The digestibility and absorption of the calories, proteins, purines, fat and calcium in wholemeal wheaten bread.

Wheat is so important in human affairs that its digestibility has been investigated on many occasions. The literature was summarized and fresh experiments carried out by Borgstrom (1941), Macrae, Hutchinson, Irwin, Bacon & McDougall (1942), Heupke (1943), McCance, Widdowson, Moran, Pringle & Macrae (1945), Brull, Barac, Brakier-Zelkowiecz, Clemens, Crismer, Deltombe, Divry, Dubois, Dumont, DumontRuyters, Lambrechts, Neuprez, Nizet, Op de Beeck, Piersotte & Thomas (1945) and by McCance & Widdowson (1947). There are, however, matters still in dispute and aspects which have not been investigated, and the work now to be described was undertaken in an attempt to clarify some of the points at issue. The following seemed to be outstanding problems. ( I ) Calolies. Moran & Pace (1942) rightly pointed out that the digestibility of wheat flour, in terms of energy, did not depend so much upon its percentage extraction as upon the amount of bran which it contained, and they suggested a method for assessing the digestibility of high-extraction flours from their fibre content. They took some data which had recently been obtained by Macrae et al. (1942) for the digestibility of 73% and wholemeal flours. They showed that the difference could be accounted for by supposing that every increase in fibre of 0’2 % (over a basal figure of about 0.15%) led to a decrease in digestibility of about 1.1 yo. The possibilities of this