What's so bad about enriched flour and why shouldn't I eat it?!
Answers: I would really like to know!
The term "enriched" is especially misleading when looking at the final product. Such a term readily invokes the impression and visceral response that any food that is deliberately enriched must truly be an especially good food to eat. In fact, so much is taken out of the grain products in the first place that the subsequent addition of some vitamins and minerals to those products barely mitigates their loss when they were initially removed from the grain. To use an analogy, if a robber takes the last ten dollars out of your wallet, you've definitely been acutely and totally depleted of your immediate financial resources. However, if that robber became suddenly sympathetic to your acute financial deficit and decided to return to you one dollar, it is not likely that you would consider yourself "enriched." Rather, you would just consider yourself a little bit less massively depleted of your money. And so it is with grains and modern food processing. Enrichment really only means slightly less massively depleted.
THE IRONY OF FOOD ENRICHMENT
What could be worse than depleting food and then "enriching" that food in the manner noted above? One thing that makes it much worse is when at least one of the added nutrients is really a non-nutrient, toxic additive. The iron that is added to many of our foods today is, in fact, a metallic form of iron.When you click on the link at the end of this newsletter, you will be able to see for yourself that METALLIC IRON FILINGS can be pulled out of a popular breakfast cereal with a strong magnet! Such iron filings have also been pulled out of a number of other "enriched" or "iron-fortified" foods. Iron, like any other nutrient, must be in a food-form, bioavailable state to be useful to the body. When it is not, it not only does little or no good, it can have its own direct toxicity. It defies all logic and common sense to think that grinding shavings off of a bar of iron onto your food, analogous to shredding cheese onto your Italian food, could be anything less than toxic. Yet that appears to be exactly the form of iron that is routinely added to many of the "enriched" food products that we eat today.
Enriched- (because its poor)
Enriched flour is flour that has lost all its nutrients so nutrients have to be added into it.
The term “enriched” is a result of an FDA ruling which said that a pound of enriched flour must have the following quantities of nutrients to qualify: 2.9 milligrams of thiamin, 1.8 milligrams of riboflavin, 24 milligrams of niacin, 0.7 milligrams of folic acid, and 20 milligrams of iron (Note that the first four are B vitamins). Calcium may also be added at a minimum of 960 milligrams per pound.
Enriching is necessary because the processing used to make white flour destroys some of these nutrients that were originally present in the whole grain. These nutrients promote good health and help to prevent some diseases. It is because of these benefits that enriched flour is so prevalent today despite there being no Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations requiring their use.
The effort to start enriching flour started during the 1940’s as a means to improve the health of the British and United States’ wartime populations. The decision to choose flour for enrichment was based on its commonality in those populations diets ranging from the rich to the poor. A major factor in the switch to enriched flour in the United States was the US army’s restriction in 1942 that it would only purchase enriched flour.
The reason that enriched flour is “enriched” as opposed to “fortified” is because the nutrients are added for the purpose of replacing those lost in the flour processing.