From
AlterNet / By Maggie Beidelman
. . . Americans are severely lacking in potassium, magnesium and Vitamin E, nutrients that are found in the whole wheat seed, but not in modern white flour — and not as much as you’d think in whole wheat flour, either.
“There’s pretty good evidence that being short on zinc, magnesium and certain vitamins make for a weaker gut,” says Killilea, a former nutritionist. Gluten is hard enough to digest on its own as it is — adding modern flour only makes it worse.
It’s funny, really: modern wheat flour is causing us to lose our ability to digest modern wheat flour.
What happened? For thousands of years, wheat was ground in whole, either by hand or with a hand-powered stone-on-stone quern, like the one Albala used. As populations grew and technology improved, donkeys and horses were used to pull large stone mills, grinding the grain between huge slabs of rock. Later, a water-powered wheel turned the mill to grind the grain.