is known to be a factor in some child development disorders. A child's physical and psychological growth, they warned, 'cannot be accelerated. They change in biological time, not at electrical speed'. British industrial baking, too, appears to have abandoned the timescale of biology. Time has been removed from the baking process, replaced by electrical energy and additives. Industrial bakers target children with 'crustless' loaves whose nutritional vacuity is masked by appeals to convenience and indulgence.
Children dislike crusts, they assert, ignoring the fact that childhood constipation, obesity and diabetes, all possibly affected by the bread we eat, are major public-health concerns.
But give or take the crusts, such infantile fodder is no different from the bread that 95 per cent of the British population eats. It is relatively cheap and available in a multitude of brands and varieties, including ever more options purporting to include some 'healthy' additions. Bread is not what it was.
About 15 years ago, people started asking me to make bread without wheat, yeast or gluten. Shop bread made them feel 'bloated' or worse. Irritable bowel syndrome, candidiasis and Crohn's disease all entered common parlance. Coeliac disease now affects one in a 100 people, other wheat intolerances probably more. How did we get here?
We have bred wheat to produce high yields in intensive growing conditions with scant regard for its nutritional quality; modern varieties have 30-50 per cent fewer minerals than traditional ones. Fast roller milling separates grain into its constituent parts so effectively that white flour has up to 88 per cent less of a range of minerals and vitamins than whole wheat. A recent study showed that organic stoneground flour had 50 per cent more magnesium and 46 per cent more zinc than chemically grown roller-milled flour.
The changes to baking have been equally drastic. The Chorleywood Bread Process, invented in 1961, uses intense energy, chemical additives and large amounts of yeast to produce loaves in a very short time. Nearly all the bread eaten in Britain is made by this method or one that uses similar additives. If dough is not allowed to ferment for several hours, there is little chance for natural bacteria to destroy harmful elements in the dough and to make important nutrients available to the human body.
Worse still, enzymes, often genetically modified, are added to flour and dough to make loaves bigger and keep them squishy for days, if not weeks, after baking. But most troubling of all, recent research suggests that one enzyme, transglutaminase, used in food manufacturing and baking, may actually turn some of the gliadin protein in wheat flour into a form that can be toxic to some people. Even the organic loaves made by the industrial bakers can contain this stuff.
The industry is keen to sell us 'premium' loaves with fashionable additions of omega-3, inulin, folic acid and the like. But if we don't attend to the innate quality of our wheat and flour, our diet will consist of little more than nutrified industrial slop.
The relatively affluent may be able to afford a broad diet, but poorer people depend disproportionately on bread. For them, especially, it matters that every slice is as good as possible.
Bread is life. Literally, in the sense that, properly made, it has what agricultural pioneer George Stapledon called 'the ability to enliven'. Symbolically, in that it stands for all food. We need to reclaim the staff of life from those who profit by selling it to us and refuse to admit what's in it. Increasing numbers of people are already doing this and making bread slowly with their own hands.
Were the baking industry to stop and ask itself what this signifies, I'd be tempted to say: it's about time."