Enriched Flour

Is it though?

Nearly every bread product at our stores and restaurants is made with this kind of flour. What’s the difference between enriched flour and regular flour? Enriched sounds like an improvement - but is it?

What is Enriched Flour exactly?

This is a concise straightforward definition which comes from the website recipetips.com. “Flour that has been processed from grain to remove the bran and germ, bleached to whiten the appearance, and then reformulated with nutrients, such as thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, Vitamin D, iron, and calcium added in accordance with established government guidelines. The nutrients are added because of the removal of the bran and germ, which contain most of the nutrients found in wheat grain.”

Come again? They remove the parts with all the nutrients??

Yes! They take the grain and process out the part of it that has the majority of the nutrients. Then they add back in synthesized molecular copies of those identifiable nutrients. Moreover 20 essential nutrients are removed and only 5 are required to be replaced.

?? Why take them out if they’re just going to put them back in?

“The removal of the oily germ helps the flour to keep for much longer periods.”

Mainly because shelf life is extended through this process. However we must note that not all the nutrients are being restored because if they were then there wouldn’t be any difference between the two products.

And so what does that mean for me? Should I care?

To answer these questions we have to understand the process of food spoiling. Food spoiling is actually the process of food being eaten by little tiny microbes. In every day life, if we leave our food on the counter, little microbes start to eat it as quickly as they can. Sometimes we do this on purpose in the examples of fermented foods or live cultured foods.

Ok so little microbes don’t like to eat enriched wheat flour. That’s good right? Then they won’t eat my food?

Unfortunately not - These little microbes in our kitchen that eat our food when we leave it out also live in our gut and are the inhabitants forming our micro biomes. The micro biome and it’s correlated study is radically changing modern health science as we know it today. It turns out these little microbes are responsible for everything from digestion, to immunity, to circadian function, to energy and mood. There are literally billions of them existing in your gut right now.

Herein lies our problem - If the microbes outside don’t want to eat the bread, then the microbes inside don’t want to eat it either. Fresh food spoils because it is nutritious and that’s how you know it’s good food. The microbes outside eat it as quickly as they can which means when you eat it, the microbes inside do the same. Would you want to eat food that never spoils?

And so a somewhat sobering proposition begins to reveal itself. Enriched Flour is a process created to increase the profit of food companies. Not only can the food sit on the shelf for months, but this also allows them to sell it more cheaply. And so if you’re a believer in the idea that there is no such thing as a free lunch like I am. Then we must ask ourselves what is the cost here? Can we really be getting the same product that magically sits on the shelf for longer and also costs less?

It seems to me that the cost we pay in this scenario is the quality of the food and the nourishment we receive from it. Enriched Flour extends shelf life at the cost of reducing our life.

What can we do?

According to the Global Burden of Disease study a collaborative effort that assessed risk factors for death and disability for 187 countries from 1990 to 2010.  The #1 cause of death and disability for the United States is our diet.

In my opinion, our most effective option is to bring the matter into our personal lives and exercise our personal freedom of choice. I don’t think the FDA is going to do anything about this one for a while but the fact is we do have choices.

Whole Foods, Fresh Thyme, and other grocery stores have bakeries where they sell fresh breads and many of them are made with whole wheat flour. Dave’s killer bread is also made with whole wheat flour. We have the personal choice to buy food products made with real ingredients and reject the products that are not. The Whole Foods Multigrain bread is a personal favorite of mine and I 10/10 recommend.

I’d also like to make a shoutout to a company called Janies Mill. I first found them about a year ago and I think their flour is amazing. I can genuinely experience the nutrient value difference in their flours compared with other flours I’ve had.