Too-White Bread

For 25 years U.S. millers have been using in their flour a compound called nitrogen trichloride. It bleaches wheat flour and saves months in the aging process (hence the trade name: Agene). It is now used in 80% of U.S. white flour. Sir Edward Mellanby of Britain's Medical Research Council fed a concentrated diet of highly Agenized bread to dogs he was using in an experiment on nutrition, published the frightening results in the British Medical Journal two years ago. The flour had caused "running fits"; most of the dogs that did not recover in 30 minutes died.

The University of Wisconsin's Conrad A. Elvehjem did another series of experiments for Agene's makers, Wallace & Tiernan of Newark; on an Agenized diet, cats, rabbits, mink and dogs developed fits. Experimenters sometimes found the brain cells of Agenized dogs shrunken, misshapen or missing. A similar diet had no bad effects on 20 human guinea pigs. Nonetheless, Dr. Anton J. Carlson, dean of U.S. physiologists, announced last winter (TIME, Jan. 12) that Agene may make the eater nervous.

Last week the Food & Drug Administration decided to take action.* It handed down a tentative order banning Agene as a bleaching agent for flour. If no exceptions are filed within ten days (so overwhelming is the evidence that none is expected), the order will become final. The bread industry will have until August 1949 to convert.

* Apparently by coincidence, the Russian news paper Meditsinsky Rabotnic (Medical Worker) chose last week to attack U.S. bread, praise Soviet bread. It bad-guessed that the U.S. Government would not forbid treating flour with such harmful chemicals as Agene because "such a way out is unsuited to the trust-owners -- real bosses of the U.S. "

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