This is all the more funny () that half a century ago, there was a broad scientific consensus against it. Like what consensus is ok and it comes with the wind.
Again, you confuse the consumer's taste for refined grains
What you are confusing is culture and its circumstances. The famous taste for the refined grains in question, is only a reaction to the bread of war that you are not old enough to have known and that was made with what came to hand and therefore generally infected, but when There is nothing else to eat, the bad is better than nothing at all.
By reaction, the industrialization of the flour mills made it possible to produce, in large quantities, this strongly blended flour which appeared to be brioche in comparison, then it became the standard product with the stick mainly, the beret and the cigarette. symbolize the average French for comedians)
But it turns out that I ran a business where I sold real bread and it was a huge success because it was good, but only rarely did people who had lived through the war and its restrictions came in exceptionally. A trauma does not disappear like that and the generations of white bread, after the war, have never known anything else. It is not a matter of taste when no other product is offered in a bakery ... which changes slowly, thankfully!
and scientific knowledge about their nutritional value known for much longer than half a century.
You mix everything, again. I mention in terms of whole bread, these last 50 years the consensus was opposed to it, not that other scientists and a long time before the industrial flour mills had, on the contrary, promoted the virtues of whole bread, unrefined.
Everything therefore depends on what is known as scientific knowledge since it is dependent on the technological means of analysis available at each time. The nutritional value, for the average person, is what he eats and the difference felt between two products, even if there is a relative value there, but which has been the only criterion for millennia.
Scurvy and beriberi were not reduced by scientific knowledge, but by the observation that various missing or refined foods caused these pathologies and the change was made without current science. In short, science always has a subway behind the reality.
"We make science with facts, like making a house with stones: but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a pile of stones is a house" Henri Poincaré