Flours today are more refined and more likely to be bleached.

Extended with fillers and soaked in sweeteners is stated to be how "grains are typically available to us." Wonderbread is a fair example, and the "standard" muffin that typically has 30 or more grams of sugar is another. Oatmeal today, in its most common presentations, will have a great deal of sugar.

What does "more refined" mean in this context, and what makes that bad? In other words, is flour simply ground to smaller sizes, chemically altered to remove certain elements, ...?

There is no/very little fiber and no/very little complex carbs, so your body reacts to it just like it would table sugar.

Refined flour has a high glycemic index, so do starches like potatoes.

It spikes your blood sugar levels very quickly.

Wheat germ is removed from white flour in order to increase shelf-life and rising ability, which removes useful fatty-acids, oils and nutrients as well as fiber and protein. Whole-wheat flour is flour that has not had the germ removed.

Wheat germ was removed from white flour in 1914 too, as pointed out in the original article.

No, of course not. I was being metaphorical. However, yesterday when I opened a box of flour that I'd ordered from the internet, I realised that it made me feel kinda snobby. Why do I order flour off the internet? Protein content. Read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flour#Flour_type_numbers

There's a lot more to flour production than the milling. Or the bleaching. We think of flour as just being "ground wheat" -- turns out, there's plenty of kinds you never see, which have a greater nutritional value than what your standard preprepared-from-grains prepackaged food item is made from. Think of it as the difference between the coffee you buy in the supermarket in tins and the beans you pick up at Intelligentsia or Peets. Prepackaged foods are optimized for profit to the manufacturer, using the cheapest available ingredients.

What are your sources of grains? Specifically, if you taped a USDA Food Pyramid graphic to your refrigerator and kept track of how many servings of each as per those recommendations are you consuming a day? Remember that one sandwich is two servings of grain. (I am NOT endorsing the USDA food pyramid. Just using it as a reference point.) You might even get Mr Taubes to admit that not all grains are equal.

As for extending prepackaged foods with fillers, look for ingredients on the label such as carboxymethyl cellulose, carageenan, guar gum, xanthan gum, agar, pectin or maltodextrin. These things are called stabilizers, thickening agents and bulking agents by the food industry. They are cheap, and some of them are not entirely bad for you, as they contain indigestible fibers, but for the most part, they are nutritionally empty. Real, good food that is made the proper way doesn't need to be thickened, bulked up or stabilized.

As a would-have-been pastry chef and baker, this is a topic somewhat dear to my heart. It's somewhat suspicious that I lived on bread, yogurt, cheese and pasta in CH for 19 months and still lost 65lbs. My hunch -- and it's only a hunch -- is that there's something in our food here in the US that's partly to blame.

Also, my great-grandmother would have used groats, not steamed, rolled quick-cooking oats. With no sugar.

> No, of course not. I was being metaphorical.

Also, patronizing. And quite possibly mistaken. I mean, how do you know what was in US flour in 1914? It was legal to mix it with chalk dust and cornstarch not very far before that, and I think it still was in 1914: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20810FB3D5C1...

http://www.rsc.org/education/eic/issues/2005mar/thefightagai... claims:

    To whiten bread, for example, bakers sometimes added 
    alum (…) and chalk to the flour, while mashed potatoes, 
    plaster of Paris (calcium sulphate), pipe clay and even 
    sawdust could be added to increase the weight of their 
    loaves. Rye flour or dried powdered beans could be used 
    to replace wheat flour and the sour taste of stale flour 
    could be disguised with ammonium carbonate.

Anyway, so at the time, I think there were already a lot of food additives in use. They just weren't systematically vetted for toxicity the way they are today.

> However, yesterday when I opened a box of flour that I'd ordered from the internet, I realised that it made me feel kinda snobby. Why do I order flour off the internet? Protein content. Read this:

Thank you! That was awesome! I had no idea.

> carboxymethyl cellulose, carageenan, guar gum, xanthan gum, agar, pectin or maltodextrin.

It's true that those are common additives, and as you say that they are generally not unhealthy (those are all fiber, protein, or a mixture of the two, aren't they? Except maltodextrin, which is a starch), but they are usually a tiny fraction of the food.

