Brown Bread

In the article below the advantages of brown bread over white bread are presented. Does it really matter whether we eat brown bread or white bread?

The wheat grain consists chiefly of starch, cellulose, gluten, and water, with small quantities of fat and earthy salts, and from one to two per cent. of a peculiar nitrogenous substance called cerealine. These compounds are unequally distributed throughout the structure of the berry. Examined with the microscope, each grain is seen to be made up of four distinct coats, or envelopes, surrounding a mass of cells filled with starch grains. This collection of starch constitutes the chief bulk of the grain, and in the wrappings external to it are found the greater portions of the gluten, oily matter, earthy salts, and cerealine.

This last-mentioned substance possesses the power of transforming starch into sugar, and thus becomes an important aid in the process of digestion. But as wheat is ordinarily ground, the outer portions of the grain are separated as bran; and as the more completely they are thus removed, the finer and whiter will be the flour, it commonly happens that most of the earthy or bone-making constituents, much of the cerealine and fatty matter, and no inconsiderable portion of the gluten, are lost with the bran. In the use of unbolted or graham flour, these are retained, and it is thereby rendered not only more nutritious, but by the presence of the cerealine also more digestible. How this substance is affected, by the process of baking was long a matter of uncertainty; but from the experiments of Professor Attfield, as lately mentioned in the Lancet, it appears that six-tenths of the cerealine remains in a soluble condition in the bread, and is therefore free to exert its starch-changing power when taken into the stomach. — Sel.