Good Calories, Bad Calories

This might seem obviously disadvantageous, but white flour had its proponents. It was traditionally considered “more attractive to the eye,” as Sir Stanley Davidson and Reginald Passmore observed in their textbook Human Nutrition and Dietetics (1963). It was preferred by bakers for its baking properties, and because it contains less fat than wholemeal flour it is less likely to go rancid and is more easily preserved. Millers preferred it because the leftover bran from refining rice and wheat (as with the molasses left over from refining sugar) could be sold profitably for livestock feed and industrial uses. Nutritionists also argued that white flour had better “digestibility” than whole-meal, because the presence of fiber in the latter prevented the complete digestion of any protein or carbohydrates that were attached. White flour’s low protein, vitamin, and mineral content also made it “less liable than whole meal flour to infestation by beetles and the depredation of rodents,” as Davidson and Passmore wrote.

It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that white flour became suitably inexpensive for popular consumption, with the invention of roller mills for grinding the grain. Until then, only the privileged classes ate white flour, and the poor ate wholemeal. Sugar was also a luxury until the mid-nineteenth century, when sugar-beet cultivation spread throughout the civilized world. In 1874, with the removal of tariffs on sugar importation in Britain, sugar consumption skyrocketed and led to the eventual development of the biscuit, cake, chocolate, confectionery, and soft-drink industries. By the beginning of World War I, the English were already eating more than ninety pounds of sugar per capita per year—a 500-percent increase in a single century—and Americans more than eighty pounds. Not until the mid-twentieth century did mechanical rollers begin replacing hand-pounding of rice in Asian nations, so that the poor could eat polished white rice instead of brown.

Explorers would carry enormous quantities of white flour, rice, and sugar on their travels and would trade them or give them away to the natives they met along the way.^*27 In The Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin tells how the expedition’s members persuaded Aborigines in Australia to hold a dancing party with “the offer of some tubs of rice and sugar.” As early as 1892, the Barrow Eskimos were already described as having “acquired a fondness for many kinds of civilized food, especially bread of any kind, flour, sugar, and molasses.” These foods remained primary items of trade and commerce with isolated populations well into the twentieth century.^†28

Until the last few decades, the nutritional debate over the excessive refining of flour and sugar had always been about whether the benefits of digestibility and the pleasing white color outweighed any potential disadvantages of removing the protein, vitamins, and minerals. In late-nineteenth-century England, the physician Thomas Allinson, head of the Bread and Food Reform League, wrote: “The true staff of life is whole meal bread.” Allinson was among the first to suggest a relationship between refined carbohydrates and disease. “One great curse of this country,” wrote Allinson, “is constipation of the bowel which is caused in great measure by white bread. From this constipation come piles, varicose veins, headaches, miserable feelings, dullness and other ailments…. As a consequence pill factories are now an almost necessary part of the state.” Allinson’s chain of cause and effect from white bread to constipation to chronic disease was given credibility in the late 1920s by the innovative and eccentric Scottish surgeon Sir Arbuthnot Lane in a book entitled The Prevention of the Diseases Peculiar to Civilization. The hypothesis would hold a tight grasp on a school of British medical researchers for decades to come.