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Take a cup of flour from 1914 and a cup of AP flour from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other. Take

Take a cup of flour from 1914 and a cup of AP flour from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other. Take a cup of oatmeal from 1914 and a cup of Quaker Oats from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other. Take a slice from loaf of bread baked in the home from 1914 and place it next to a slice of bread from the grocery store bought in 2011. Tell me how they are different. So no, it's not just grains that are making us fat. It's how grains are typically available to us. Highly refined, protein and fiber reduced, extended with fillers and soaked in sweeteners. It's a fact. People won't eat things that taste bad. If I gave you my great-grandmother's breakfast from 1914 (the Scottish one, you get oatmeal), you just might not eat it. I've heard she liked it with ham. And, as other commenters point out, it doesn't hurt that people walked pretty much everywhere 100 years ago. And swept their floors, washed their laundry by hand, walked up lots of stairs as elevators were not in wide adoption.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
Gaussian 16y ago
Exactly. The average American's day starts in the kitchen. It then migrates to the seat of a car, then to a comfy chair at a desk, then back to the steering wheel, which, of course, gives way to the kitchen and the dinner table. Then to the sofa and to bed. Rather than what comprises our diets, I'd prefer to see a chart of obesity plotted against the average square feet of an American home during the same period. (The creeping size of homes being a indicator, in many cases, of sprawl and its related side-effects).
kragen 16y ago
> Take a cup of flour from 1914 and a cup of AP flour from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other. Have you actually done this? Do you really expect someone else to be able to do it? You've managed to come across as really patronizing but I can't tell if you actually have a point. I'm no expert on milling technology, but I imagine today's flour is finer (just from the numbering system: 0, 00, 000, 0000 — I assume the finest flour in the system originally was 1!) but do you expect any other differences? > Highly refined, protein and fiber reduced, extended with fillers and soaked in sweeteners. Extending flour with fillers is illegal now in the US, and it wasn't illegal in 1914. That's probably one big difference. It's just as "protein and fiber reduced" now as it was then (as the original article points out!) and it's not "soaked in sweeteners". Likewise with the oats. What was oatmeal like in 1914? How do you know?
- crystalis 16y ago
  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.
  - nitrogen 16y ago
    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, ...?
    - shpxnvz 16y ago
      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.
      - kragen 16y ago
        Wheat germ was removed from white flour in 1914 too, as pointed out in the original article.
    - chopsueyar 16y ago
      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.
- elptacek 16y ago
  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 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.
anamax 16y ago
> Take a cup of oatmeal from 1914 and a cup of Quaker Oats from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other. The complete ingredients list for my cup of Quaker Oats from 2011 is "100% Whole Rolled Oats". (Yes, you can buy flavored oatmeal packets that contain other things, but your claim is different.) That's what you get in the big round tubs. What, exactly, is different about 1914's oatmeal? Note - saying "they've added lots of stuff" isn't an answer unless you can show that "100%" is wrong. ("Rolled" is a mechanical crushing process and doesn't imply that anything was removed or added.)
- elptacek 16y ago
  Whole rolled oats are typically made by having the chaff removed from the groat. Then the groats are parcooked by steaming, rolled flat and sometimes baked. These are your "Old Fashioned Quaker Oats." "Quick-Cooking" varieties are made in a similar way, only the chaff AND the bran have been removed. The bran is the nutritious part. Around the turn of the century, the US imported most of its oats from Scotland and Canada. These would have been "steel cut oats" with the bran left on them. Rolled oats would have been relatively new in 1914. I have no idea when quick-cooking oats appeared. So the difference is in what you buy. Think 'pig' versus 'pork' -- to a food scientist, there's a word for the grain in every stage of it's processing. But to us, it's just an oat. It's convenient language for Quaker to put "100% Whole Rolled Oats" on the package, because that's what they are. Are they whole rolled groats with the bran still on them? Or are they whole rolled endosperms, which are mostly the high-calorie starch that the germ uses to become a plant? BTW, if you love oatmeal as much as I do, you will appreciate slow-cooked oats: http://www.foodnetwork.com/good-eats/oat-cuisine/index.html http://www.foodnetwork.com/good-eats/oat-cuisine/index.html

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

Gaussian 16y ago

Exactly. The average American's day starts in the kitchen. It then migrates to the seat of a car, then to a comfy chair at a desk, then back to the steering wheel, which, of course, gives way to the kitchen and the dinner table. Then to the sofa and to bed. Rather than what comprises our diets, I'd prefer to see a chart of obesity plotted against the average square feet of an American home during the same period. (The creeping size of homes being a indicator, in many cases, of sprawl and its related side-effects).

kragen 16y ago

> Take a cup of flour from 1914 and a cup of AP flour from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other. Have you actually done this? Do you really expect someone else to be able to do it? You've managed to come across as really patronizing but I can't tell if you actually have a point. I'm no expert on milling technology, but I imagine today's flour is finer (just from the numbering system: 0, 00, 000, 0000 — I assume the finest flour in the system originally was 1!) but do you expect any other differences? > Highly refined, protein and fiber reduced, extended with fillers and soaked in sweeteners. Extending flour with fillers is illegal now in the US, and it wasn't illegal in 1914. That's probably one big difference. It's just as "protein and fiber reduced" now as it was then (as the original article points out!) and it's not "soaked in sweeteners". Likewise with the oats. What was oatmeal like in 1914? How do you know?

crystalis 16y ago
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.
- nitrogen 16y ago
  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, ...?
  - shpxnvz 16y ago
    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.
    - kragen 16y ago
      Wheat germ was removed from white flour in 1914 too, as pointed out in the original article.
  - chopsueyar 16y ago
    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.
elptacek 16y ago
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 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.

anamax 16y ago

> Take a cup of oatmeal from 1914 and a cup of Quaker Oats from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other. The complete ingredients list for my cup of Quaker Oats from 2011 is "100% Whole Rolled Oats". (Yes, you can buy flavored oatmeal packets that contain other things, but your claim is different.) That's what you get in the big round tubs. What, exactly, is different about 1914's oatmeal? Note - saying "they've added lots of stuff" isn't an answer unless you can show that "100%" is wrong. ("Rolled" is a mechanical crushing process and doesn't imply that anything was removed or added.)

elptacek 16y ago
Whole rolled oats are typically made by having the chaff removed from the groat. Then the groats are parcooked by steaming, rolled flat and sometimes baked. These are your "Old Fashioned Quaker Oats." "Quick-Cooking" varieties are made in a similar way, only the chaff AND the bran have been removed. The bran is the nutritious part. Around the turn of the century, the US imported most of its oats from Scotland and Canada. These would have been "steel cut oats" with the bran left on them. Rolled oats would have been relatively new in 1914. I have no idea when quick-cooking oats appeared. So the difference is in what you buy. Think 'pig' versus 'pork' -- to a food scientist, there's a word for the grain in every stage of it's processing. But to us, it's just an oat. It's convenient language for Quaker to put "100% Whole Rolled Oats" on the package, because that's what they are. Are they whole rolled groats with the bran still on them? Or are they whole rolled endosperms, which are mostly the high-calorie starch that the germ uses to become a plant? BTW, if you love oatmeal as much as I do, you will appreciate slow-cooked oats: http://www.foodnetwork.com/good-eats/oat-cuisine/index.html http://www.foodnetwork.com/good-eats/oat-cuisine/index.html