Here's my understanding of these common wheat products...Bread (and
pizza crust) and pasta are normally made from wheat flour that is milled
and refined, meaning the the whole seed or wheat berry is initially
obtained, then the wheat germ (the portion with nutrients) and wheat
bran (the outer husk, a fibrous substance) are taken out.  What is left
is starch or farina, which, when milled is your flour.  If you eat that
remaining farina or starch by itself then you get ill and I think the
disease you get is beriberi.  So it is the usual practice to add back to
the flour certain nutrients
("enriching") that were in the wheat bran to prevent the most obvious
symptoms of illness, as your body needs those nutrients to process and
utilize the farina. But not all the original nutrients which were taken
away are added back, and the fiber is missing, which aids in
peristalsis, and is, I believe, slightly acidic.  Additionally, some
bread flours are bleached, and the bleach is LEFT in the flour (**very
toxic**) Most breads are leavened and contain a yeast leavening.  Breads
are all cooked with dry heat, baked; all pastas are cooked by
simmering.  The only bread that isn't made from flour is essene bread
which is sprouted grain that is masticated and baked at low
temperatures; it is sort of a sticky slightly sweet, heavy dense bread.

Whether from wheat or other grain, I can not imagine such severe
tampering ("processing") with a seed (which might have been marginal as
food to start with) resulting in a healthy food, and my gut reaction is
that all
refined grain products are not healthy.  Probably this means that grain
products that are made from whole grains are better, but I don't know if
much cooked grains or anything with much flour could be all that
healthy.  No other animal on the planet eats a diet based on foods made
with flour of any kind.

regards

r

Jean-Louis Tu wrote:
> Barbara:
> >Just curious - is there a qualitative difference between bread and pizza
> >base, on the one hand, and pasta on the other (assuming that they are all
> >wheat-based)? Is it that the former two may contain yeast, while the
> >latter doesn't?  I think that white bread and pasta are made of roughly the same parts of
> the grain.