Reading Files with LOOP in Bash Script?

Question

I hope someone can explain to me what's happening in this situation and how to solve it.

I am trying a simple thing: to read each row from a text file with loop.

This is the text file content that I am working on:

aaaa   aaaa a aa
bb bbbbb bbbbb    b
cccccccc          c                              c      c

NOTE: This is a simple file, just to test the concept. The main text file I am working have around 140MB, with a positional layout for each field.

This is my bash script content:

FILE=./text.txt
awk '{ print }' $FILE | while read ROW; do
    echo $ROW
done

I am getting each row from the file, but this is the result:

aaaa aaaa a aa
bb bbbbb bbbbb b
cccccccc c c c

As you can see, the extra white spaces are being remove from the ouput.

I am trying to test this script using awk, but I already tried with cat and stdout and had the same result:

FILE=./text.txt
cat
cat $FILE | while read ROW; do
    echo $ROW
done
##########
stdout
while read ROW; do
    echo $ROW
done < $FILE

I also tried using for loop:

for ROW in $(awk '{ print }' $FILE); do
    echo $ROW
    echo "---"
done

But this was the result, each row content was split by the white spaces:

aaaa
---
aaaa
---
a
---
aa
---
bb
---
bbbbb
---
bbbbb
---
b
---
cccccccc
---
c
---
c
---
c
---

As I mentioned before, the main text file have positional fields, that's why I need all row characters, even if they are extra white spaces.

I was wondering if someone can explain to me why the extra white spaces were removed and how to print/work row full content (with any extra white space)?