Health

Harmful Maida- a dangerous tastemaker

kerala parotta

Now a days it is very difficult to live without this beautiful white color flour called Maida. But have you ever noticed it is a silent killer for human beings. But how?

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This article tells about how Maida is made from wheat flour, what are the toxic ingredients which can mix with Maida to make sweet bakery items and overview of other harmful chemicals present in the eatable food products.

How Maida is made?

In wheat there are two parts, the outside shell part is eatable and the inside one is not. The inside part does not contain any fiber too. This part grinded and bleach with benzoic peroxide to form a white powder. This one again mixed with Alloxen (chemical) to form Maida. Because of this process Maida is very soft; it has already gone through the dangerous chemical processing.

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Alloxen and Benzoic peroxide in Maida

This chemical is mainly used in rats and pigs for the testing of insulin. Scientists usually inject this chemical to those animals so that it gets affected with diabetic hence can test their experiments medicines on them. This chemical is toxic to Pancreas in our body. Pancreas is responsible for regulation of glucose and sugar in our body and blood. Pancreas is producing insulin in our body. Actually Insulin is responsible for the control of blood sugar. Once Pancreas is damaged, one will become diabetic. Pancreas can be damaged in many ways. Our genes and heredity also have a role in making Pancreas susceptible to injury by noxious agents.

To get pure white color Benzoic peroxide is used in cloths mill industry. If you take this powder and mix with water, fumes will come out and is dangerous to our skin. But unfortunately this chemical is one of the important intakes for Maida production.

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throwing flour

(photo : Epic food fight)

Why Mineral oil and Aginomoto uses with Maida products?

As everybody knows, from petroleum we can extract petrol, diesel and kerosene. Once it’s done we get a smell less bi product called mineral oil. The advantage of this oil is we can make/ fry any food item with and nothing will happen for a longer period. If you make any food item with coconut oil something will happen to that food after some days. This is because of the natural bacteria which come automatically in any food products. But with mineral oil even natural bacteria can’t sustain. Then we can imagine the powerful nature of this chemical.

The other villian Aginomoto’s birth place is China. Because of severe kidney failure reported over there Chinese government banned this chemical. But in India most of the food items are still served with Aginomoto. This chemical adds the taste to the food in other way it actually enhances the taste buds. Most of today’s food items contain aginomoto for e.g. in biriyani, fried rice, soup and other Maida food products. If you buy any products (especially soup) from shop please go through the ingredients of the same and say NO to aginomoto products. I have read some article about aginomoto in that doctors advise that if you feel some kind of headache after having Chinese food no wonder they might have used aginomoto in their food products.
Other set of chemicals which are available in bakery foods are sodium meta bi sulphate, benzoic, citric acid. All these chemicals are hazards to humankinds especially for pregnant ladies and kids.

bakery

Where can we see Maida products

90% of the Bakery items are made from Maida. Bakery is a hub for most of the dangerous chemicals. To get colours in food products, need mix of different chemicals. The same chemical (Petroleum bi products) is used in Paints manufacturing industry. Other chemicals used with Maida are mineral oil, taste makers, aginomoto, preservative, dalda, sacrin, sugar etc. The list goes on.

Maida or white wheat flour is used in many food stuffs world-wide. The big corporate lobby world-wide has succeeded in hiding the harmful effect of Maida and disseminating the information. The food industry was able to prevent any research to rule out the causation of DIABETES by Maida. The incidence of diabetes mellitus is increasing worldwide and India and Kerala is going get the number one place in this regard. May be our food habit esp. using Maida in most of the food intake may be responsible for this. Research involving randomized control trial is needed in this regard to prove that Maida can cause Diabetes. Since maida contains the poison alloxan which can damage the pancreas, it is better to avoid maida. just like cigarette can cause lung cancer and many other health hazards, maida may be one of the leading causes of diabetes, the emerging disease of modern life style.

Alloxen is one cause of adult-onset type 2 diabetes, it is of course not the only cause. Current theory suggests a hereditary beta-cell predisposition to injury coupled with some defect in tissue regeneration capacity may be a key cause. For alloxan to cause injury to an individual’s beta cells, the individual must have the genetic susceptibility to injury. This is similar to the connection between high-cholesterol foods and heart disease and cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Eating high-cholesterol foods causes heart disease, especially in people who have family histories of heart disease. Similarly cigarette causes lung cancer in genetically susceptible individuals. The link between alloxan and diabetes is as clear and solid as the link between cholesterol and heart disease and cigarette smoking and lung cancer.

It all comes down to asking if putting yourself at risk for diabetic coma, blindness, limb amputation and death is worth eating white bread. If you’re willing to risk your quality of life and your life itself, then go ahead and eat all the foods made with white flour you want. However, if you want to stop poisoning yourself with alloxan, a known toxic chemical, then make a few simple dietary changes. Eat groceries made with whole-grain wheat flour, not processed white flour

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Image courtesy: photobucket.com , wikimedia.org , nydailynews.com

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