The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1875-08-14 00:00:00

BREAD.
(From the Herald of Health)

Bread is the staff of life. Good bread contains the
best food for man, in the proportions required for the
healthy nourishment of the system. We tire of many
kinds of food; hut we eat bread every day (so it be
good bread) with the same relish. A certain variety
is desirable; but if we could have but one kind of
food, we should choose bread. In a certain sense we
must consider all kinds of farinaceous food as bread.
Wheat is the king of grains—the most perfect food of
man—but we have bread also of rye, oatmeal, barley,
maize, rice, &c. Even a baked potatoe is closely allied
to bread, and the bread fruit of the tropics is a
nourishing substitute.
We do not know why it is, but the fact is observed
by every traveller, that while one finds good bread in
France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and best of all.
k.erhaps, in Austria, good bread in England is very
rare. As a rule, the bread ot English bakers is bad,
and consequently unhealthy. It is dry, chippy, flavour-
less, or sour, or bitter. English rolls are doughy and
indigestible. Much of this bread is made of the flour
of inferior or damaged wheat, or flour that has turned
sour. This is doctored with alum, and alum makes
the bread absorb a third more water, and so adds to
the profits of the baker. It is overfermented, to make
big loaves. Whatever the rea.scn may be, bakers' bread
is bad as a rule—the good is the exception.

Few people practice the economy of making domestic
bread. Servants either do not know, or will not take
the trouble. It is so much easier to get it of the baker.
There is the bother of getting flour and yeast, of rais-
ing the bread and then of baking it. At the best,
whiLe bread made of the innermost portion of the
wheat is often a cause of disease. Unless one eats
considerable proportions of fruit or vegetables with it,
it produces constipation.
The sweetest and most nutritious, the healthiest
bread in the world is that made from unbolted wheat
flour—brown bread; not the dry and tasteless stuff
sometimes made by bakers by mixing bran with their
ordinary dough, but bread made of the "whole meal"
of good sound wheat, and containing all its nutritive
elements. Chemists have found by analysis that the
nitrogenous or flesh4orming portion of wheat r,sides
chiefly in its outer layer—the very portion thrown
away, or given te cattle; and physiologists have also
discovered that it is this portion which keeps up a
healthy action of the bowels. No person who lives
chiefly or largely on genuine brown bread, or its equi-
valent, in perhaps a better form—porridge made of
coarse wheat meal—ever suffers from constipation, and
long-standing cases are speedily cured by a diet of pure
wheat and fruit. I have never known a case, even of
years' standing, and constant use of aperients, that did
not soon yield to such a diet.
From the earliest known ages brown wheat bread has
been famed as a most healthy, invigorating food.
Hippocrates, the father of medicine, prescribes it; the
hardy Spartans lived on it; the Romans of the heroic
ages lived on it, and their armies conquered the world
on a diet of brown bread. The most healthy peasantry
of central Europe eat it as their common food. Baron
Steuben said the peculiar healthfulness of the Prussian
soldiery a century ago was owing to their living al-
most entirely on unbolted wheat bread. During the
naval glory of Holland her soldiers ate the same kind.
During the wars of Napoleon, when wheat was dear in
England, the army, from motives of economy, was
supplied with brown bread. The soldiers at first re-
fused to eat it—threw it away—all but mutinied; but
in a few days they liked it better than the white; and
their health so much improved that in a few months
disease was almost banished. Many of the nobility
adopted it, and physicians began to prescribe it. An
orphan asylum in New York was cured of epidemic
ophthalmia by the use of brown bread in place of white.
And this brown bread with its equivalent prepara-
tions is the purest, the healthiest, the best form of
human food. The model food for childhood and youth;
the food of growth, purity, beauty, intellect—in one
word, of health, is brown bread, milk and fruit. There
is absolutely no need of any other. A pound of wheat
has more nutritious value then three pounds of beef
or mutton. Lean beef or mutton is 75 per cent. water
to begin with. The remaining elements—fibrine,
gelatine, albumen—are identically the same as in
wheat, but mingled with animal impurities, and the
wheat is superior in heat-forming elements. Bread
and fruit are the natural food of man; the flesh of
animals is an artificial substitute.