Vitamin Returns

Admirers of old-fashioned bread point out that not only does today's mass-produced bread taste as pallid as it looks but that it is less nutritious than the kind mother made. The bleached white flour U. S. bakers use contains only 12 to 15% as much vitamin B1 as whole-wheat flour. Last week the National Research Council, a group of scientists organized by Woodrow Wilson in 1916 for Preparedness, announced that part of this deficiency will soon be made up.

Crystalline thiamin, which is vitamin BI, together with iron and nicotinic acid, will be generally restored to white flour by millers this month. Cost: two-tenths of a cent per pound loaf. The British Government ordered thiamin into bakers' recipes in July 1940. But Britons eat much more bread than Americans, get a more useful dose of B1 to buck up their war-strained health.

Reasons for not simply using wholewheat flour: 1) bakers think the U. S. demands highly bleached bread; 2) white flour and bread keep better than whole wheat in the highly industrialized U. S. baking system. But the "enriched" bread will still taste store-baked, not homemade.

RCA laboratories in Camden announced a new, simpler electron microscope for educational and research laboratories. Like earlier and bigger models, the new instrument uses beams of electrons instead of beams of light for magnification, furnishes enlargements up to 100,000 diameters, but it can be plugged into an ordinary electric outlet.

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