Our Bread May Be Killing Us

I'll be honest with you. I didn’t expect a conversation about bread to change my mind about much of anything.

I'm a meat guy. I tell my sons to eat meat, eggs, and drink the raw milk. That's what will build them into strong men. In my head, the equation has always been pretty simple: meat good, carbs bad. So, when Sue Becker of Bread Beckers sat down across from me, I was skeptical, a little resistant, and fully prepared to be polite and move on.

By the end of that conversation, I had gone from avoiding bread to wondering how quickly we could start milling our own flour.

What Happened to Our Bread?

Here's the part that made me genuinely angry.

In 1900, America was considered one of the healthiest nations in the world. Today we are one of the sickest. That decline didn't happen by accident, and it didn't happen slowly. You can trace it almost directly to what happened to our flour.

For most of human history, bread was made from whole grain. Communities were literally built around grain mills. People milled what they needed and used it. When you mill a grain and keep it whole, you have one of the most nutrient-dense foods God put on this earth. Of the 44 to 48 essential nutrients your body needs for life, wheat is only missing four.

Then in the late 1800s, someone had a profitable idea. If you strip the bran and germ away from the wheat kernel and keep only the endosperm, which is essentially protein and starch, that flour doesn't spoil. It ships anywhere, it sits on shelves forever, and it makes the soft, fluffy, white bread that everybody wanted.

So, they did it. Industrial steel rolling mills stripped the bran and germ away, sold the nutrient-rich byproducts as animal feed, and fed the masses the empty white interior of the grain.

Three diseases became epidemic almost immediately. Beriberi, a nervous disorder from B1 deficiency. Pellagra, which caused burning skin sores, severe bowel disease, dementia, and death, so widespread in Georgia and South Carolina that mental institutions couldn't hold all the patients. And iron-deficient anemia. Health officials traced all three back to the missing nutrients that bread had provided for centuries.

The government went to the millers and said put the bran and germ back. The millers said no. They had found a lucrative side market for those byproducts: animal feed. The animals were getting the nutrition, and we were getting the husk.

So, in 1941, during World War II, when military recruits were found to be so nutritionally deficient they couldn't serve, the government mandated an enrichment program. Here's what enrichment actually means: they stripped out 35 to 40 nutrients and were legally required to put back four. Three synthetic B vitamins and iron. That's what they call enrichment.

And then they bleached it. Nitrogen trichloride, a chlorine derivative, was used for more than 25 years to whiten the flour until they discovered it caused seizures and hyperactivity in dogs. When it was removed, they added a different chlorine derivative that is still used today. It’s called potassium bromate, and it’s currently under scrutiny in Florida for links to liver and thyroid issues. The average woman in America has a 60% chance of developing thyroid issues. There may be a connection worth paying attention to.

Surely they know. They just don't care. And I don’t think MAHA can fix this. No government program is going to put the bran and germ back in commercial bread any more than the millers did in 1900.

This one falls to us.

Gluten Is Not the Problem

My oldest son developed a severe gluten intolerance. My wife had significant issues with it too. For years, gluten was the enemy in our house.

But Sue reframed that for me entirely.

Gluten is not a toxin. It is a naturally occurring protein formed when two proteins God put in wheat, gliadin and glutenin, combine with water. It is what makes bread rise and is what gives bread structure.

The problem isn't gluten. It's the processed white flour it lives in. Strip the fiber and nutrients out of the grain, compromise your gut's ability to digest protein properly, and then watch your body react to what it can no longer process correctly. Gluten gets blamed for a problem it didn't cause.

Sue has watched people who were down to four or five foods they could tolerate, people who were housebound, people covered in burning skin sores that wouldn't respond to medication, find their health restored after switching to bread made from freshly milled whole grain. A child came off twelve medications. A man who said the pain made him want to die was symptom-free within months. These are the kind of testimonies that have been building Sue's business by word of mouth for 34 years.

What You Can Do About It

The solution is not complicated, but it does require taking ownership of something most of us have completely outsourced.

You need a home grain mill that sits on your counter. It's an electric appliance. You pour grain in, flour comes out in about 30 seconds. Eight cups of grain mills into twelve cups of fresh flour. From there, a bread machine does the rest. Five minutes of prep, a timer, and you wake up to a loaf of real bread. That's the entry point. It is not as hard as it sounds, and the difference in what your family is eating is not marginal.

Sue's company, Bread Beckers, has been doing this for over three decades. They sell grain mills, wheat in food-grade sealed buckets with a shelf life of 25-plus years, and every variety of grain you'd need to get started. Every employee in their store mills their own grain and makes their own bread. They know what they're talking about because they're living it.

The Provider Angle

Sue's parting word to our audience was this: be the health provider in your home.

That hit home for me because I think a lot of us as men have completely checked out of the food conversation and handed it to our wives with zero engagement. She handles the kitchen, we handle the rest. But what we're feeding our children matters as much as if not more than any other area of provision. More children are harmed by the food they eat than by drugs, alcohol, and tobacco combined.

We train hard, we carry, and we prepare for threats, but the slow erosion of our families' health through what's in the grocery store bread aisle is a real threat, and it is documented.

Get your family off the commercial bread. Mill your own flour. Start with one tool and one habit and let it grow from there.

Watch the full interview with Sue Becker on The John Lovell Show and then head over to BreadBeckers.com to get started.

Remember, Train Hard. Train Smart. And feed your family real food.