THE BREAD QUESTION

 

IT IS SPIRITUAL AND PHYSICAL

FOR HEART AND HEALTH

Growing up, my father (who did not eat white flour, white sugar, or margarine) knew there was something wrong with the food culture in America. To prove his view to his children, he would sit on a loaf of white bread; it went “flat as a pancake.” My mother stopped buying white bread when we were young.

She didn’t stop there. It is my mother’s legacy. She began making whole wheat bread. Before finding the latest news on health was convenient, she knew instinctively: whole grains made sense.

Since my father and mother began the emphasis on eating healthy food, it was natural for their eight children to know there is a difference between processed and whole food.

It is not just for my husband and me now. Our son and daughter in law asked me to show them how to make bread, then again brought it up, “When we come over are we going to make bread?” Below is a simple recipe for making whole wheat bread.

The naturally harvested wheat includes the bran, endosperm and germ. An unwitting consumer is denied the benefit of whole grain when it is taken apart and sold separately.

If the endosperm is processed (bleached white), then made into bread, it is minus the powerful nutrition found in the whole grain. The bread made from it becomes the airy white loaf most often sold in grocery stores at home and the world over. The white flour is eye appealing and has a much longer shelf life. The bran and germ are gone from the grain and sold separately.

This “allenpuff” which my father called it, could be one major reason for health problems. When a lifetime of devitalized bread with no heart strengthening power from protein, and minerals is our regular diet we suffer. Often the food industry separates the most nutritious parts and sells them separately.

Bread bleached and degermed are not health building. Like fast food available everywhere, it is a trap. Easy, quick, cheap, habit forming, addictive. Fad diets confuse and frustrate us and work against hope for good health. When a better Way is right in front of you, take it! “Who satisfies your mouth with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagles.” Psalm 103:5

The combination of “fine flour, oil and honey” are included in Scripture all the way through. Until in the New Testament we see Jesus as the perfect picture of healthful bread. “And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.” John 6:35 

"I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." John 6:51.