Silent Poisons in Nutrition-Health Risks of Processed Salt, Sugar and Flour in Foods

Nutritional silent poisons are seemingly innocent ingredients that slowly rob the body of essential nutrients in health. White refined flour, white refined sugar and white refined salt are ingredients that some nutritionists and doctors consider silent poisons. They are found in canned, processed and prepared foods, but also may be the flour in your cupboard or salt on your table. They may be one of many innovations that emerged from the gears of industrialization, but nutritional research is shedding new light.

We all readily visualize flour, salt and sugar as white because that is the product of their industrial processing, broken down from its natural color and bleached. If you’ve seen pure whole flour its often gray or brown in color, raw non-refined salt is gray and raw sugar is golden brown. When these ingredients are processed for long term storage and mass consumption they go through a strenuous, often chemical, transformation. For years doctors emphasized careful watch of the amount of calories we intake, but attention is shifting to the type of calories. More specifically, the kind of salts, sugars and flours in the foods we eat. There is some of this thinking in the popular Atkins diet and South Beach diet, because both flour and sugar form carbohydrates, which they suggest temporarily eliminating. Essentially what should be eliminated are ingredients that are silent poisons, though this does not mean all sugar, salt and flour.

White sugar, salt and flour are robbing your body of valuable nutrients.

Credit: Jason Cangialosi

Copyright: Jason Cangialosi