With the dawn of the industrial age, white flour—once available only to the wealthy—became available to all. By the early 1900s, white bread had largely replaced “coarse” whole-grain bread, and white flour added to sugar and spices resulted in the proliferation of cakes, donuts, and pastries in the diets of both the rich and poor.
During the 1920s and 1930s, researchers began to study the factors in foods that contributed to health—vitamins and minerals—and realized that white flour lacked the nutrients that nature put into whole grains. One of these researchers was Dr. Weston Price, who noted in his studies of isolated, so-called “primitive” peoples that when white flour and other devitalized foods were introduced into these communities, rampant tooth decay and disease of every sort soon followed.