> Real, good food that is made the proper way doesn't need to be thickened, bulked up or stabilized.

I don't agree. I use cornstarch, arrowroot, or even white flour as bulking and thickening agents when I make real, good food the proper way, and I often use milk, mustard, or egg as stabilizers. I've used lemon peel as a stabilizer too when I made blackberry jam, because it contains pectin. I don't know how you propose we should make blackberry jam without adding stabilizers?

I don't know of any reason to believe that the more popular food additives you list are any more dangerous than the traditional ones I usually use. I just don't happen to have them in my pantry or have experience cooking with them. (Indeed, many traditional additives like sassafras and lead sugar have been discovered to be toxic in the last couple of centuries, but to my knowledge, there still hasn't been a systematic testing program.)

I recognize that you're probably a lot more experienced at cooking than I am, so maybe I'm totally off the wall here. Enlighten me!

> Also, patronizing. And quite possibly mistaken.

Perhaps I was unclear. It was my intention to point out two things. First, that the base ingredient grains we eat now are a great deal different from what was regularly consumed in 1914. Second that our sources of grains are more likely to be prepackaged foods containing ingredients that were very uncommon in 1914. This was done as a means of pointing out a significant logical fallacy in the original article.

Seems like we've got some scope mismatch here. I very specifically want to point out that what goes into a loaf of bread now is not the same as what went into a loaf of bread in 1914. Fine white flour (and sugar) were still somewhat dear around the turn of the century. It's no surprise that a dishonest baker would extend it with chalk. The less close you were to the city, the more dear they were or the more likely you were to grow your own or do without. I made the assumption that most people would eat more coarse bread. Just for kicks, I looked up the ingredients of three different brands of bread. The main ingredient was, indeed, flour. Typically followed by HCFS, water, yeast and less than 2% of stuff like barley malt, soybean oil, diglycerides, and guar gum. Thus I am willing to accept "exaggerated" over "wrong" -- while I was writing, my frustration over the afore-mentioned ingredients in DAIRY products was foremost in my mind. If you haven't already read it, I recommend _Food Politics_ by Marion Nestle. http://www.foodpolitics.com/

It just so happens that I've got a stack of very old cookbooks that belonged to my great grandmother. Well, half of it. My mom has the other half. I started baking using recipes from those books around the age of 9. The backs of these books are full of notes written in her spidery handwriting. Notes about substitutions (she lived through two world wars), notes about compensating for ambient conditions, and the recipes from her childhood. Well, longer than that -- she didn't come to the US until she was 30. When my results did not match hers, I assumed her base ingredients were different from mine. This partly responsible for what lead to learning how flour is typed by ash in Europe. It's also how I learned that most of the oats consumed in the US around the time my great grandmother emigrated here would have been imported from Scotland and Canada, and that they would have been steel-cut to increase cooking time. And that rolled oats came into being sometime around 1910. It's also what eventually lead me to read _Day of St Anthony's Fire_, but that's a whole 'nother topic of conversation. From this, I'm making an "educated guess" as to what a cup of flour would have been like in 1914. And you have to admit, it read well.

This would be one of those deals where I have zero credentials to offer other than the claims made in the last paragraph. Or you can ask tptacek... pretty sure he'll provide a glowing reference for my cooking skills. Having no phone, television or computer in my childhood, I turned to the big stack of cookbooks and the abundance of fresh ingredients available on our small farm. Doesn't make me an expert, but I am quite facile at slinging some tasty hash.

As for non-grain foods, jam is, more or less, flavored pectin. Why is there pectin in Stonyfield Farms yogurt? So they have to put less actual yogurt in there. Why is there 'modified food starch' in Breakstones's cottage cheese? "Mouth feel," is what they'll tell you. But I've had hüttenkäse that had much better "mouth feel" with nothing in it but milk, salt and culture (likely due to higher fat content).

And thanks for the links. It amazes me to think that my great grandparents -- the ones I knew, at least -- lived into their late 90s with plaster, alum, strychnine, sawdust and bean flour in their food. Maybe the fact that the latest act cited in the second article was passed in 1899 helped, somehow.