I've read the opposite; that brown rice is just white rice with the bran still attached, and that white rice was only eaten by the elite because of the additional work required to seperate it (like white bread only being for the wealthy during the middle ages), and that beriberi was a noticed more in times specifically because of industrialization increasing the availability of white rice:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine_deficiency
Apperently a lot of white rice is now enriched with thiamine for this reason
>I've read the opposite; that brown rice is just white rice with the bran still attached, and that white rice was only eaten by the elite because of the additional work required to seperate it (like white bread only being for the wealthy during the middle ages)
I've read that, too, many times, and I stopped believing it after I watched videos (on Youtube) of people preparing rice the traditional way. Particularly, I paid close attention to the color of the rice after the processing steps: it was white with bits of brown stuck to it.
I searched for bookmarks for those videos, but cannot find them.
(I don't know about wheat: I only investigated rice.)
I found the bookmark. Anyone who has ever seen modern brown rice will immediately be able to tell that although there might be bits of bran still stuck to it, this rice has no more than 3 or 4% of the bran of modern brown rice:
I bookmarked another video, but it has been made private since I watched it.
Here is a very illuminating moment: the rice has already been pounded, then winnowed (the separated hulls removed), but there are still many kernels that need to be hulled (roughly one kernel in every 150 or 200 kernels), so the rice
is put back in the mortar for another round of pounding. In other words, although there is more pounding to do to make the rice edible, already most of the bran is off the rice (and thrown away along with the hulls).
(When only a few unhulled kernels remain, she removes them one by one with her fingers.) This supports my assertion that it is impossible with traditional
methods to get the hulls off while leaving on most or even a significant fraction of the bran. Again: I think you need precision machines that only became available in Europe in the 1800s and in East Asia in the 1900s to get the hulls off (which I think you really need to do if you eat rice every day and want to keep your teeth) while leaving most of the bran on the kernel. I.e., people in traditional rice cultures did not have the ability to consume anywhere close to as much rice bran as is possible by eating modern brown rice.
Interesting, though perhaps it is possible the colour change is due to oxidation? It would be interesting either way to see a nutritional comparison of traditionally prepared and modern brown rice, as well as their bran content
