the evils of flour

I've been on a diet lately. The plethora of nutritional advice raining on me from all angles of media is just soaking in. I've got a pretty good idea of the things that are bad for me, and I've been trying to avoid them: white flour, sugar, meats and processed crap. Yesterday my boyfriend asked me why white flour is so bad, as he made a large roll quickly disappear. I stumbled around, but didn't really have a good answer.

Here's a good answer, from a review of Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food":

It began with refined flour in the 1870s which removed bran and wheat germ to produce long-lasting snowy white flour. Consumers loved it because flour no longer turned rancid, and it didn't become infected with bugs.

Okay. Why didn't bugs chomp down on this new flour? Quite simply because the nutrients, the bran, wheat germ, carotene, were gone. Pollan explains, ". . . this gorgeous white powder was nutritionally worthless, or nearly so. Much the same is now true for corn flour and white rice." Take a look at a package of white flour and count the additives that make up for the loss of natural ingredients.