White Flour and the First Metabolic Wave
Where we are on the timeline
After The Roller Mill, the book enters the early modern health puzzle. Refined flour becomes common inside a wider shift in sugar, sedentary work, urban food systems, and chronic disease observation.
This chapter uses “wave” carefully.
The historical claim is moderate: from roughly 1900 to 1970, observers increasingly linked refined carbohydrates and industrial diets with chronic disease. The causal claim is cautious: white flour is one contributor within a cluster, not a single master cause. The theological claim is indirect: bread’s inherited authority made refined grain harder to question.
Sections
Cross Links
- The Transfer Problem defines the industrial handoff.
- What Genesis Does Not Say keeps the argument from becoming anti-food mythology.
- The Food Pyramid shows how policy later stabilized the grain base.