Jasper Republican, Volume 2, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 December 1875 — Unbolted Wheat. [ARTICLE]

Unbolted Wheat.

Near the close of the last century, when England and France were waging war with each other, the British Parliament passed a law, to take effect for two years, that the army at home should be supplied with bread made from unbolted wheat meal, solely for the purpose of making the wheat go as far as possible. At first the soldiers were exceedingly displeased with this kind of bread and refused to eat it, but after two or three weeks they preferred it to fine flour bread. The result of the experiment was the health of the soldiers improved so much and so manifestly in the course of a few months that the officers and physicians of the army publicly declared that the soldiers were never before so healthy and robust, and that diseases of many kinds had almost entirely disappeared from the army. For a while the use of this bread was almost universal in public institutions and in private families, and it was pronounced by civic physicians by far the most healthy bread that could be eaten. The testimony of sea Captains and whalemen is equally iff favor of wheaten bread. “ The coarser the ship bread is the healthier is my crew,” said a very intelligent sea Captain of thirty-seven years’ experience. The inhabitants of Westphalia, who are a hearty and robust people, capable of enduring the greatest fatigues, are a living testimony to the salutary effects of this sort of bread; and it is remarkable that they are very seldom attacked by acute fevers and those other diseases which wise from bad humors. • In fact the laboring class throughout Europe, Asia and Africa use bread made out of the whole grain; happily for them they cannot afford to buy fine flour. The more intelligent class of people in our large cities have bread made of unbolted wheat on their tables every day, and depend upon it; but in country places the idea prevails that it is cheap and, coarse, and that to feed a guest on Graham bread would be inhospitable. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Our first-class hotels have regularly on their bills of ftire “ cracked-wheat,” “ hominy,” u oat-meal mush;” and some advanced teachers of hygiene are beginning to hope that the reign of fine flour is passing away. Of oat-meal as a diet one of oor writers says: “ Americans are gradually awakening up to the fact that oatmeal is by no means an unimportant article of diet. As a food, the merit o - which has stood the test of centuries, and which is designed to promote the sanitary condition of the nation, by laying the

* - - • foundation for more ready and vigorous frames for the coming generation, let us regard its adoption as an article of diet, as nothing short of a national good. Its phosphorus gives a healthful impulse to the brain, and on no other food can-one endure so great or so prolonged mental labor as on oat-meal porridge.— N. T. Tribune.