You may want to reconsider eating that piece of bread or sandwich. While most everyone knows that white flour is not healthy to begin with, the bleaching agent, itself, creates a dangerous by-product that actually causes diabetes.
It’s well known that refined flour is not healthy because it is bereft of most nutrients. In the refining process, the bran — outer layer of grain, which contains dietary fiber, essential fatty acids, starch, protein, vitamins, and dietary minerals — is removed. Also, the cereal germ, or reproductive part of the plant that contains many nutrients, is also removed to prevent the flour from going rancid. What’s left, the endosperm, is a simple carbohydrate that quickly converts to sugar in the body, which spikes insulin. It’s almost as bad as eating table sugar straight from the bowl.
While the flour may say “enriched” or “fortified,” don’t be fooled. Only a handful of nutrients are added back in, and they may not be in the same quantities as they were taken out. Also, some of these added nutrients are synthetic forms, which don’t necessarily behave the same in the body as the natural forms.
Don’t Be Fooled by the “Whole Wheat” Label
As I wrote in a previous article “Whole Grains Are Not Intact Grains,” when you eat “whole grains,” you may be eating refined flour with the wheat germ and bran added back in. (If the bread, for example, is soft, it’s not whole wheat.) The term “whole grains” is essentially meaningless because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) created a definition friendly to food companies that misleads the consumer.
According to the FDA, “whole grain” means
Cereal grains that consist of the intact, ground, cracked or flaked caryopsis, whose principal anatomical components – the starchy endosperm, germ and bran – are present in the same relative proportions as they exist in the intact caryopsis – should be considered a whole grain food.
Diabetes-Causing Contaminant
Unfortunately, not only is the refined flour more likely to cause diabetes, but the bleached flour is especially dangerous. To bleach flour, one of the agents used is chlorine oxide, which creates a by-product called alloxan, a toxic compound that is used in research labs to induce diabetes in animals. It has no other commercial application. According to the article “The Little-Known Secrets about Bleached Flour…” by osteopathic physician Joseph Mercola, alloxan creates “enormous amounts of free radicals in pancreatic beta cells, thus destroying them.” Beta cells create insulin to help move glucose into your cells, so if the beta cells are destroyed, you will have high amounts of sugar in your blood, hence diabetes.
Avoid Processed Foods
Once my family and I started tossing out the processed foods, we started losing weight without even trying. Any food ingredients that can’t be pronounced or visualized should be avoided because they are faux foods with lots of added chemicals. Most of the Western diseases can be solved by eating whole foods in moderate amounts and getting some moderate exercise. (See my article “The Evolution of My Eating Plan to More of a Natural Diet.”) The results of eating faux food doesn’t just affect the person eating them, but the person’s family and society as well. All will bear the burden of the person’s health care costs.